SEEDED GROUND INTERVIEW WITH SANDRA YELLOW HORSE
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JUSTICE: Welcome to your audio companion formed in support of access and in the spirit of community. I’m Justice Shorter. And you’re listening to the Disaster Justice Guidebook for People of Color with Disabilities.
Each companion is comprised of remarkable reflections and recommendations gathered from interviews with incredible People of Color. This creative collaboration is brought to you by Seeded Ground, the Adult Advocacy Centers in 1217 compound. May this offering be a salve and a sought-out source of solidarity for all those most impacted by the disasters in crisis. This particular companion is guided by insights from Sandra Yellow Horse. I am going to immediately pass the mic and let Sandra introduce herself.
SANDRA: So, I’m going to introduce myself in my native language to you. [ speaking in native language ] I am Sandra Yellow Horse. I am the, I’m from the Towering House People clan born from the French of the Navajo Nation. Our community is located in the southwest corner of the United States. Above all, I am a Dene person, and that is how I think about myself and my identity and how I kind of navigate through the world and have my experience around that. So, and how I view different ideas all come from my specific Dene lens and upbringing. So, that’s how I identify myself. I am a Towering House People. Identify as a woman. I have fair colored skin, medium-length brown hair. I have freckles.
[ Laughter ]
And I love to smile and that’s how I describe myself.
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JUSTICE: I first came across Sandra’s work through a piece she wrote for the Visibility Disability Project. An extraordinary initiative created and curated by Alice Wong. Reading Sandra’s reflections and research on the connection between indigeneity and disability made me instantly be excited to have her contribute to the Disaster Justice Guidebook here’s Sandra on what indigeneity teaches us about survivability.
SANDRA: I’ll start with indigeneity at first. My background is kind of in recovering ancestral stories and ancestral teachings about who we are as a people and how that informs some of our ideas and social understandings of things like disability.
And so, I think about my own journey in kind of growing up in a very assimilated culture, which is something that has happened to a lot of Indigenous young people. We have such a very complicated and difficult history in terms of the colonization of the United States, the implementation of ,you know US empire and it’s kind of growing relationship with Native nations. And our kind of legal status as domestic dependents underneath kind of Supreme Court rulings and different designations.
So, Indigenous people have really complex identities and there’s many different Indigenous nations within the context of United States.
And if we think about survivability within that context, we’re literally thinking of surviving and working within systems upwards 500 years of colonialism, and that’s a really long time to, to be in relationship with a, with a very violent apparatus, a very erasing apparatus, a very destabilizing apparatus. Something that has created a sense of not only physical danger and threat removal assimilation, all of those things.
This is an apparatus that has constantly infringed on Indigenous identity and sovereignty. So, when we think about what does indigeneity have to teach us about survival and living, it’s literally the last 500 years of our histories are about survival. They’re about constantly renegotiating and negotiating our relationship. Do we want that relationship? Are we, you know, what types of relationships do we need?
And so when I think about the context of our ancestral teachings, I’m often told that these are time tested. Like these have been with us since time in memorial. So, returning to the ancestral knowledge, particularly in the context of what I had written for disability, visibility, that concept of this idea of putting our heart and soul and our aspirations into the pursuit of positive relations.
Because we live in a world of relations, no matter what, many of these relationships are bad, they’re good, they’re indistinguishable, in between, but there’s relationships everywhere. And I think this is kind of where Indigenous people kind of depart from kind of mainstream, you know, very Americanized views of like, oh, we build relationships, but actually I think from an Indigenous perspective, there’s always relationships. There’s always relationships with the natural world. There always is relationships with our food sources. It’s just that they’ve been commodified through, or colonized thinking that we think that we build those relationships or that we can control them or construct them in some way.
And so, I think, you know, what indigeneity does, it teaches us that, first of all, like I said, there’s relationships everywhere. Those relationships exist beyond us. How do we honor the right kind of relationships that lead us towards positive outcomes, that lead us towards futurity, that lead us towards sustainability.
And when I think about it that way, it really helps me kind of understand that where we direct our attention and our planning, too, I think survival sometimes is often talked about, you know, a fight, a fight against something, which is true, that has to happen as well. There has to be some, you know, there has to be the struggle, right.
But also, the other part of that is rebuilding and reimagining and world building. And I think that’s kind of the hardest part is where we start thinking about how do we carve out and make these spaces where we can build towards futures. Where we can build each other up, where we can hold each other.
Because I think that, again, those relationships to both struggle and futurity, both have to have a balanced approach and that we have to think, you know, about sustainability in that sense. So, I think Indigenous history, just by virtue of living through, you know, the centuries of colonialism, and by living through just the hardship of assimilation, the various policies, because I think if you look at Indigenous history, specifically, the Dene history, there’s the documentation of the totalizing violence of US empire and its views about normativity, ability, diversity, sameness, white supremacy, all of those things have been compounded in our communities. Okay. So, we’ve been surviving through that for a long time, since our first relation, right, our first encounter, our first kind of engagement with colonizing apparatuses.
And so, when we think about it that way, you know, it’s the survivability, we have to think about kind of the context of it’s not just been 500 years of disaster response, right. The complete erasure of our lands, our knowledge systems, our way of being, our social relations, our kind of thinking about ideas, even thinking about diversity and disability and caretaking. Those have all, our knowledge has been completely, completely under attack for upwards 500 years of colonialism.
But within that, has been the preservation and the caretaking of these knowledges despite all efforts to assimilate Indigenous people to destroy their languages, to force them into boarding schools, to bring in, you know, Christian kind of missions to kind of change kind of the spiritual, you know, quote, religious views of Indigenous people. Those knowledges, those sacred knowledges and our ancestral knowledges, our stories our songs, our prayers, our teachings, have lived and they are resurfacing and there are people who are keeping them safe and they are starting to find root within wider systems now.
And they’re starting to find root within revitalization efforts within language revitalization efforts. And so, what we’re seeing now in terms of, you know, survivability is not just the fight, because in the end, you know, we don’t believe that US empire will change. We don’t believe that it can systemically change, but we believe, in a sense, that Indigenous people themselves can rebuild and that they can use the tools and the stories and the knowledges that we have to build a sustainable future, to build hope and to world build for all those yet to come.
And I think that’s really the task of when we’re talking about survivability with an Indigenous context, it’s not just about thinking about our long ongoing struggle and how do we just make it through systems, but how do we thrive? How do we build, and how do we nurture and caretake and love and, you know, all of those things, all of those positive good things that aspiration is still there.
So, that’s the Indigenous side.
[ Laughter ]
That’s what indigeneity teaches me about survivability and sustainability, I guess. For me, it is more about sustainability. It’s about those aspirations to thrive and to live well, right, with dignity. Which is, you know, the right, right, the inherent right of all people. It’s not a government right that’s given to you, we’re going to give you rights. I have such a strong view about that as well. It’s actually an inherent right. And a natural world has that right as well. And, you know, the water has that as well.
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JUSTICE: Class is clearly in session. Here Sandra continues by connecting both Indigeneity and visibility to how we sustain relationships, as well as respect for the wonderous world around us.
SANDRA: Disability, in terms of thinking about this concept of disability, as I said in the article, you know, there’s many ways to kind of describe it. It’s such a very subjective, it really depends on a person’s kind of world view and thinking within our communities and, of course, we have what is kind of the language that’s given to us through the medical and legal sector about disability, right, and Indigenous people. Dene people, I’ll just speak for my community, we adapt that American language and use of disability. But again, you know, it goes back to those principles of disability, which are found in our stories about disabled people. We have stories, ancestral stories about ancestors who were disabled.
We have stories about ableism and how the social treatment of our ancestors was horrible and they had to survive as well and work through those systems, but the kind of teachings of those are not necessarily around, you know, what is disability? What makes it, like those types of things. How is it described? It’s not so much focused on that, again, it’s focused on that principle of positive relationships.
What happens, what kind of happens when we don’t have positive relationships? When we don’t pursue that? What is the imbalance there? And then also what is the necessity of that? Like, what are the things that come from positive relationships? How do we build a system where everyone is looked after and taken care of, and lives within the system of relationship, which is really a system of accountability, right. Because when we’re talking about relationship, you know, it’s not just this American view of we have a relationship and it’s exchangeable and mutually beneficial. Like, actually, relationships is about accountability. It’s about when you have relationship with something, your accountability to keep it safe. You are accountable to keep it well. You are accountable to keep it within its own sense of prestige and dignity. And a sense of self, right.
And so, the relationship actually requires that we also give up things, that we also share things and that we also could have that kind of collective thinking around, around, this could go for anything. It could go for people. It could go for land. It could go for animals. And this is why I think Indigenous philosophy is so interesting, because it really is considering an incredible wide scope of diversity.
So, disability from the Dene context teaches me about sustainability of water and teaches me how the water is trying to survive and gives us life and how that is a relationship that we need, that is a relationship that is sacred and precious. It teaches me about the land. It teaches me about, you know, healthy food systems. Our relationship to food. Our relationship to capitalism. You know, disability in this context, teaches us about a variety of issues that look at our relationships at its core.
What are our relationships to these wider systems and these wider systems of power? And what does it, you know, what we’re witnessing now is a very imbalanced system. Because so many of these aspects of our lives are in pain and they’re hurting. And they’re non-sustainable. And so, when we think about, for me, thinking about disability from a Dene context, from Dene life view, from Dene teachings and ancestral oral histories, they’re really teaching us about how to live in a way that honors the life force and the way of being, the unique way of being of everything. And to me that’s a really beautiful, beautiful way to understand it. It’s a really kind of integral way of thinking about how are we all connected?
And that is the basis for caretaking.
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JUSTICE: Disaster justice requires collective care. This value is vital to how we, as People of Color with Disabilities survive. Here Sandra dives into how various value systems can help deepen our practice of disaster justice.
SANDRA: I think values that shape or that must underpin what I view as disaster relief, really has to start with first what’s called radical relationality. And that kind of came from a Dene activist scholar, her name’s Melanie Yazzi. She talks about radical relationality. It’s not just that we have relations or that we understand relationships. It’s that those relationships compel us towards a principled kind of struggle, right. It propels us to a principle’s kind of movement towards something.
And when I’m thinking about this, specifically, I’ll just return to the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of our Dene community with the schooling system, right, I’ve talked about this before, the schooling system in the US continued as it did, right. Everyone wanted to return to this idea of normal, this normal life called normal life. And just the idea of how violent this idea of normativity during the time of crisis is, because people were forced to put aside their human response to what was a very scary event and it was a very traumatizing event and it was horrific. We had, you know, we had just the mass loss of people. We had just the prolific ableism just front and center. It was there and it was overwhelming.
But within that, the school systems were still pushing for children to attend school because they wanted to keep things, quote, as normal as possible, right? And so within our community we had this movement to online learning. And within that, we were looking at just the lack of incredible basic needs within the reservations specifically, within border towns. I mean some of our community homes didn’t have running water. They didn’t have electricity.
These children were having to have their parents drive them to the nearest, they’re called chapter houses, they’re community facilities that are kind of the heart of the community where all the decision, local life decision making was made. But they were having to drive to these chapter houses and sit outside and do, you know, use the internet there. And they were using all these different apps, right, they were using, you know, this is the movement to go into technology, right. This is where, I think, capitalism as well, you know, has also really benefited from, you know, kind of the scarcity of human interaction when we were all kind of isolated away from each other. There was all this creation of apps and they were going to help.
Well, you know, that was really overwhelming. And a lot of our parents who had children who had learning needs or learning supports and requirements that they had in the school system, those were completely gone. Their community was gone. The support for all those were gone. There was no one there to help them with the different modalities of learning how to use these different apps, to use all these different tools to maintain this sense of normativity. The sense of achievement that the US education system just shoves on to people, right.
And so, within that, there was just such a great, you know, it was, it was packaged as this thing that was intended to help people, right. Whenever someone’s saying they are trying to help, I think the Indigenous and disabled community are very skeptical because that often means they’re trying, you know, often help themselves and it’s not actually meeting the needs of the people who are supposedly receiving this help.
And so, I think some, you know, thinking about the terms of relationality, again, thinking about not just these relationships that, that lead towards imbalance or harm or struggle within our communities, but also our kind of mechanisms for remedy and how, how do those actually relate to the basic needs of people? And how do they, how do we even start to support people or look after them?
And how do we even just make space to just rest and do nothing, right, in the middle of crisis. Because that is also something that was necessary. All or students that year, I think they should have just had time to grieve instead of keep busy and keeping forced to work, you know, keep being forced to go through these schooling systems. It’s very ableist, very much based on this idea achievement and success, and maintaining normal, you know, routines when we were going through a very traumatic time.
And so, that’s part, I think that’s one of the first values is really kind of thinking about our responses, that relationality, the relational kid of responses that we not only have as people, but we have as systems, as we have as policies, people who inform policies.
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JUSTICE: Relational responses we have as people, systems, policies and people who inform policies. Sandra went on to explain how these relational responses are directly related to reciprocity and responsibility.
SANDRA: You can’t have relationships without accountability. And I think it was John Wilson who came up with this type of relational accountability where we think about not only the mutual interdependence between things, right, the ways in which we actually need one another. We need systems. We need social systems. We need community.
But also, that within that, is tremendous amount of accountability. It’s a tremendous responsibility, right. And so that we have to kind of really think about the wider set of relations in that context, you know. We don’t just think about how we help the most people. We have to really kind of think about how we help everyone. And that requires a lot of responsibility and a lot of planning.
And so, I mean I think that’s directly related to questions of access as well. So, we have radical relationality, or relationality, and we have reciprocal accountability. I would say at this basis as well is love. I don’t think we talk about love enough in our kind of context. Even the ways in which we talk about love sometimes it’s complicated. But I think, within our values of caretaking and our values of world building, that we really, you know, allow space for this idea of radical love that we have, that we have for our lives, that we have for our world, that we have for our aspirations, for our dreams and our hopes, because that is an incredible motivator.
And I think that the ways in which our communities, particularly our POC and our disabled communities, the way that I’ve seen love in these communities, I don’t think has been explored enough. Because it is transformative. And it is a space on the margins of the margins to really have something special and something that’s really, you know, it’s incredible. I think when I think about it, that leads to a next value of belonging, right, that really important value of having a space to be, having a place to be yourself, to be cared for, to have your of being recognized and understood, and maybe not even understood but just held, held in a way this, you know, rooted in love.
So, we have, all of these things to me are integral. It’s like, they’re kind off, you know, they are all part of the same branch. I don’t know if they’re all individual values, but they’re all values to me, the relationality, the accountability, the love and the sense of belonging. And I think for me, I want to say something as well in terms of like the value of imagining, right, our imagination, I think within crisis work we’re often faced with the reality, right, the reality that these are the issues. These are the struggles we have to overcome. These are the steps we have to take to overcome them.
We need this. We — and it can be overwhelming. The imagining and the joyful spaces of imagination are such an incredible value. And I see this within the work of a lot of disabled artists, actually, the type of world building, the freedom. The love. The sense of, you know, just what is possible. And I think again that this goes back to kind of my first point that I talked about at the beginning of this interview, about how it cannot just be this struggle, right, always the struggle focusing on the relationship with an abusive system, because that’s exactly what it is, it’s an abuser. We’re giving a lot of attention and conversation to an abuser. But also, what’s the other part of that? What’s the other part of generative world building and caretaking and creating our own world and creating our own visions and ideas and aspirations for something that is filled with goodness and love and belonging, all the things that we value and treasure.
So, I think both of those have to be balanced in some sense. But again, all those values are integral to one another, but I see those as kind of the basis for not only our movements but our basis for sustainability as well.
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JUSTICE: Indigenous scholars like Dr. Linda Tuhiwai Smith have taught me that program interventions can be detrimental irrespective of their intentions if implemented without invitation or involvement of those most impacted. Here Sandra offers a few thoughts on what People of Color with disabilities should keep in mind when navigating crisis interventions.
SANDRA: I think our community’s quite good at this. But just recognizing we’re all different and we have different social political context. And that we have different histories. We may still be working and operating within the same overarching system, but that doesn’t mean our approaches, our wishes are things in terms of what the outcome is, is the same thing. I think having open conversations with one another and also understanding the value of compromise. Often when I’m in spaces, I see this replication of a sort of power relation back and forth between people who are trying to figure out what is the best response? What is the best intervention? What is the need?
How do you talk about the need? What is the language used to even engage with some of this. I guess for me it’s academic as well, thinking about, you know, just the everyday kind of power relations. If we’re trying to disband the system of power and create a more, I suppose, egalitarian society, one that’s consensual and one that’s based on mutual respect and dignity between us all, there is going to be kind of a compromise, like this ebb and flow of compromise between people.
And so, I guess my message to POC who are organizing within these spaces is to just remember that we ourselves can often replicate some of the things that we don’t like within wider power relations. And I think that’s a really hard wake-up call for a lot of us. We have the capacity to re-enact, and to re-live and to create oppressive conditions and unwelcome advice or unwelcome opinions about what should be done or how people, what would make things better.
I think going back again to acknowledging the sovereignty and self-determination of people, especially our POC disabled people and understanding that it really comes from that perspective and we have to be able to hold all those stories and find a way to work within them. And so, I’m always really skeptical of kind of these, you know, one size fits all. Like it has to be the same across all different, you know, context or groups or communities. I think, you know, importance of grassroots organizing as well, that the importance of community-based organizing where we kind of center those voices and we have a conversation about it, right, and that there’s a process for that and there’s not just kind of a top-down approach. It really comes from the people.
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JUSTICE: We can’t have a conversation about relationships without also addressing loneliness and isolation. So, I asked Sandra to offer a message to all the folks dealing with very real feelings of loneliness, whether in institutional settings or in their communities, what do you do when you feel truly disconnected on the land, your ancestors, or the people around you.
SANDRA: Wow, that’s a really powerful question. Well, first, I just want to acknowledge the reality and the real pain isolation and suffering that can occur within that. And I just want to hold space for anyone who feels that way. I suppose for me, and this comes from kind of Dene, Dene thinking speaking as I’m speaking with, you know, my Dene thinking within this, that something that helps me is to remember that I’m not, I’m not alone. Even if it feels that way, even though there have been times where I have felt the most disconnect and isolation.
There’s this teaching that when we’re born, that there’s, that there’s a pathway for us. There’s a pathway for us. And that in our life, sometimes our feet, we find that pathway, right. It’s set out for us. Sometimes we don’t, right.
But I think for me kind of the hope that I’ve had to really challenging times is that, there is, there is a pathway forge for me somewhere. And it’s just a matter of finding where those footprints belong, right? That’s the kind of language they use as well. You know, the, this idea about your feet touching the ground in terms of, you know, thinking about mother earth and all of that, the connection, right. Because it is a really incredible thing to be a human in this world.
And I think trying to remember that, for me, has been helpful. Trying to remember that everything our ancestors have lived through, everything they have survived, the hope is that, you know, that their generations will make it and that they will continue to survive. And they will continue to have our language. They will continue to have teachings. And so, I don’t know if, if that’s a helpful, this is such a sensitive question. And I don’t know if that’s helpful, because the different types of grief that people have, the different types of isolation they have are so unique. And I think that’s one thing that has, you know, helped me is remembering that I’m not alone. And that I have those teachings, even if I’m not in relation to them yet or I haven’t been in relation to them, they’re waiting for me, because someone in the past have put them there for me. And it’s just a matter of finding that path to them.
And so, this idea of I think hope is really powerful for me, as someone who lives in this space, that works for me. I don’t know if it, you know, if that’s something that would be an offering to other people, but having hope is again kind of related to all those values, right. Those values of relationship. Of knowing that there are relationships there whether we see them or whether we acknowledge them or feel them or experience them, right.
Or if we don’t. They’re still there, those relationships within the world, okay. They’re still an accountability that impacts us even though we don’t feel it maybe or we’re struggling to feel it. And there’s still that imagining, right, that hope of what is possible. And I think for me, especially trying to come back into, even finding space in some community, which can also be isolating, right, I think Mia Mingus talks about this, being on the margins, right, where you have such a kind of intersectional identity. You have such a unique experience, like how do you fit within certain places.
And there’s been so many times of struggling through not feeling like I belong or that there’s space for me, or that there’s understanding of the way I think or feel or my identity. And it is a very lonely place. But sometimes, you know, those relations that keep us grounded and that keep us hopeful, are non-human relations, you know, they could just be finding a space of sunshine and taking a sun bath. And I think that relation as well, there’s teachings, ancestral teachings about the sun and sun beams.
So, again, I think for me, something that’s helped healed me is going back to ancestral stories, even when those weren’t necessarily passed down to me or shared with me, they had to be kind of sought out and recovered. But finding those teachings and finding the people who could share those, really kind of brought me back to kind of think about the different types of relations that were submerged in all the time and how do you find, you know, solace and comfort and balance within those many relations, and that’s just something that’s helped me.
But again, this is such a difficult question. And it is very unique to people and kind of, you know, their own, their own experience.
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JUSTICE: We’ve been focused on radical relationships as a means of survival. And tightly tethered to this concept is radical love, which Sandra also mentioned earlier. So, I asked her to expand further on what radical love means in connection to disasters in crisis.
SANDRA: I would say radical love is just exactly that, it’s radical. It breaks all barriers that lives across time and space. It has all the beauty of the world, the aspirations, the hopes, the dreams, the intentions for good. And I think for people who are living in crisis, particularly, I’ll think about my own communities, our own Indigenous communities, our own young people who are struggling thinking about a future that is full of hardship ahead of them.
And that they are struggling with the resources to meet their needs and they’re struggling with the challenges of just all kind of things right now. I could just go on and on about the different struggles. But that there is love there. There is, there is a radical love that is brewing. That is thinking about them and holding them close to heart and planning in whatever way that can be planned. And that they’re not forgotten. They’re not alone. And that there is a community.
There is a community who is doing something. Who is trying their hardest. I think that’s a really beautiful and hopeful thing to know that, you know, even though the struggle seems so big and it sometimes has so many arms and it’s sometimes so overwhelming and we can’t imagine a future from within it. That there are people who are doing that work and there are people coming together and loving each other despite all odds and hardships. To try to think of a way that a world can be built out of this and that things can be different.
And so, to just really acknowledge them and hold them close and understand that, that you are loved. You are loved unconditionally and you are not forgotten. And there is work happening and people are trying and that’s the best we can do is continue the fight and continue to try and continue to push back and continue to build and continue to imagine forward and to hold each other during that for the times that some of us can’t imagine a future from where we are, because that is really difficult and lonely space and there is nothing that needs to happen in that space except to just be yourself, be yourself and continue to just live in that power of who you are. And just know that there is a community there and if, you know, you are not surrounded by community right now, we keep all those people close to us and hope that they find us and that we find them.
And so, I think that’s kind of my offering and words to people who, who are struggling with that right now.
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JUSTICE: Listen, disaster discussions are inherently difficult. And they can activate a range of heavy emotions, and that’s completely fine. It’s human. Sandra reminds us of this fact as we bring this companion conversation to a close.
SANDRA: I just want to, I guess I suppose just to say that it’s okay to have a very emotional response to this. And I hope that more people do have a emotional response. I feel like sometimes our efforts to talk about these, are very hyper intellectualized and as well as there’s that humanness of us, right, that, in many ways, that’s very vulnerable, and it’s okay to be vulnerable.
And I hope that there’s more vulnerability in these discussions, because as I’m talking, I’ve thought about many, many people and many instances and many times in my own life facing different types of disasters and facing different types of oppression and violence and marginalization, and it is so traumatizing. So, I suppose my offering as well as well, as we kind of wrap up, is to really look after yourself and to really find sources to draw, to draw whatever kind of strength or the tools that you need to be able to have these discussions.
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JUSTICE: I so enjoy hearing Sandra speak. Her words soften and center me. May they do the same for you. In fact, I hope this entire interview served you in whatever ways you needed it to. Thank you so much for listening. For more information and to access other audio companions or the full written Disaster Justice Guidebook go to JusticeShorter.com or AdultAdvocacyCenters.org.
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Transcribed by Michelle Houston