Behind the Scenes Minis: Worms, Hikes and Tekahionwake

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Trazy v Wilson and I'm Holly Friday. We kicked off our week with the second part of our two part of Unearthed, having done the first part last week. Yes, it's a little weird, just to throw everyone off a little bit. It's a big psychological experiment, especially because we're recording all of this on the same day that was not happening. Yes. Uh, you said you had a a category to propose. Is at least that's how That's what I interpreted. Yes, I mean, at least jokingly, we should just have a worms category because it was like parasites and then whip worms and then ship worms, and I'm like, clearly there's a worm thematic going yeah, going through history. And it made me think of the Futurama episode where Fry gets worms and they actually make him smarter and stronger. Yeah. So um. We have talked before about how Futurama is a show that has all these things I would love on paper, but I have somehow never watched all of it. But that's one of the ones I know about. My family came over on the Sandwich is such a good episode and it's so funny. I feel like that one comes up a lot is like examples of really good episodes of that show. I mean there's so many, so so. I mean there's Jurassic Bark Forever, which is painful. M uh Fry Gets Worms is great. There's a lot that show. It's been rerunning a lot lately, which it wasn't for a while, and now I keep running into it as my thing in the background in the evenings when I'm zoning out or working on something elson I'm like, oh, I need to rewatch the show all the time. But there are too many things that I feel that way about. Yeah. Uh. I also had another animation moment when we were talking about edibles and potables, because that word potables came up on Bob's Burgers recently yes where they were going camping, and there was a note that the water was not what Linda called potable, and Bob was like, it's it's potable. This made me laugh. I think that's the word I've heard people say both ways, and that also reminds me of various times that I've been places where there's just been very stern warnings that the water in whatever place should not be consumed, often the water used to wash her hands. That like a porta potty somewhere. Oh gosh, when when I used to do a lot more races, like all of those little like you know, on the course for runners, porta potties would have like stickers usually on them that were like, don't drink this water. And I'm like, on the one hand, of course you would need to do that warning, And on the other I'm like, who really needed that warning? But somebody probably did. Somebody probably did, for sure, I'm certain. Plus to be fair, I'm not. I don't want to judge anybody. After you've run like ten miles. If you're like me, your brain has stopped functioning anyway, So maybe you need the sticker to no, don't don't no, don't do that, don't do that. Yeah. I can also see easily see people like washing their hands and then like rinsing their mouth out not even thinking, or just like splashing their face which will put it very close to your mouth, which is not a good idea either anyway. Water. Yeah, none of this has anything to do with that. I've been following all of these through hikers on TikTok Uh and one of the through hikers I follow got e coli during her through hiker um along with a bunch of other through hikers, and it turned out that there was a well that was contaminated that they all thought, uh, that they all thought was a safe sort of source of water because it was a well for drinking from. You're making the most horrifying face. As a child who grew up on wellwater. There was a time we had to bleach our well because it got something I'm not even on wellwater. I'm still back on why would anyone do that to themselves? Because why would anybody do it through hiking? I don't camp, so a through hike is like a nightmare to me. Um. I have been kind of living vicariously through these various through hikers because I similarly that's most of the hikes they've been doing are like, that's more than I think I ever would actually want to do, But I'm enjoying watching somebody else do it. No, I do a lot of day hiking, and I'm like, it's like day hiking every day, but it's it's more than camping. Yeah. Yeah, I've been in the woods, not for you. Plenty of camping as a kid, when my family moved from outside Seattle to the Florida Panhandle in my parents thought it would be cool to camp across the country to make that move. Nine year old Holly got all she will ever need of And I hate it and I have hated it ever since. And please let me camp at the Marriott. That's what I want. UM. When I was a massage therapist, you had to get a certain number of continuing education hours every year to keep up your stuff. And we also had requirements for additional training beyond just massage school for this job that I had. And so a coworker and I had signed up for this continuing education course. UM that was a couple hours away from where we were living. And this uh was at a massage school that was housed in a place that was originally a farm, and you could camp there for something like ten bucks, which gave you access to like the like an area there to camp and also a bathroom in a shower and stuff like that. And we were like, this is great, we have no many we will camp there for ten bucks. It'll be great. Night number one of camping. We were both like, this is amazing. That was the best night of sleep I have had in so long. We were so excited. Uh, and then when we got up after night number two of camping, we were both like, that was horrible. I am too old for this. And we were both in our like thirties at that point. She was little older than me, so she might have been like in her forties. And so now I'm like, I bet, I bet if I tried to sleep on the ground for nights and nights and nights. I know people have all kinds of cool like sleeping mats and inflatable stuff and whatever, but I'm sure I would be like, oh, a bet a bet is a thing? I like you, I know, I just never no. I like how we've spent this whole behind the scenes talking about worms and hiking, and very little of it on the part of Unearthed History. I know this is I will to loop it back to stuff we talked about on the episode. All of these Vermier things are make me think, like, do I need to plan a trip to go see that exhibition? Yeah, it's supposed to be like a landmark exhibition of Vermeer's works, So if you are a Vermeer aficionado or just an art person that might be a good one to check out. As always, I have a three page list of stuff that I had bookmarked that we did not wind up talking about. Uh some of it because I couldn't find like a very like like what was interesting about this that makes it sound like an interesting thing to talk about. And sometimes I just like couldn't find the right like angle, or I was really confused by it, or it was um, it was almost identical to stuff that we've talked about recently. Yeah, Like somebody found a bottle of of heart drops is what it was described as, like a medicine an intact medicine bottle with the stuff still inside of it, at the bottom of the river. I thought that was really cool, but did not wind up talking about it this time, um, which is just always going to be the case. I used to keep the bookmarks for this publicly visible so people could look at them, but then I ran into technical difficulties and that was no longer possible. So anyway, I'm sure we will find yet more parasites stuff to talk about in future installments of Unearthed, but I found these ones particularly gross. They're pretty achy. Yeah, So anyway, we'll have more unearthed and approximately three months, probably sometime right after the first of the year. This week we talked about Emily Pauline Johnson, also known as Decayell and Wigay, who I don't even remember how I stumbled across her name. I was told in various it ups of her that one of her poems called the song my Paddle Sings is like a staple in younger grade school classes on poetry. Um, but I did not go pull my various friends from Canada to be like, do you know this poem? Is this still true? I mean, I was not in Canada but in the Pacific Northwest in elementary school, and I don't remember it. Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. I don't remember a lot of being a kid like yeah my uh, my gut would be for folks in the Pacific Northwest, they might have been more likely to hear things that were specifically about the Pacific Northwest or the Squamish legends that she wrote about, which I heard multiple Mohawk people, particularly women talk about her with just so much love and affection, and it like it just made me really joyful to hear people talk about her. I don't actually know off hand how the Squamish nation feels about her having written and shared these stories and legends that were shared with her by chiefs ap look Um, because that's a complicated thing to share an indigenous people's stories or legends or or any of that. And it does really seem like she tried really really hard to be as accurate with it as possible, but she was also from, you know it, in a different indigenous nation, from a different part of the continent, and they didn't share a language totally fluently. UM. And then when she got to the work that she was needing to dictate to somebody else because of her illness, Like there's another layer of separation between she who was writing this down and the person who told her the stories initially. So I feel like it's it's kind of a complicated thing. One of the things that has become um a resource for me on the show is a book called Elements of Indigenous Style UM, and it is by Gregory young Ing who UM wrote this book to like give especially non Indigenous people a framework for writing thoughtfully and correctly about Indigenous people or people from a different indienus indigenous nation that they are not part of. And one of the points that is made is there's a lot of stuff, especially from around the nineteen and early twentieth century, that's widely available that is in like an indigenous nation's stories or legends or whatever, that was documented and written down without really their participation or consent. And it's really important for researchers who are working today to not just rely on that uncritically without really confirming with people who are still living today whether it's accurate it and how they feel about it, and whether there's maybe a different source that would really be the preferable one to be used. So I feel like all of that is like connected to that book Legends of Vancouver, but not something I was able to go and like track down how does everyone feel about this book existing today? I keep thinking about the fact that we we even mentioned in her accounts when she had that initial meeting that she was like, oh, I only knew some of their their words. Then when you get into that um many layers, as you said, of removed from possible accuracy and retelling, it gets very tricky. I felt some some papers written about her UM that were critical of her in a way that I saw the point being made, but I also didn't feel like it was entirely justified. Like she clearly didn't love the fact that she needed this Indian princess costume for people to think she belonged on stage, right, She she didn't like the fact, but she also seems to have been willing to play that game so that she could have an audience and she could you know, write what she wanted to write and say what she wanted to say. And then in her will, like she understood that that costume, like she thought that costume belonged in a museum. It wasn't something she was like, Oh, that was garbage, I should throw it away. And so I would sometimes see things that were like, uh, like had a tone of I wish she could have been more authentic. And while there's a piece of that where I'm like, yeah, I can see where you're coming from, but also a lot of things about her life we're really in line with the history of her family and the history of the Mohawk Nation more generally, like the Mohawk Nation had just long standing alliances with the British while also simultaneously being you know, exploited by the British, like her her father was named after King George the Third, she was named after Napoleon's favorite sister. Like, there was a lot of interconnectivity between their family and British and Canadian culture. Um. And So some of the times when I would find these things that people would say was like I wish she could have been more authentic, and it was like, well, she she authentically felt herself in both of these worlds, um, and there are definitely things that she felt conflicted about or didn't really love, but like to write her entire body of work off as inauthentic, I was like, I don't think that's actually correct, right, Well, I mean here's the thing. If she had written in a way that someone with that criticism may have perceived as authentic, that word is so loaded it would have been inauthentic to her experience. Yeah. So, like there's the weird thing of like, would you really want her to lie or misrepresent herself to fit a frame work of what you think is more appropriate for a woman of her background. That's problematic, Yeah, And that's there were times when it also seemed threatened through with like an assumption that there's only one way for an indigenous writer to write. Like, I would find some places that had sort of counted how many of her poems were quote indigenous and uh, and they were only counting the ones that were like very explicitly about being Mohawk or a piece of indigenous history or whatever. And it was like, well, but she she wrote all of these and she was Mohawk, so all of it in some way is like influenced by that part of herself. Um. And I found that just an interesting way for people to focus, because I don't think when somebody is like, oh, here's a woman poet, but only one percent of her poems are about women, Because only one percent of her poems there's like specifically saying this is my poem about being a woman's It was a little weird. So anyway, I really love her and I love her story and uh. I think all the complexities of her legacy are still really relevant to a lot of people who are like living in multiple worlds through having like multiple pieces to their heritage and ancestry. I think about her life on tour and I cannot help but be filled with admiration because it sounds exhausting it so does when you and I go on tour, I feel like three shows that we need a break after that, like we need a day off. Yeah, for sure. And so the just the colossal amount of of shows that she did over the course of just a few months, I was like, man, I I would not have known where I was or what I was doing by the end of that. That's um, I mean, we don't know after three shows where we are. I know, it's different, right, she wasn't doing big jumps of air travel every day, but she's presumably doing train travel and that had its own logistics and ships across the Atlantic Ocean. Yeah. Yeah, it just makes you want to lie down. Yeah. Yeah, some sometime when I make it out to the Pacific Northwest again because I do have family out there, maybe I will take a little trip to Vancouver. I love Vancouver. Oh, the food scene is amazing. Yeah, it's just a great a great place, beautiful, all of the all of the beautiful scenery, all of the yummy things. Plus I'll tell you about you know, the places to eat ice cream? Sounds great? So, uh, Happy Friday again. Whatever is on your plate over the next couple of days. I hope it's great. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We'll be back Monday with a brand new episode. And if you haven't subscribed to our show, we're on the I heart Radio app or wherever else you'd like to get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.