What the summer did: brought with it the usual sunlight and longing, but mostly WORDS + SOUNDS.

Step 1) WORDS. Receive acceptance letter from the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) saying that you're officially an "artist in residence" for a month,
which makes you feel and sound very official. Mostly this means that there (finally) can be a month in a room of one's own-- a much-needed
space and place for finishing up the second book. Days spent among the red rock and juniper, blue skies and sudden monsoons, and all
of this added up to more poems. The new poetry collection is titled COUNTERGLOW and is looking for a permanent home with a publisher.
They're mostly small poems, what Paul Celan would call "gem-like," and it feels good to finish the book because some of these poems have been sitting
in folders for six years, needing breath and light. Some of the poems from the collection, too, got picked up this summer by Spiritus, a journal from the Johns Hopkins
University Press and another poem from COUNTERGLOW found a home this summer in As/Us: A Space for Women of the World.

Step 2) WORDS + SOUNDS. Proposed project for SFAI residency included an experimental foray into video poems. As in: collect video clips
wherever your body finds you and then combine said strange clips with music you make by yourself (bass, keyboards, vox, etc.). I've been
pleased with this project because it prompts questions re: how making video poems changes poetics, how moving from the page
into the air and onto the screen creates new useful language experiences. Here are links to a few:

"Gegenschein": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZTnza6QIY4

"Omphalos": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7s717n-waA

"Scapular": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlIgaVzygPA

Step 3) RESEARCH WORDS. Spend your mornings in Santa Fe at the Institute of American Indian arts for dissertation research. Riffle through 

the archives and find it actually fun/find beautiful words and stories that deserve attention and air. Make photos. Schedule interviews. Raise questions. Be grateful. 

Step 4) SOUNDS. Consciously decide to rock out deeply and utterly. I'm a serious poet and scholar, but I'm also a serious metalhead. I play bass and write
lyrics in the atmospheric black metal band, Valley of Thorns. We played plenty of shows this summer and we have plenty more booked in the coming months. 
Hopefully we'll be recording an album next year. I also started video recording local metal bands in California, Nevada, and New Mexico, so if you visit
my YouTube channel for video poems, you'll also be greeted with the harrowing screams and depressive thunderings of underground metal music.  

We all know 4 is a good number, so let's stop there. 

What the summer did: reminded me, again, that I'm an artist first and a scholar second. I'm grateful to be working in NAS at UCD where artistic 
endeavors are honored and understood. Here's to another trip around the sun, the end of one more summer, and the beginning of another academic year. 

Patricia Killelea is a mixed-heritage Chicana poet and musician. She is the author of the poetry collection Other Suns, which is available from Swan Scythe Press (2011), and is currently a Ph.D Candidate in Native American Studies at the University of California at Davis, where her research focuses on contemporary experimental American Indian poetry. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and English, also from UC Davis. Originally from the Bay Area, CA, she has taught the Introduction to Native American Literature course at UC Davis since Fall 2009, and she is also revising her second poetry manuscript, tentatively titled Counterglow. A future resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Patricia is also the bassist in the metal band Valley of Thorns, and is currently producing experimental video poems. Find out about all of her projects atwww.patriciakillelea.com

He:yung! This summer I attended the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages Conference for two weeks in Washington D.C. At this conference I had the opportunity to learn more of my heritage language, na:tinixwe mixine:whe’, view the Smithsonian collections of Hupa objects, listen to ceremonial songs recorded in the 1950s, and read some of the first Hupa language documentation ever recorded. All of these experiences were made richer by sharing them with my co-Hupa and cousin, Kayla Carpenter. Together we painted the town red and had some unforgettable experiences.

Visiting the collections of Hupa basketry, regalia, and ceremonial objects is always bittersweet and during this conference it was no different. I was delighted to see and hold the stunning baskets and greet them in na:tinixwe mixine:whe’ but I was equally saddened to watch them be put back in their storage closets. The Smithsonian collections were in a giant concrete labyrinth in Maryland some 30+ miles away from D.C. I couldn’t help but think that the objects in those collections were very far from the valley and the people who know how to use them to remake the world.

Breath of Life was an incredible experience for me as a Hupa language learner. Part of this experience was being surrounded by other Native American people who were all at varying stages in their language acquisition and the support that this environment offered. Of course, with Indian people comes Indian humor – so I laughed at jokes in Yurok, Hupa, Menominee, Wendot-Wyandot, many Chumash languages, Pawnee, Kwakwala, Tunica, Miwok, Konkow, Cahuilla, and Eastern Algonquian. The laughter made learning Hupa easier. Of Course Kayla’s humor, skill as a linguist, and incredible knowledge of the Hupa language made speaking Hupa with her was a great source of happiness for me. Hearing myself say Hupa words and watching them be understood was so moving and it invigorated my desire to keep learning more. Speaking na:tinixwe mixine:whe’ feels like satisfying a hunger and I speak it every day now. I recommend Breath of Life for all Native people. Ts’ehdiyah.

This summer I became a mom! It still amazes me to say those words out loud- I am a mom! Whijay Joyce Meza was born on August 28, 2013 weighing 6 lbs and 9oz and a whopping 19.25 inches long!  She is perfect and healthy! This is our first baby, so my fiancé and I are extremely excited. Being in grad school and becoming pregnant was an adventure in it self. I had a good amount of morning sickness, I became fatigued all the time, and I gained enough weight for two pregnant ladies! But in the end, it was all worth it!

This summer I played catch-up! While in grad school I was bogged down with the normal amount of work, reading-writing and of course-more reading. So when my midwife, relatives, and friends would ask me if I was reading What to Expect when Expecting or any other literature regarding post pregnant life, I would feel bad and reply no, I was reading Defying the Odds: The Tule River Tribe’s Struggle for Sovereignty in Three Centuries by Frank, Gayla, and Carole Goldberg, or Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda. So this summer I read, googled, interrogated family members, and took classes about how our life was about to change.  And let me tell you, I am glad I did!

 This summer was an experience filled with new knowledge about my body, newborns, and the entire birthing process. I had a couple of adventures as well, like driving to Tule River reservation for the California Indian Basketweavers Association (CIBA) annual gathering, driving to Hoopa with Stephanie Lumsden to participate in our first Flower Dance ceremony, presenting at the College of Marin for their California Indian Studies Certificate Program, and going camping - all while I was 7-8 months pregnant!  Lets just say I stayed very busy! My fiancé and I will be concentrating on our new family for the next few months, so I will be back to school next quarter. 

This past June and July 2013 I co-led an interdisciplinary team of four Willamette University students in a research project that looked at Oregon community responses to a recent statewide ban of the use of Indian themed mascots in Oregon’s public schools. The project team represented a diverse group of scholars and I had the distinct privilege of being both a mentee to my senior colleague Dr. Rebecca Dobkins (Anthropology), and a mentor to four fabulous students: Felicia Garcia (Phycology), Cristina Marquez-Guerrero (Anthropology), Blanca Gutierrez (American Ethnic Studies and English) and Kelley Villa (American Ethnic Studies).

The Oregon State Board of Education passed a resolution on July 1st 2013, banning the use of Indian themed mascots in Oregon’s public schools. Over the next five years, eight schools with the names “Indians” “Braves” or “Chieftains” will have to change their name and Indian mascot imagery and seven schools using the name “Warriors” will have to change their mascot imagery, or risk the loss of state funding. This ban was subsequently challenged by Oregon State legislators who introduced SB 215, which would relax the ban and allow some high schools to retain their mascots as long as they do so in consultation with the geographically closest federally recognized tribe.

As one might expect, both the original ban and SB 215 had strong supporters and opponents. The Oregon State Senate passed SB 215 on July 15th 2013. Governor John Kitzhaber proceeded to veto SB 215 on August 16th 2013 leaving the original ban in tact.    

For nine weeks, our team conducted fieldwork, collecting archival materials and conducting interviews. The first community we visited, Enterprise, Oregon, had already gone through the process of changing their high school mascot from one that was Indian themed to a non-Indian themed prior to the statewide ban. We chose the City of Enterprise as part of our project in order to get a sense of how this transition took place, gain important insights, and identify best practices other communities could employ when making this transition. In addition, we visited two communities effected by the ban, interviewing high school principals, vice principals, superintendents, athletic directors, as well as Native American community members concerning their thoughts and feelings on Indian themed mascots and the statewide ban.

We meet wonderful people, we were challenged in our thinking about the issue, and we obtained a tremendous amount of data on the topic. Our findings are important and timely.  As I turn to the task of report writing, I am struck by how this issue highlights the widespread lack of reliable information about Native Americans available to the general public, an issue legal scholar Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee) in his book In the Courts of the Conqueror: the 10 Worst Indian Law Cases, calls one of the most pressing problem facing Indian people today.

For more on the mascot issue visit: http://nativeappropriations.com/category/mascots