After freshman year illuminated how socio-economic disparities were affecting her beloved Native American communities, activist Tracy Canard Goodluck felt fired up and committed to doing something about it. She began that journey as an educator, affecting change locally, but was eventually called to policy work, challenging the status quo at a different level. Find out how heeding the fire in the soul leads to the place where you can do the most good.
Guest Tracy Canard Goodluck, Dartmouth ’96, is a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and also of Mvskoke Creek heritage and was raised as a strong Native woman in her urban communities of Utah and New Mexico. Freshman year of college illuminated how socio-economic disparities were affecting her beloved Native American communities, and the activist in her got fired up and, after a few terms away to process it all, came back to campus committed to do something about it. After a job in the Hanover After-School Program she knew education would be one route to impact and received a fellowship for graduate study in education.
She made sure to be near Native communities to learn about the systems that empowered and challenged success. Wanting to test a style of education that championed culture instead of removing it, she helped start the Native American Community Academy (NACA) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When she realized, however, that in telling the students to follow their dreams she was actually saying what she needed to hear herself, she applied to law school to pave her road to public service in the federal government, where the majority of tribal policy decisions are made.
In this episode, find out from Tracy how heeding the fire in the soul sometimes leads to the place where you can do the most good.....on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
Tracy Canard Goodluck is a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and also of Mvskoke Creek heritage. Beginning her career as an educator, she was one of the co-founders of the Native American Community Academy (NACA) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She now is an advocate for Native American communities throughout the United States in her roles within the federal government. She recently joined the White House as a Policy Advisor for Native Affairs in the Domestic Policy Council, staffed there on a detail from the Department of Interior where she is the Deputy Director of the Secretary’s Indian Water Rights Office.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Tracy Canard Goodluck : We supported the culture and language of the students and we made them feel like they mattered and that who they come from and where they come from was important. And I think that makes all the difference. When you can emotionally support a student in their identity, you're going to see progress and you're going to see growth.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: After freshman year illuminated how socio-economic disparities were affecting her beloved Native American communities, activist Tracy Canard Goodluck felt fired up and committed to doing something about it. She began that journey as an educator, affecting change locally, but was eventually called to policy work, challenging the status quo at a different level. Find out how heeding the fire in the soul leads to the place where you can do the most good, on today’s Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today, I'm here with Tracy Canard Goodluck. And we're going to talk about how sometimes we need to listen with discernment to where the call's coming from and where the greatest need is. So, Tracy, thank you so much for being with us. I can't wait to share your story.
TCG: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
LJR: All right. So I ask thee same two questions of everyone: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
TCG: Those are really good questions. So when we were in college, Who was I? And then I would say that would depend on what year and how many years I had been into Dartmouth. I would say that I was very much an activist type of sort when I was at Dartmouth. You know, I'm native American. I belong to the Oneida tribe of Indians, of Wisconsin, Oneida Nation now, and also Muskogee Creek from Oklahoma, but I'm an urban Indian so I grew up away from my reservation in tribal communities, in both Utah and New Mexico. But I was still very much an activist. I came into Dartmouth as this young native woman, really raring to kind of fight the patriarchy and the system. I talked to my mom once about it, and I was very much, it was less of a cultural shock for me, attending Dartmouth as it was a socioeconomic shock.
I came from a single parent household most of my life, having lived in a blue collar neighborhood coming to kind of the white ivory towers. And that was a big shock to my system. So I became an activist pretty quickly in my communities, which were primarily, I grounded myself in the Native American community at Dartmouth, NAD, the Native Americans at Dartmouth and that was actually one of the things that drew me to attending Dartmouth. Yeah. But I also was very active in the Dartmouth Outing Club, getting involved in environmental issues. And then I had this other life as a member of the band. I joined the Dartmouth band did that was a whole other type of community for me.
So I was bright eyed, bushy tailed, and ready to experience it all. And as I went through my four years, I went through stages. My mom said I came home after freshman year angry. And I think that was when I was learning about kind of the disparities in opportunities that my peers and I had had as Native people coming from our reservation communities and inner cities.
And those of us who had maybe had different life experiences than other folks, primarily from the east coast. And I came home angry. And I had to go through, I think, a series of steps at Dartmouth, where I had a love-hate relationship with our school. And I had to kind of process that. And I took a year, I took three terms off to reflect on that freshman year so that when I came back, I knew it was with a purpose.
And I definitely came back with a purpose. You know, I was going to make it at Dartmouth. I had a mission to graduate from there and succeed. But, you know, freshman year definitely defined a lot of who I am today. Having experienced kind of that.
LJR: So you were back in the middle of sophomore year, angry, but with purpose.
TCG: I wouldn't say it was angry anymore by then. [LJR: Okay.] And by “angy” I mean, I think I was just going through that
LJR: Fired up.
TCG: Fired up. I like that better than angry. Fired up. Um, yeah, so I came back that spring and there was a lovely new class of NADS. So again, Native Americans at Dartmouth was my community and my support system and my family.
And they still are to this day as alumni. Yeah. And there was a lovely class behind us, the 97s, that I actually ultimately walked with because I was a little bit behind. By this point, he came back that spring. It was Pow-Wow. It was lovely. You know, I felt renewed the still not sure what I was going to do with my life.
But at that point I received an opportunity. To work for a program after school called the Hanover After-School Program. I think that gave me a lot of purpose, too, and set me on my path into my first career in education. I became an educator for a large amount of my professional career and I credit my time at HASP for that.
LJR: And did you go directly into the field of education right after our graduation? [TCG: I did.] So you knew that was…
TCG: Yeah, well, so I had two thoughts in mind. I was either going to go into education and I come from a long line of teachers in my family, but they're all like, “But you're going to Dartmouth. You need to be more than a teacher.”
You know, they, they were always “no do something different,” but I was like, “but you're all, you all are teachers. And it's been a great career in life for you. And it like. You know, and I enjoy working with our youth.” So I was either going to go into education or I really had a desire for policy and law and advocacy.
I've always had a part about me that's all about advocacy and advocating for what's right. And doing the right thing and fighting for my people. What moved me into education at first was I had taken classes from Professor Garrod and also Binswanger, you know, Ed20, if you can get through it. Yeah.
LJR: Life changing.
TCG: Completely. But professor Garrod also, I did some independent studies with him where I did some really deep reflection on education and what that meant to me in my life and how it helped me get to where I was at that moment at Dartmouth. And both those professors connected me to a program called the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellowship program.
It was a pipeline to bring people of color into the teaching pipeline to teach kids like you. So I received that fellowship, which was life changing, to receive a scholarship right out of undergrad to go to grad school and it's paid for basically. And so I began as search across the country of the right graduate school.
And I really had some focus in mind in terms of, I wanted to go to a school of education that was. Prestigious and hat and, you know, Indiana was highly ranked, but it also needed to be near tribal communities where I could do some direct service learning with tribes and their use. Ultimately, I decided on the University of Washington school of education in Seattle and that was an amazing experience as well.
LJR: Great. So we're going to come back to young and early Tracy, but walk us through kind of the progression of you as an educator. And it's not just an educator of people. It's an educator of systems and a creator of systems, which really speaks to that activist in you. So, so walk us through a bit of those steps.
TCG: Sure. So, you know, it was important for me to find a place, an institution that would allow me to grow as a Native educator, allow me to have experiences working within tribal communities, where I could see firsthand what the issues were. It was less about learning how to teach kids how to read and write. That was certainly a part of it and an important part of it. But it was also important for me to look at what the systems were that were creating challenges for communities like mine, for tribal communities or children of color ‘cause I also did some student teaching in inner city Seattle.
So the University of Washington provided me those opportunities. I was able to do some research and student teaching and inner city Seattle. I was able to do a full year of student teaching kindergarten of all subjects or grades, um, on the Tulalip Indian reservation in Marysville, Washington, which was a very powerful learning experience for me to see how a tribal community embraces education infusing culture and language into a public school system that is normally not designed to support any of that. And so I feel like I made the right choice to head out west and have that experience. It’s paved the path actually to where I am today.
LJR: Yeah. But I, I would imagine that not only did you see where things were working the way that you feel like they should be working, unexpectedly, right? But you probably saw it where it wasn't working. For students of color or other, other socioeconomic groups, or what have you.
TCG: Oh, 110% of that. Um, I mean, I feel like the second you walk into an institution of education that's been designed you know, kind of from this Western…It's like what I felt about going to Dartmouth my freshman year, or going through high school or, you know, it's like you see the barriers in place from the moment you step into to these institutions. And I call them institutions because there's no other way. I mean, there's other words being used now in terms of education reform and communities of color, where we're taking back, you know, and tribal communities, they call it education sovereignty, and you know, there's new words now, but that back then, you know, this is 20 plus years ago, there were still so many barriers and challenges. It's not everyday that you walk into a school like where I student taught where their language is being taught. For the most part education systems are actually designed to dismantle culture and education. The Western view of education, in particular for Native communities, was an assimilation strategy. It's like how non-Native, how white can we make these children? In order to make them fit into this American system. And I don't want to sound anti-American here because that's far from what I'm trying to say. But that's our history and we have to acknowledge that our history is one of colonialism and education is one of colonialism. It's weird because that's why I went into education is to dismantle and fight that kind of system.
LJR: That's right. And there were times when you found that there was dismantling to be done. And there were times when you thought building might be a better strategy. So talk me through where you, were student teaching then there's probably a big jump, but ultimately you're, you're designing a school, right?
TCG: Right. So, yeah, so I, you know, I, I had my experience, I received my master's in education and teaching and I could have stayed in Washington state and the Pacific Northwest. Like I said earlier, I come from a family of educators and my aunt and uncle, this is on my dad's side, so my Native side, have been school teachers in bureau of Indian education schools or tribally controlled schools on the Hopi reservation in Arizona, at that time for 20 plus years and my auntie, my auntie Linda, she really wanted me to come teach with her on the Hopi reservation. So I thought that would be a really good experience for me, because for those of you that don't know the Hopi reservation, it's what we call a landlock reservation within the boundaries of the Navajo reservation in Arizona. So you have a reservation within a reservation land in Arizona, which is a very unique and odd. Situation for the Hopi tribe to be in. It's also very rural and remote from a large city. It's about, I would say two and a half hours, almost three hours to Flagstaff, Arizona to most people would consider a very remote and in the middle of nowhere type of reservation. And I don't like saying in the middle of nowhere, because for the Hopi tribe and people, it is their universe. It is the center of who they are and where they come from. So, um, you know, you have to change that perspective. But I thought it was important for me to go and teach with my auntie both to have that experience on that reservation, which I'd also grown up going to as a youth as a, as a child visiting them, so I knew it was familiar to me and I love the desert, but I also felt like it was important for me to see Indian education. From that perspective, a perspective that's very rural and remote and probably had a lot of the challenges that I was trying to help. So I went and taught out there. I taught fourth grade. It was amazing. I would have stayed, but I ended up moving back home to Albuquerque New Mexico, to work for Albuquerque public schools for a couple of reasons. I wanted to be closer to family, my other, my, my parents, and also my partner, now my husband.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. There are good reasons for that. Yeah. So at this point, you're kind of mid career. You've seen opportunities to lots of different places. You've. It's gotten to see different systems and your, your activist heart is still beating strongly. And so where do you find that call for the thing you need to do next?
TCG: There I am back in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and teaching again in a title one school, where about 13 languages were spoken in my first grade classroom. Then I moved to a school in Albuquerque. That was. Predominantly a school of Mexican immigrants, monolingual, Spanish speaking families. So, man, I learned Spanish quickly, because my parents teacher conferences had to be done in Spanish and those were predominantly done in the homes of the families because they had a hard time coming into the school for various reasons, mostly for fear of immigration reasons.
And I loved that experience. It was amazing. But I missed teaching Native students. I really wanted to have that opportunity to create some change via curriculum wise and experience wise for the native community of Albuquerque. Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a hub of urban Indian families.
It historically has been a hub of urban Indians. My grandparents came there in the 1940s as federal workers. And there's this deep history of urban Indian issues, including education issues in Albuquerque. And so I met a woman. She had been trying to meet with me for months and I kind of was like putting her off, but I finally met with her and she proposed an idea, like, what if we created our own school? An urban school that would focus on urban Indian youth issues. What do you think about that? And my mind was like, absolutely yes! So within about a month, I, um, told my school that I wasn't coming back for the fall into the next school year and that I was going to start my own school. Um, and I feel like it was met with some like, Yeah, sure. Good luck with that.
We were using the charter school model. I did a lot of research on the charter schools in Boston. I did some research on some charter schools in Arizona. I know there's controversy in the, in the public school realm of charter schools versus public and funding and all of that. But we were trying to really do it in a way. That was positive towards the school district. In Albuquerque, the students who had the greatest achievement gaps were Native students and have historically always been Native students, highest rates of suicide, highest rates of teen pregnancy, lowest high school, graduation rates and college enrollment, et cetera. You know I don't like talking about poverty porn is what I call it so much. But like, unfortunately the reality is that our native youth we're facing some of the harshest demographics out there. And so we wanted to propose to the Albuquerque public schools, an idea where like, let us try this, let us try to start our own school with our own people, with our own ideas, our own curriculum from a Native perspective. And if it works, let's share what works best practices. So that you can use them in all of the schools in the district that have a high number of Native students and hopefully we can close these achievement gaps. Thus was the birth of NACA, the Native American Community Academy. So in 2005, that became my baby with not just me; it was a community endeavor. There's many of us that stood up this school stood up. This curriculum, supported these families, many of whom, which here's a really cool fact: Many of our first couple of classes of students are actually now the teachers at this school, which is amazing. And that's exactly what we wanted to have happen.
So yeah, that happened in about 2005. That was my next move of: All right. We're going to, we're going to do this. We're going to start a school. Based on our history based on our culture, based on how we perceive education should be. And we did it.
LJR: You did it, you started the school and now that foreshadowing of first alumni coming back to teach means it's still a going concern. What about those achievement gaps and those best practices being kind of infiltrated back into more mainstream services?
TCG: Yeah, absolutely. So we started seeing that our school was successful. Our school started meeting standards every year. We had our first graduating class and we had students that attended Yale, Columbia, Pomona. We have NADs that have graduated from Dartmouth now that I taught. So yeah, we started seeing huge growth in our community and I think really what it was, it's not that we were, you know, we still had to teach math. We still did teach science, literature, English the way any other school does. But the difference is we indigenized it.
And we supported the culture and language of the students and we made them feel like they mattered and that who they come from and where they come from was important. And not just some one paragraph in a history book, which most of us learned about. And I think that makes all the difference. When you can emotionally support a student in their identity, you're going to see progress and you're going to see growth.
And now NACA has created an offshoot, a nonprofit organization called NACA-Inspired Schools, Network, NISN, where we have some of our former original teachers that are running that nonprofit organization now. And they're standing up schools across the country in South Dakota, Oklahoma, Washington state, other places in New Mexico and Arizona. Both in reservation and urban communities that are not exactly the same as NACA, but the similar foundation of supporting students' culture and identity.
LJR: And so at this time you've started this, I mean, I'm sure the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into that is, like, unfathomable, but you do start to see the progress and the impact, and that must have been exhilarating. And you want to keep doing that. Yet, you talked to me earlier about when you left college, there were these two kind of parts of the track or the identity of educator and then policy law, advocacy champion. Did you start hearing that voice a little bit?
TCG: I did. So, you know, I was the founding Dean of Students, essentially a glorified, um, somebody who does…
LJR: Jack of all trades.
TCG: Jack of all trades. I was the janitor when I needed to sweep out the, you know, the classrooms, I taught middle school math. I was in charge of our testing. I was in charge of setting up our school discipline system, which was indigenous-focused. So a restorative justice model, you know. I did it all and I taught native American literature to high school students. I attended conferences and spoke about our school and, and it was really inspiring, But it was really that first class, those first two classes of students. And it was those students. It was their eagerness that kind of re sparked my eagerness for learning. And I felt like I kept preaching to them to follow your dreams and don't let anybody tell you, you can't do something, be strong.
And I had to do some internal, like reflecting, like, okay, if I'm telling them this, but I'm not walking that talk, you know, that's not okay. Because at this time I was kind of in my head, had this nagging, like notion that it's time for me to do the next thing. The next step. I've given a foundation to the school. These students are going to be fine and great. The school is going to keep thriving and being awesome. But what am I going to do? I would have been happy being a Dean of students or the principal for the next 20, 30 years. But I just had this nagging sensation that like I could be doing more in this realm in terms of policy. In the native American cosmos of issues, a lot of our issues happened at a much larger place here in Washington, DC at the federal government level. It's just the history of our people. We are sovereign nations. We have a unique history with the federal government, with our treaties that set us up as, we're not actually considered really a race. I mean we are, but the way Indian law works is that we are positioned as illegal status as tribes. And we have a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government. And, you know, and there's a series of Supreme Court cases from the 1800s that's kind of set that up, you know, so a lot of the work is done at this national level with the federal government. And I just kept thinking, like, if I'm gonna affect change even more than I have done at this level at the school. You know, I'm going to have to kind of pursue that path that I was semi thinking about it. Dartmouth. I had taken an Indian law class at Dartmouth, so I had taken all the Native studies classes I could when I was a student at Dartmouth and education and I was a sociology major, but I always felt like I'm not good enough to go to law school. Like originally that’s probably one of the things in reasons why I didn't go to law school right out of Dartmouth is I had my own self-doubt about my own self-worth and could I actually go to law school? And so I didn't. But this time around, I was like, I'm sitting here feeding these students this, like, notion that you can do anything you want and you're strong and you're powerful and don't let anybody tell you No. And I'm like, well, I've got to walk that talk. And I made the difficult choice to leave NACA, which still has my heart and soul in it and my passion, but I decided not getting any younger. It's a good time for me to make the move. And so I put all my eggs into one basket, which they never tell you to do when you take the LSAT and apply to law school. And fortunately for me, I made it into the university of New Mexico school of law. That again was also a life-changing event experience.
LJR: And yes, there was the geography and the embeddedness into community that made that a good choice. But likely if you're. Chosen some other school because of some ranking or some something it might not have had those very things that you needed about embeddedness and culture and, and recognition of tribal law and all of those things.
TCG: Right. Absolutely.
LJR: Talk to me about how then you use this new-found not only knowledge, but identity and hopefully confidence and all of those things to launch this next chapter.
TCG: For me, it was the notion that I was, I've always been about public service. My life has always been about. Public service and giving back, giving back to my people, making this place a better place than I then than it was for me. And that's how I viewed law school as well. You know, I didn't go to law school to, as a second career to kind of be a, an associate attorney in a big law firm and…that just wasn't me. I knew I was doing it for a very policy minded oriented type of, probably federal government service, area. And that's exactly how it turned out for me.
My 3L year in law school, I was applying for the Department of Interiors honor's attorney program. And then sequestration happened. And the honors attorney program after sequestration was defunded for a few years. So I couldn't qualify for that. And my heart was kind of really sad because I thought that was my way into federal government service.
And I want to preface this really quickly with the history that my grandparents both were public servants for the federal government. My Oneida grandmother worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And my grandfather was a budget analyst for the public health service, which has become the Indian Health Service now. So I felt like this was kind of like, Kismet, right? Like I was meant to meant to be a federal government employee for, for now and meant to be in Washington DC.
LJR: But since that program wasn't happening, you needed another in which was the highly selective Presidential Management Fellows program, a paid for two year rotation in a variety of federal offices, which you got.
TCG: Which you know, was a huge deal. And I was very excited, but then it meant that, okay, game on, I need to try to find a position, an agency that will hire me. There weren't any positions out there that were specific for Indian affairs and that wasn't sitting well with me because that's not why I was deciding to go into public service, federal government service.
Fortunately for me, this is in 2014 and there are a ton of Dartmouth NAD alumni that actually had either positions within the government as career level people or positions within Obama's administration that were political positions at the department of interior. So I had that working for me in my favor. So I kid you not, when they say it's all about who, you know, and your network. Also my New Mexico network. I was able to leverage my network to find a way to be placed in a position that allowed me both to work on my legal skills in the legislative capacity, but also specifically for Tribal affairs. And I was placed in the Department of Interior's office of congressional legislative affairs as a legislative affairs specialist managing the Native American affairs portfolio. So, you know, I worked with the assistant secretary of Indian affairs on his legislative initiatives and preparing him to testify before Congress and things like that. So that was my trajectory from law school to the federal government service.
I think this is probably the appropriate time right now for me to say this podcast obviously is I'm here in my personal capacity, as you know, a Tracy Canard Goodluck and alumni of Dartmouth college. While I worked for the federal government and can talk a little bit about what I do. I'm not here in my professional capacity at all.
LJR: Speaking on behalf. Right? [TCG: Right.] So that was a two year time-bound position, but it's who, you know, and you got to know lots of different people and see what you liked and see where you got fired up all over again, right? So talk us through that period of time, which wasn't so long ago to where you are now in Washington.
TCG: Sure. Part of the presidential management fellows program PMF program is that you have to do rotations outside of your office. It's part of the requirement to finish your fellowship. So, as I was looking for rotations, you know, there were things I could do that were National Park Service, which all of the opportunities would have been amazing. But for me, I really wanted to do something that was going to make a lasting change for tribal communities. I'm like, well, I'm a Fed now, which can sometimes in Indian country be a dirty word, just because of the history of our federal government, you know, policies with tribes. So I wanted to find a place I wanted to land in a rotation that would really make a lasting change. And another Dartmouth graduate class of ‘91, Jodi Gillette was the special assistant to the president, then President Obama, for native American affairs at the white house. I contacted Jodi and you know, said, “Hey, basically I can be free labor for you. Like I'll still get paid by Interior. If you want to bring me on to the white house for six months, is that something you can do?” And, you know, there's always a way where there's a will, there's a way. So I was able to do my rotation for the PMF. Um, fellowship at the White House, under Obama's White House as a policy advisor for the domestic policy council, working with Jody, working for a director, Cecilia Munoz, and ultimately, you know, putting forward the policies of the president. And President Obama at that time had the most forward-thinking policies for tribal affairs that we had ever seen historically. And I was able to, again, work on native issues. We stood up a program called Generation Indigenous, which is a tribal education and youth initiative under Obama. I worked on the tribal nations conferences, which was a government to government relationship meeting we put on with tribal leaders and the president every year and a bunch of other, everything you name it, every issue came into our office. So I was able to do that for six months with Jody. Went back to interior, back to my office in leg affairs, which I love by the way, you know, there's, I love working with the hill and on legislative issues, I have a passion for that.
But then about six months after I got back to Interior, the White House knocked on my door. Again, one of my friends who was leaving her position in intergovernmental affairs at the White House, which is the front facing side of working with tribal leaders. And they needed to hire somebody for the last year of Obama's White House. So for the last seven months of Obama's administration, I worked in intergovernmental affairs and the office of public engagement as the tribal person.
LJR: At this point, you went back to Interior and legislative affairs and were approached to work on water rights, which I know wasn't your focus, but you had an interest in environmental issues. So you took on this new challenge as…
TCG: Currently the deputy director of the secretary's Indian water rights office, where we work with tribes and municipalities and states to negotiate and settle their water rights rather than litigate for years. So the tribes get their members of Congress to introduce an enact legislation that settles their Indian water rights. And then my office works on implementation of those settlements. And that's what I've been doing over the last four years, 2017 to basically a month ago.
So I don't think what people realize is that the White House is a slim budget. They have a slim actually framework of political appointees they can bring in. So they actually go out to a lot of the agencies and look for people like myself that have experienced an expertise in a particular subject matter area. And they bring us in to do details. So I was approached again to see if I'd be interested in a detail back to the Biden-Harris White House. And I feel like you don't say no to that opportunity, you know. So there, there was some things to work out, but ultimately I said, yes, and I am now back at the White House as a policy advisor in the domestic policy council for Native American affairs, working on a variety of issues, you name it, it comes to us. I mean, there will be an end date at some point where I go back to interior, but for right now, I'm enjoying working on the issues again, I. I'm working on education and youth issues, veterans affairs, water issues, and,
LJR: And being janitor and math teacher all at the same time
TCG: Yeah, you name it. I'll do it. That's right.
LJR: Well, it sounds like that's that same spirit that you've always had the roll up your sleeves. I'm going to do it where there's impact and where there's need. Tracy, I would just love for you to go back to the young Tracy and. You know, you said it wasn't really ‘angry,’ it was more fired up, but there was a little, you know, undercurrent of being so riled by things that didn't seem right. There still as a lot of that. So how do you see things from your new lens in a slightly different way than you did then? Or is it much the same?
TCG: Well, you know, I think that every generation helps pay the path to make it better for the next generation. I would say those native students, that first came in the 1970s to Dartmouth and the first women and the first minority students definitely made it easier for me in the 90s when we were there. And I hope that the work that my colleagues and I did to fight things like, you know, like the Indian symbol and things like that, and the Hovey Murals and things that were just overtly in our faces that just hurt us and hurt our spirits. I would like to think that we made it a slightly better place and easier to handle for the future generations.
However I do think it's okay to be angry. I do think it's okay to get sparks and to get fired up and to fight for what you know you think is right. I do think I'm a changed person in the sense that I think there's a place for activism and activists. And I see that now in my community now, and I'm super grateful for that, but I also see a place for the kind of work that I'm doing now kind of more an inside path and making change from maybe a different perspective. And I would tell my former self that it's okay to be fired up right now. And it's okay to have those experiences. That part of me hasn't changed. I've just learned how to redirect that into the situation I'm in now to make a change in a different way. I think it was important for me to have had those experiences to have had some anger. And to push through that and to learn from it, to know how I'm going to formulate that into policies today.
LJR: Yeah. Well, Tracy, I mean you, at every step in, in advocating for children in schools, in creating a new school, in looking at policy from everything that's thrown at you, you are making change and you're using that fire and those experiences and your deep care for your culture and many other people that don't feel as though they fit and need a place to fit. I am so impressed and inspired, and I am so glad that you shared your story with us and it's certainly not over. So we'll be watching you from here with all of our support and admiration. So thanks so much, Tracy.
TCG: Thank you.
LJR: That was Tracy Cannard Goodluck, a member of the Oneida nation of Wisconsin and also of Muskogee Creek heritage beginning her career as an educator, she was one of the co-founders of the native American community academy NACA in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She now is an advocate for native American communities throughout the United States in her roles within the federal government. She recently joined the white house as a policy advisor for native affairs and domestic policy council staff there on a detail from the department of interior where she's the deputy director of the secretary's Indian water rights office. Thanks to Tracy for all she does. And thank you for listening. Please subscribe or follow us wherever you find your podcasts or at RoadsTakenShow.com so you can hear more inspiring stories with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on the next episodes of Roads Taken.