When I was about five years old, I remember I was trying to remember something about being five years old and it's not always easy, but there was a bird in the skies of Southern Alberta in Northern Montana where I was born on the blackfeet blood reserve and I love this. I used to watch him for hours effortlessly. Gigantic sky that you've all heard so much about up there or come down and light on the water and Float. They're very majestically and sometimes if you watch them, he'd the creep into the grasses and waddle around not very gracefully and we call him mix akatsi which in the blackfeet language means pink colored and Mexico City and I became very good friends the bird had a very particular significance to me because I desperately wanted to be able to fly.I felt very much as if I was a kind of person who had been born into a kind of world where flight was just impossible and most of the things that I dreamed about a red about would not be possible for me, but possible for other people. When I was about 10 years old my life changed very drastically like so many like 60% of Native American people. I found myself no longer living on the reservation. I found myself adopted forcefully against my parents will because they weren't considered adequate parents because they couldn't make enough money to support me and I found myself in that terrible position that 60% of Native Americans find themselves living in a city, which they didn't understand at all and not in another culture but between two cultures A teacher of English language told me that Mexico City was not called Mexico City, even though that's what my people had called that bird for a thousand years, but Mexico City was really duck. Well, I was very disappointed with English and I couldn't understand I couldn't understand it. I mean first of all the bird didn't look like Duck. And what it made a noise it didn't sound like Duck and I was even more confused when I found out that the verb to duck came from the vertibird and not vice versa. This was the beginning of a very complex lesson for me. And if I tell you a bit about it, I think perhaps you should hear it as a metaphor of a complex situation that doesn't just happen to Chicano and black and do it an Indian children, but to all children. Because you see we are born into a cultural preconception, which we call reality and which we never question. We essentially know the world in terms of that cultural package are preconception and we are so unaware of it that the most liberal of us go through life with a kind of ethnocentricity which automatically rules out all other ways of seeing the world and show you how this work for just one Indian style as I came to understand English better. I understood that it made a great deal of sense, but I never forgot that Mexico has he made a different kind of sense and I soon realized that languages are not just different words for the same thing. But totally different concepts totally different ways of experiencing and looking at the world. television of course is one of the ways in which we do look at the world and then one one of the major ways in which we teach people how to see How is all artist of always known reality depends entirely on how you see things? I grew up in a place that's called a Wilderness and I never could understand how that amazing ethological Park could be called a Wilderness something wild that needed to be harnessed nature. You see as some sort of photo some sort of adversary in the dominant cultures mentality. We are not part of Nature and Society. We are created above it outside of it and feel what we must Dominate and change it before we are can be comfortable and safe with in it. I grew up in a culture in which we are considered literally a part of the entire process that's called nature to such an extent that when blackout called himself the brother of the bear. He was quite serious about this and other words Indians didn't need Darwin find out that they were part of nature. I saw my first Wilderness as I recall one August day when I got off a Greyhound bus in a city called, New York. Now that struck me as being fairly Wild. And pretty much out of hand, but I didn't understand how the term could be applied to the place where I was born. Let me show you other ways in which I gradually through the help of some very unusual teachers was able to find my way into two cultures rather than remain helplessly between two cultures. I guess you realize that the Earth is such an important. Symbol to most Primal people that if we use European languages, we tend to capitalize the e in much the way that the word God is capitalized by people of the dominant culture. You can imagine my distress when I was 10 and 11 years old to find out that synonyms for the word Earth dirt and soil were used to describe uncleanliness on the one hand and obscenity on the other. I couldn't possibly understand how something that could be. Dirty could be a negative. Could I have any kind of negative connotation how it would be like saying that that person is Godly Don't Go Near him and I couldn't grasp how how these ideas made their way into the English language. The biggest problem I guess I ever faced was in an astronomy class when I was about 14 and I have somebody finally explained to me that we live in a universe and that made no sense to me at all because you see as someone from an outside culture who hadn't learned speak English until he was about 10. I was very literal about words and I tried to figure out what in the world Universe met because native people almost all over the world don't live in a universe but in a Multiverse, They do not have this monotheistic monomaniacal kind of notion that behind all truth is one final truth almost always their own. They therefore have no desire. to send out missionaries because they don't have this notion that everyone is wrong, but them The late Hannah Arendt in one of her last books called thinking said something that is amazingly perceptive. I think. One piece needs to speak out of this culture. She said that. The impulse behind the use of Reason should not feed the discovery of truth, but the discovery of meaning and that meaning and Truth are not the same things. There are many potential ways of interpreting the world in which we live. All we have to do is go from the work of my teeth to the work of Picasso to giacometti and we begin to see the variety of ways in which we can see the world and experiencing. These aren't distortions of some more fundamental some more acceptable reality are ways of seeing that reality. I have the feeling when I watch television. That one of the major problems in dealing with it as a viewer and one of the major problems and dealing with it as a Creator is that we must fit our thoughts into a form which may be alien to our thoughts. Just as you must if you want to tell someone about a dream you've had must often change the dream in order to facilitate being expressed in language. You simply cannot get to what happened in that dream. That's so vivid to you. You can't using the language perhaps of your culture get that experience conveyed to someone else literally. you find that you begin to change your reality to suit the ways in which we traditionally must express ourselves because language not only permits us to be expressive but also free determines what we're going to say and limits what we are able to say it's for that reason that the Arts exist of course, and it's so that they could infer things that cannot be explicitly said The explicit part of the world, of course, it was an important one science and many of the many of the things that we look forward to and to make our lives better come out of that kind of explicit mentality. What I'm trying to suggest you today is that there are alternative world to the one in which we are. So sore of which we are so certain and until we begin to realize what Carlos Castaneda said in his Don Juan books that there are separate reality. That in effect so-called primitive art is not simply naturalistic art, which has not yet achieved Perfection, but is an alternative invalid form unto itself. My mother I remember once said something to me that that impressed me a great deal. She said that isn't it strange in the dominant society that men tend to give away everything that's best about being human to women and children. They give away Taste of responsiveness to color the ability to cry and feel emotion intuition inspiration all of these things, which somehow it don't fit into this linear construction of the world this notion of certitude of that ultimate truth that lies behind all ideas. if television could somehow open up rather than close the doors of perception. How much how many more brilliant people we might produce? If we could somehow or another in the images that we provide on that screen suggest that some of the things that children think which will soon be abandoned by them because they will be taught not to think them or they will simply be told that there's no way to think them inaccessible tools of their culture. Wouldn't it be nice to affirm those things rather than to deny them? My grandfather one day was watching television. I think it was an old John Wayne movie and he was my father by the way was a stuntman and died many times for Mr. Wing. And we were sitting and watching one of the old things waiting for a glimpse of dad doing one of these fantastic falls off a horse and watching mr. Wayne when that was all it was on the screen and Mr. Wayne said to another gentleman you're nothing but a dirty coyote. Why my grandfather stop turn off the sap right then and cuz that was Blasphemous to him. He said I won't allow swearing in this house. And I said, well, he didn't mean that it's where I tell me something how I mean if he hates this man, why would he call him a coyote because you see the coyote Clan among the blackfeet is one of the highest levels that you can reach a massive wealth, but no you see a coyote. He means, you know sort of a varmint. I absolutely spent two hours trying to explain to my grandfather why the word coyote would be used as in some as a criticism of a man rather than the compliment and to this day if my grandfather was still alive, he would still be sitting there scratching his braids and trying to figure out what in the world I was talking about and sure that I was lost because I understood. Mine great Advantage has been the fact that I was initiated into two worlds rather than one. Television has the opportunity of teaching in the most fundamental way very much as those unusual teachers who gave me the opportunity of seeing the valid the validity in the world that I come from in the world that I was moving into it would seem to me that it would be possible in the kind of images that are presented to suggest that there are alternatives. There are larger ways of looking at the world different ways that are looking at the world that are not simply amusing and exotic and different but valid and true. Maybe we simply have to learn to use the word truth a little bit more and the word Superstition a little bit less. In writing about Native Americans. I've made a particular effort not to talk about the fact that they believe in this and they believe in that let's talk about it as an actual fact. I tried not to use the word myths and legends in the same way that I would not tend to speak to a Christian audience and talk about the Jesus myth because in some peculiar and very fundamental way. It shatters something that we wish to believe and do believe and these kind of patients these ways in which the media Express a kind of unintentional superiority a kind of unintentional correctness are all of the Insidious and unintentional ways that very liberal people actually destroy our great multiplicity and begin to make us confused being equal with being uniform or conform conforming we don't have to be the same in order to be equal and it's very Look out for us to grasp that because well, unfortunately gentleman from Africa wear suits and gentleman from Japan wear suits and gentleman from Indian reservations wear suits when they go in to speak to Big corporations about account and it's a difficult thing in a difficult temptation, but on the other hand what it suggests to us is that they somehow have changed where they simply are disguised. They're simply disguised in terms of the dominant world so that they can wheel and deal in that word Weldon. They may very well go home and put back on their kimona or whatever they wear. I once tried to make this point very Vivid and sofa many smokes many moons. I asked an Indian artist to draw a picture of a very famous event that took place in 1492 and let me as the concluding remarks give you such an image since after all television deals with images and let me try to show you how different images make different Impressions. I found a sixteenth-century etching and it showed of marvelous Galleon in a bay with handsome gentleman coming onto the shore of the landing boat. And there were very European looking brown people. I assume who had gifts one of them had a peace pipe along fortunately for the occasion. There was a gentleman in a row planting this large hole structure that looks something like that in the ground and it was a very familiar scene to all of us the same scene was painted by an Indian was quite staggering to me. It showed three Indians crouched on the shore staring in amazement into the water where a floating island of rock was gradually approaching the island was covered with tall the foliated trees in which line and various leaves seem to be blowing in the wind beneath some strange man wrapped in some peculiar kind of shell. And who looked as if they had squirrels in their mouth they were so bushy. Well, I showed these two pictures to a group of Indians and to a group of nine into you and the Anglo said well. If you think about it. The Indians really didn't see what they thought they saw. I mean the island is really a ship and those defoliated trees are really masked and those people had beards they weren't squirrels in their mouth. They simply didn't know what they were looking at. So they made an error but I showed the same drawings to Indian side look at them for a long time. And that's a well. After all isn't a ship really a floating island and what are math finally but Aldi foliated trees. You see we see reality in terms of the way in which we experience it. I asked you then to do me a favor of imagining an alternative third way of looking what if we saw the world as Einstein said it existed. What if we were an entirely alien kind of being who didn't see these outward shapes and forms that are really whirling molecules, but saw the particles that make up that science tells us makes up our world and that case finally who sees reality. and if we are in charge of chewing of showing our reality to our children and the children of others don't we have to show them more than the reality that we have taken for granted for only a few thousand years. Thank you.