The Memory Generation

Episode 8: Cliff Sebastian

INTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: Hey everyone, I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Welcome to The Memory Generation – a podcast about the memories we inherit and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next. Today we are talking with Cliff Sebastian. Cliff is a member of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation – one of the oldest Native Tribes in the New England area. In this conversation, Cliff reflects on inheriting a history  that is thousands of years long. It’s an American story that comes with centuries of unjust pain and trauma, but also hope as the language of his ancestors is again being embraced. He shares with us how modern generations are finding new words to describe old wounds. 

Cliff used to work for the Pequot Museum and is now the Project Director for the Primary Prevention Project – an initiative that helps individuals who have fallen victim to the opioid crisis.

We recorded this conversation through Zoom on May 17, 2022. I was here in Portland, Maine and Cliff was on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation in Connecticut.

INTERVIEW

Rachael Cerrotti: Let's start off this conversation by going back to your childhood.

Cliff Sebastian: Yeah. So I was born in New York and I lived in Queens for like the first nine months of my life or so. But when the Mashantucket Tribal Nation really started expanding in a major way in the very late eighties and the early nineties, that's when my family decided to return to the reservation where my grandfather was already living. And I grew up there and I returned to New York for college and lived there for a few years. And, since then I've been back in Connecticut right here on the very same reservation.

Rachael Cerrotti: My guess is that most of the folks listening, including myself, don't have much insight as to what it's like to grow up or live on a reservation. So can you just take us there and tell us what your childhood was like?

Cliff Sebastian: First and foremost, I do feel like it's important to just make this point that a lot of reservations are different and that this particular reservation is definitely different than a lot of larger reservations that you can find across this country. But it still is a tribal reservation and happens to be arguably one of the first reservations formally made in the continental United States going back to the 1600s. We have a comparatively small reservation. It was only a few years ago that we broke a thousand members. I believe we’re between 12[00] and 1,500 at the time being with a very young population. Like a third of our population being under the age of 18. It was very small town living. And I think the big difference between some other kinds of small town living is that everyone around you is a relative. Basically everyone around you in like a few mile radius is at bare minimum, at least, fourth or fifth cousin or something like that, so that can be very interesting. But it also leads to a very nice community where there's a lot of trust and just a lot of familiarity. So there's just a lot of people that all are working towards something similar. It's sort of like a company town in many ways because of the fact that our reservation started to grow so quickly because of Foxwoods Resort Casino, which some people, you know, on the East Coast might have heard of. And, some of our other enterprises started to provide the finances to allow more people to move back and allow for the government of the tribal nation to become more sophisticated and start offering more services to people. But of course, when you're a child, you're not really noticing any of that. You're just enjoying being able to hang out with your friends and your cousins and go over people's houses very easily. People leaving their front doors open and kind of every adult knowing who you are and you knowing all the kids. So, there's a lot of good stuff in that regard.

Rachael Cerrotti: That’s cool. Does it feel contained or does it feel like part of the larger Connecticut community?

Cliff Sebastian: I would say it's like a little bit of like a yes and a no there. Definitely in our circumstance, you're always a part of a larger non-tribal community just because of geographically how small it is. If you want to go to a store, if you want to go to a supermarket, you're leaving the reservation and then you're automatically around non-tribal people. I went to a kindergarten on the rez. So I was starting off my education exclusively around cousins and other tribal members. But then as soon as it was time for like furthering elementary school and so on and so forth, I left the reservation. So you're always a part of a larger community. You're never completely isolated in any way. But on the other hand there is that definite separation that you're aware of and that also other people are aware of.

Rachael Cerrotti: There’s of course a very long, complicated, painful history for Native Americans in this country. I want to give a little bit of an overview for listeners because it's not a history that we learn. And I would like to talk to you a bit about that. So for over 10,000 years, Native people have lived in the area that we now know as southeastern Connecticut. And then from 1636 to 1638, there was a Pequot War, which really was the first major battle between colonists and indigenous people. And that dramatically decreased not only the population of the Pequot tribe, but also the amount of land that the survivors and their descendants had to live on. Am I getting that? Am I doing good so far? On the history? 

Cliff Sebastian: Yeah yeah yeah, that’s an excellent summary.

Rachael Cerrotti: Okay. Great. So then it wasn't until way later in the 1970s and then you had mentioned the 1980s that tribal members began moving back to this reservation and really had to fight for their land rights. 

Cliff Sebastian: Mmhmm. 

Rachael Cerrotti: That's a lot to inherit. It's a lot of pain and it's a lot of story and it's a lot of community struggle. And, so often when we refer to history in this country, we barely make it back a few hundred years before we have some sort of cultural amnesia. And so I'm wondering if you could speak to this. How is that long line of history talked about in your family? Is it talked about? 

Cliff Sebastian: My short answer would be that there is sort of like a micro and macro way of looking at it. And I think that me thinking in those terms is already part of the answer. That, with all of that history there, those thousands of years, you wind up kind of looking at time in history different and it tends to make things seem a lot smaller. So I think that from a micro perspective, when it comes to like an immediate family, you're certainly not thinking about those things all the time. You're not thinking about those thousands of years of history all the time. It's not something that's like constantly in your mind because as a person you've got the same concerns as everyone else. And a lot of times you're just thinking about today and making it tomorrow and those kind-of things. But then when you do start zooming out, you do start viewing history in an incredibly different way. I can remember being younger and being in elementary school and getting that very fundamental American history taught to me, but then also being back on the reservation and then getting a form of history taught to me that's very similar, but also way, way, way longer. So you just wind up conceptualizing time and history differently where you start to realize that what you may spend all year learning about in history class, that might be a fraction of like a timeline between now and then that you might look at when you consider your own personal history. And so you start to realize that part of your history might be deliberately left out of teachings, and you can feel one way about that. But there's also another way to consider things, which is that those several hundred years where you're still sort of unpacking and dealing with a lot of the trauma of the past 3[00]-400 years, while that's awful and you do want to keep it in mind, it also allows you to remember that that's not the zenith of your history. It's not the end of your history. It's not the main part of your history because of the fact that it represents an important but ultimately within the grand scheme of things, not incredibly long part of your entire history. And it also kind of helps you know your place in history that things aren't ending with me and they didn't begin with me for certain. And that, there's a history going back thousands of years and, Lord willing, it'll continue for a long time as well. 

Rachael Cerrotti: I feel like as as a Jewish person, you know, who grew up regularly hearing stories about, you know, oppression and discrimination and genocide, that is that is such an important message to be brought into future. Because you can get really caught up in the persecution of the past. Like it can really come to define a community of people is how you are mistreated. 

Cliff Sebastian: Yes

Rachael Cerrotti: And I think that's part of the struggle that our generation has is how much do we sit in the pain of the past versus live in the present day as it is right now?

Cliff Sebastian: It's a very, very common struggle. And the way you put it, especially for our generation of finding a way to balance, never forgetting the past and honoring the struggles of our ancestors in the past, but also doing what I believe our ancestors would want, which is to, in a way, be able to move on and live in the present, embrace the future and make sure that our future is not always exclusively about our pain and that we don't allow the pain of our past to be our end all, be all. That we have more than just that to our identity. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Growing up, is there a memory of yours from your family that you feel like has significantly shaped who you are today?

Cliff Sebastian: Hmm. I did have the unique opportunity when I was very young to participate in my tribal nation’s budding language program. So, language is an incredibly important thing to this community and just to people and cultures in general. You know, hundreds of years ago, after the Pequot War that you mentioned, it was made in law that Pequot identity itself did not exist and was not allowed to be discussed. And a part of that was that the Pequot language was not allowed to be spoken. So that was a law for some time in pre-American history and remained that way for a while. And the language was effectively lost as a real true form of communication. But fortunately in the past few decades there's been enormous revitalization efforts. And so when I was young, just being a child and not really super familiar with a lot of the pain and the trauma and etc., etc., and you're just trying to live your life as a kid. While I was at my kindergarten school (we call it our child development center), we had some of the community members who were also the teachers who were trying to teach us language classes. And I always remember, you know, when I was that age, I was a little bit of a cut up and I didn't always pay attention in class all the time. And so a teacher was trying to teach us some of our Pequot words. We had a few words to remember. Some people were paying attention and some people weren't. And I was one who wasn't paying attention too much until I had one of the teachers sort of pulled me aside and tried to explain what this is and what it means and really help contextualize what's going on and that this is something that's a little bit bigger than me and it's something that's really important. And it did kind of stick with me at that age because, you know, they weren't angry at me. There was no yelling or anything like that. But they were just trying to take some time and explain why this is more important because I already understood English and no one around me was speaking Pequot so I don't know why this would be important. And I think that that really sent me down a path of being interested in learning more about my culture and my history and more importantly being interested in continuing to preserve that culture and that history. And, I think that language is probably one of the best ways and one of the most effective and still organic ways to preserve culture in history. So, I think that moment and that memory really has probably helped shape a lot of my future and my present and where I'm going. 

Rachael Cerrotti: How old were you around that time?

Cliff Sebastian: Couldn't have been older than seven. 

Rachael Cerrotti: For a seven year old, to have that reflection is pretty powerful.

Cliff Sebastian: It wasn't something where, like, it dawned on me all at that very moment. What it did was it planted the seed that would grow into something over years. But one of the things you mentioned was that like there were periods of time where we weren't allowed to speak that language. And so then you start to notice some dissidence within your community. Like my grandfather who was born and lived on the reservation, died on the reservation. He didn't speak the language and it was strongly discouraged. And my teacher mentioning something like that to me was something that I never thought about and then asking my grandfather about it and hearing effectively that, really did help me understand like, oh, you know, my teacher really was on something. So maybe the reason that my grandfather wasn't speaking, it wasn't because he didn't care. It was maybe because he never had the opportunity, the privilege, to be able to learn his language in an environment where it would be safe to learn it. 

Rachael Cerrotti: As he got older, did he talk about his growing up or any of his memories or life experiences or was he pretty, you know, kept it to himself for his whole life? 

Cliff Sebastian: He kept it to himself for his whole life. He was a very loving man. So I don't want to give the impression he was cold or anything. I think he was choosing to keep a lot of that to himself because I think so much of it was a painful sort of thing. And of course, he's from an older generation where maybe talking about feelings isn't encouraged so much. 

Rachael Cerrotti: What about the rest of your family? Were your other grandparents, were they raised on the reservation as well?

Cliff Sebastian: So my father is Pequot. My mother is African-American and they met in New York and my father was raised in New York with my grandmother who is actually Native American from a different tribal nation. My great grandfathers met each other at a place called the American Indian House in Manhattan and then they had kids and then everyone would sort of go back and forth to the reservation. And so from there you get to know other Native Americans. Then you get to hear those stories about your reservation, but also about the Native American experience from other parts of the country and from other parts of the Americas in general even if you're talking about Central and South America. 

Rachael Cerrotti: That's a nice segway to back when you and I first met. I think it was 2016. And you very graciously welcomed my brother and I to the Pequot museum where you are working then, which is on the reservation in Connecticut. My brother and I ended up there because we had like really wanted to go to Standing Rock to stand in solidarity with the water protectors and ultimately decided that perhaps a more productive way for us to support would be to learn more about Native American life and legacy in New England, which is where we were raised. And so I remember spontaneously showing up at the museum and you were so nice to sit and talk with us and you let me take your portrait. And you had shared with us your experience going out to Standing Rock. And so I'd like to go back to that time because I know that going out there you had an opportunity to stand in solidarity with people from tribes all across America. And I'm curious what that community was like and what that felt like to be there together standing up for land rights and for the community's rights. 

Cliff Sebastian: Yeah, that was certainly a very eye opening experience. And it was a very interesting period in time, especially for this nation's history, I think, because It felt like Standing Rock was really the first time in quite some time that Native American experiences and struggles were really dominating the news in people's minds for a long period of time. And then myself and a few other people wanted to go out there physically because this was something where it was - there was an aspect of protest to it, but it was also more direct action in trying to prevent these pipes from going into the ground because that directly meant a negative effect on the lives of the Native Americans there. It really was something that I've never seen before where there's thousands and thousands of people all there in solidarity and all in support of this one goal that I never had a chance to see before. So it really opened my eyes to how effective these things can be and I've seen large groups of Native Americans before at some of our cultural celebrations like pow wows or things like that, but never before where it's just people working towards a similar goal, living with each other just in a community and finding ways to make that work.

Rachael Cerrotti: What did that feel like being in that space for the first time? 

Cliff Sebastian: Promising. Promising and hopeful. But what I took away from it was just the fact that so many people could find so many different ways to support one another and have each other's back no matter what. One thing about Native American history that has been taught in American schools for a very long time, more often is that Native Americans don't exist anymore. You know, when you hear that your entire life growing up and you know that percentage wise there's not a lot of you, it's easy to feel that way and it's easy to think that way, especially if you think about the future in any sort of long term way. That, you know, maybe Native Americans will be disappearing. And then you see something like this and you see just thousands and thousands of people from all four corners of the continental U.S. and it can be a really nice reminder that that's not true that, you know, Native Americans aren't disappearing, that we are here and we can look out for each other and take care of each other. And not only that, but that there were non-natives that were at that encampment as well, and that they also are interested in supporting you and helping you and working toward similar goals. So it can leave you feeling optimistic in a realistic way.

Rachael Cerrotti: I like that. Optimistic in a realistic way. I was actually thinking about that quite a bit as I was preparing to talk with you because a couple weeks ago, I spoke with my friend Naré for this show, who comes from Armenia. And her grandparents were Armenian genocide survivors. And we talked a lot about how that genocide has been denied for over a hundred years. It's been denied by the people who committed the genocide, but also by other foreign powers who don't want to deal with the politics of calling it what it is. And when I think about the Native American community, it's just being ignored. It's just not spoken about. 

Cliff Sebastian: Yeah. 

Rachael Cerrotti: For the rest of us. Like, how do we help your community not feel scared that it's going to be forgotten or ignored? What can the role of the outside community play to help move all the memories forward? 

Cliff Sebastian: I think that what you said, you know, when we first started talking about, you know, me going out west to the Dakotas, was you saying that you wanted to support and then you felt that it might be best if you started a little bit closer to home. And I think that that is truly probably one of the best ways to help marginalized communities in general. But, you know, Native Americans in specific, is to try to find out what's closest to you at home because I think the first step that everyone can take is to at least wherever you are in the country, try to find out what was the history before the American history? What was going on here? And are there still tribes in my area currently with members and what are they currently doing? I think that's, you know, the very best first start and then it can branch out from there in a million different directions. 

Rachael Cerrotti: You've worked really quite intimately with your community from, like, a professional space for much of your career, right?

Cliff Sebastian: Mmhmm

Rachael Cerrotti: So, tell me about what you're doing now. 

Cliff Sebastian: I am managing a federally funded grant for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. The grant is meant to prevent substance abuse, specifically in smaller communities and underfunded communities. So southeastern Connecticut had a little bit of a drug problem for quite some time. And Native American tribal nations oftentimes have higher than average amounts of like drug use and abuse. So there was a real opportunity here to try to help out. So this is absolutely about the tribal nation in specific, but it's also about the non-tribal community for New London County in Connecticut in general. We're really now putting our foot on the gas to try to spend like the next few years, really trying to offer as much as possible to the community to not just help people who have already struggled with drugs and alcohol, but also to help get to kids early on to help them never have to go through those struggles in the first place.

Rachael Cerrotti: I'm just wondering how the role of memory, if it plays a role in the substance abuse. You know, going back to the idea that perhaps feeling ignored or feeling forgotten and looked over. Is there some rooting in some of the mental health struggles?

Cliff Sebastian: Absolutely. You're right on the money. I mean, it's something that we definitely consider and think about as fully as possible. And I think that those two things, I think they both play a role, both the memories and the current contemporary situation, and you can't render them apart in any effective way. I think that a lot of the drug and alcohol abuse is because of current circumstances - a lack of financial opportunity, a lack of opportunity in general. But so much of that is very materially and concretely rooted in the past because of very deliberate disadvantages imposed on Native Americans. But then also there's the very real intergenerational trauma aspect, which is very interesting, because that's another thing that I never heard spoken about in any sort of meaningful way like 20 years ago. So it's very interesting to hear that being talked about and taken more seriously now. And I absolutely do think that it does play a role. That, yeah truly centuries of trauma, generations of trauma - that trauma sort of being reintroduced and compounded upon every generation absolutely will make you look to substance abuse. And so I think that that's something that's true for everybody. And I think we've just seen it happen more so in Native American communities. I think that it's something that's happened organically just from people being hurt and looking for a way to ease that hurt. And I think that at bare minimum, historically, it's certainly something that's been encouraged because of the fact that it can keep a hurt and marginalized people continuously hurt and marginalized and makes it a lot harder for them to be able to sort of pull themselves out and make things better for themselves.

Rachael Cerrotti: Right. Because it's not just about honoring the past and remembering the past, but it's also an act of healing, right? Like storytelling, acknowledging what happened - it's an act of healing. Or at least it can be. Why do you think it's that now the conversation about intergenerational trauma is becoming more present in your community? 

Cliff Sebastian: Hmm. I can say this for certain that I definitely did hear the rumblings of these conversations when I was young. So people were talking about it. But I think it was always sort of considered an afterthought and sort of dismissed because people are always looking short term, you know, how am I going to survive today? How am I going to survive tomorrow? I can't spend too much time reflecting on, you know, centuries ago and generations ago but I think that when you do get to a position where you are afforded the ability to think a little bit more long term, you think long term in both directions. And so when you do realize that your community has issues that haven't been solved simply by finances becoming a little bit more stable, then you have to start taking those things that aren't as concrete and aren't right in front of you more seriously. And now people are starting to say, well, there's been this centuries and centuries of trauma that's been going on and it's been ignored. And maybe the solution can be no longer ignoring it and trying to unpack it and trying to truly deal with it as painful as it may be, so that you can stop it from being passed on to the next generation. 

Rachael Cerrotti: How much do you think your family history and growing up on the reservation has played into your choice to be a professional member of your community? 

Cliff Sebastian: Everyone needs to make money. Everyone needs to eat. You know, I've definitely had jobs that have just been jobs, but to be able to work on things that I feel are important - the larger goal feels like it's something more meaningful and that it's a way to give back to the community and participate in a community and ultimately have a community. And so, bringing up that teacher that I had who taught me at seven realizing that, you know, had they not gone out of their way and pulled some kid who was fooling around aside and tried to talk to them about something important in a very kind way that a child can understand, who knows where I'd be today? So similarly, there is definitely a big part of me that wants to be able to potentially provide something like that for generations coming up

Rachael Cerrotti: And do you think that this work has opened up more conversations between you and your family about your own immediate family's history? 

Cliff Sebastian: Yeah, I think so. I think the main thing is that there's absolutely a big generational change. So like I said, my grandfather didn't completely refuse, but just would like, never randomly sort of offer information. My father is sort of similar where it's like, you know, he was familiar with that history, but it was what it was and he was ready to just live life in New York. And then, you know, now I'm interested in being an asset to my community in a way. And it's not just me. It's a lot of people in my generation have circumstances where their grandparents were the same way and their parents are the same way. And now, there's a generation of people younger than me that are becoming adults now. And you can hear them talk about these things that for our generation might feel a little like lofty or high minded. It might take a lot more, you know, emotionally to be able to grapple with. And they can discuss these things and face these things so much more naturally and it doesn't take as much effort. And so that's really, really great to see because you know that the conversation and the tone is changing. And I think it's changing for the better. It certainly changed the way that I’ve thought and changed the way that I am able to talk with my community members, old and young.

Rachael Cerrotti: Cliff, it's been so nice to talk with you and I really appreciate reconnecting. Before we end, I want to ask a last question, which I like to ask everybody who partakes in these conversations with me, which is what is something that's happening right now - and it could be either in your personal world or in, you know, your larger community - that you think will become a memory that outlives you? 

Cliff Sebastian: I'll sort of tie it all together here, I suppose. I'm sort of bookending things talking about language and how that plays in history and culture and memory. And like I told you when I was young, someone was trying to teach me the language and I was kind of treating it as an afterthought. And as I got older, especially, you know, in college and post-college, and especially when I was at the museum, I became incredibly invested in and interested in our language. And I know a little bit here and there. But, I am aware that it will never be the kind of fluency that, you know, a person who grows up hearing it will have. So the thing that I'm looking forward to the most and the thing that I think will outlive me is that right now, my community is really investing heavily into a language revitalization program. That same one that I had when I was a child, except it's grown so much larger and so much more sophisticated in a really good way. And so there's not just more Pequot children, but there's also now more resources for those Pequot children to learn their Pequot language. And thinking about that is probably the most hope inducing and sort of optimistic thing that I can think of because language is so important to memory and history and culture and knowing that there's so many young people who are interested in learning the language and are learning the language and are becoming more and more competent in speaking it and getting closer and closer to a very real fluency that so foundational to having a real identity in community and culture. And I don't know if I'm going to see it in my lifetime, but knowing that we're working towards it really fills me with a lot of hope. You know, Native American communities throughout America, there’s this concept of seven generations that you're supposed to live not just for yourself, but make decisions, presuming that it will affect people seven generations from now. And so keeping that in mind, the idea that if I never live to see the Pequot language being so revitalized that it's a full language and that there's like a generation of children that are bilingual, that can speak both English and Pequot. Knowing that we're working towards it and thinking that sometime in the near future - 100, 200 years from now - that we may very well have that, makes me feel very content and very at peace with the idea of a future for my people and for the American people in general.

Rachael Cerrotti: Could you give us a couple of words? 

Cliff Sebastian: I'll teach you one very important word.

Rachael Cerrotti: Okay. Great. 

Cliff Sebastian: Wuyeepuyôq is our word that very casually just means welcome. If I break it down it’s wee-ee-pee-on-kwa. So it's five syllables. And then just as you get a little bit more used to it, it flows very naturally as Wuyeepuyôq. like a lot of other words. It can be used as a greeting, like a hello. It can be used as a more formal thing to a group of people. But what it more literally translates into is ‘come in a good way.’ Wuyeepuyôq. And what ‘come in a good way’ means that it's a very open embracing of this person, but it's also communicating - make sure that you're here for good purposes. And, that you are in like a right headspace and that you're here for good things. As long as you're here for good reasons, we welcome you. 

Rachael Cerrotti: I love that. Thank you. What a wonderful way to end this conversation. 

Cliff Sebastian: You're very, very welcome. It's been my pleasure. It's been really great having a chance to talk to you again.

OUTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: Thank you to Cliff for joining me today. You can learn more about the Pequot Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation on our website. 

The Memory Generation was created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. You can learn more about their work and the Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu.

You can find additional links, book lists, testimony clips and all types of other resources and stories on our website: memorygenerationpodcast.com. Our editor is Lene Bech Sillesen. Our executive producer and co-creator of this show is Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo.

I’m Rachael Cerrotti. We’ll be back next week.