Raven Waldron Oral History Interview, February 16, 2019

MAYA BERGMANN: Today is February 16, 2019. I'm here with Raven Waldron in the Valley Library in Corvallis. My name is Maya Bergmann and we are conducting this interview as part of the Voices of OSU Women project. How are you this afternoon?

RAVEN WALDRON: I'm doing great. I'm happy to be here.

MB: First things first, what are your pronouns?

RW: I use she/her pronouns or they/them. I'm okay with either.

MB: Let's get started at the beginning. You grew up in Silver Lake, Oregon, right?

RW: Mm-hmm.

MB: Tell me a little bit about your family and your childhood growing up in Silver Lake.

RW: Yeah. Silver Lake is super, super small. It's a really small town 90 miles southeast of Bend, Oregon, and I had 13 people in my graduating class, so really tiny. Not a lot of diverse people. I was very known as the one Indian girl. The one Native American person. So I was the little Indian girl all the time. I got 00:01:00cast in the Thanksgiving play, I got as Sacagawea once. It was very well-known that our family was the diverse family. I grew up kind of in between all the towns so it's an isolated community anyway, but I was kind of in a home that was in the middle of the triangle between Christmas Valley, Silver Lake, and Fort Rock who all went to the same school. Even within an isolated community, our home was like in the middle of nowhere, not close to anyone else. We didn't have neighbors. We didn't live in town. My family was like my best friends because you couldn't really go over your friend's house without your mom driving you 30 miles. So, I have 2 little brothers, Wyatt and Levi. One of them's two years younger and one of them's five years younger. We did everything together. We were always really close with both my parents. My mom is Navajo and my dad is 00:02:00white. The met at Utah State and decided that they wanted to just go out and live in the middle of nowhere, I don't know. Everyone always asks how did they end up there? We were always really close as a family and just growing up out there brought us close dealing with just how remote and rural everything was. Grew up playing outside a bunch. Grew up being very precocious because I knew everything and I had these little brothers who I got to boss around all the time and my dad treated me like I was his son, so I was always very headstrong because of that.

MB: What kind of relationship do you have with your brothers. I know that you said you were very close because you didn't have a lot of people that were really nearby.

RW: Yeah, it's always fun to track when kids are really young to when they get older. My baby brother, Levi, he's the youngest was always my baby brother. We 00:03:00have never had issues. He we have never fought. He's always been like I have to take care of him because he's the baby. My middle brother was so close to me in age that when we were young we just got into it with each other because we wanted to do the same things and we would always fight and a switch just flipped when we were in middle school. In middle school I had a lot of issues with other kids at school and a lot of bullying and my little brother decided he was going to be my big brother and he wanted to protect me and everything just changed. We were like really close, best friends. We started moving through classes together. We finally got to that point where we were in junior high at the same time, in high school at the same time, so we were kind of stomp on the same stomping grounds and just got really close. Now both my brothers, we text all the time. We talk all the time. They like to talk to me about social justice stuff all the time. They're like oh our sister knows stuff about that. They'll 00:04:00text me oh my friend said this thing. I didn't know what to say. What would I say if someone said that again? We skype a lot. Right now I'm trying to help my brother get into OSU. He got into OSU, now I'm trying to help him fill out scholarship applications. We talk a lot all the time.

MB: You talked about being bullied in school. What were you bullied about, if you don't mind me asking?

RW: It was really weird, because junior high kids are just the meanest people in the world.

MB: You're not wrong.

RW: So, I can't even remember how this all started. It had always been weird because we lived in such a small tight-knit community but we always had people coming in and out.

So, there was this group, this core group, of about 5 or 6 of us that had been there since kindergarten together and then just all of these people cycled in. 00:05:00Of that group I was the only girl. I was in this class with all these boys that I had been with since kindergarten so other girls would cycle into our class and move in and move out and they were like really kind of hyper focused on this relationship that I had with these boys because I had been with the same ones for 10 years, and it was always really frustrating for them that they couldn't be close with them in that same way. Girls were always awful to me, but I shook it off and didn't necessarily care so much. But in 6th grade I had a crush on a boy and he found out about it. Oh my gosh. It was so dramatic at the time. So 13-year-old me, he found out I had a crush on him and he got really mad about it. He was a punk and basically I was reading in my corner during silent sustained reading time, which was so fun, I was reading in my corner and had my 00:06:00book and he realized that I had his book, which was totally by accident, but he thought that it was on purpose because I had a crush on him. He grabbed me by my sweatshirt and moved me so he could get his book and got in trouble for it. When he got in trouble for it and I didn't because he picked me up by my sweatshirt, right, like why would I get in trouble for that?

But he got in trouble for it and then he made everybody hate me because I was the person that got Brad Libel in trouble. It just went from there with various other stupid things. The interesting thing was although I was bullied in school it never felt like it was because I was different because I was the one student of color. I think my white dad being at school always protected me in that way because my dad was a teacher and my dad was white and so it was easier for people to just pretend I was white in school. I got told a lot of racist jokes and a lot of things like you realize I'm not, why would I laugh at that? You 00:07:00realize I'm not like you and that you're talking about me and my people? Why would I laugh? It was always really interesting the weird things that caused bullying and I always wonder if there was other stuff underlying that, being a woman who was willing to speak out and not take people's crap and being brown in a town where no one was brown. It never outwardly came out that way, which was always interesting.

MB: I know you were talking about the fact that your parents are different races. How did you deal with that and people discriminating against you because of that through high school and then coming to Oregon State?

RW: My mom is half Navajo and my dad's Welsh and English and all of the 00:08:00different European, so it was interesting because we were so integrated in the community none of that necessarily came out until I came to college or when I was outside of the community. It didn't ever seem weird to us and then I got older and I started going on trips with my dad and people started thinking me and my dad were together and not that I was his kid because I don't look like him. They'd be like oh how long have you guys been married. I'm like that's my dad! Gross. Just my mom and I have always looked really similar. People will think that my mom and I are sisters. Because I've got the more native features and I look a lot more like her, I always felt closer to her. People always kind of singled out that difference between me and my dad, especially right at the end of high school, beginning of college. They're like oh how do you know each 00:09:00other? I'm like that's my dad. We don't look the same at all. That was always really interesting. It was definitely always a kind of struggling growing up like how were we going to be raised culturally. My dad is great, but you can tell there are things that he sometimes doesn't get. My dad will sometimes tell jokes about Raven it's really dry out why don't you go out and do a rain dance with your mom? We laugh and I'm like oh it's my dad he doesn't mean much by it, but it's something that if I was in an entirely native family that wouldn't necessarily be the jokes. It's been interesting. It always comes from a loving place, but it wouldn't be something that would come up if we weren't different races.

MB: I know another thing that you talked about was growing up in a school where you were one of the only women in your class. What has it been like being a 00:10:00woman and struggling with discrimination and stuff like that through high school and then, once again, coming to Oregon State.

RW: Oh yeah. Yeah, with the guys in my class it was always, always a struggle. I look back on a lot of the difficulties that I had in high school and things that happened in high school and I can't help but be convinced that a lot of it was because I was a strong woman and that that was really threatening to those boys in class. There are a lot of just general comments from anyone who wanted to date me. I didn't get dated in high school because it was all about you're not going to be able to tame Raven. You're not going to be able to like control Raven, and get your girl in line. Stuff like that, all the time. I dealt with that all the time. A lot of it was very sneaky and under the radar because 00:11:00people didn't dare disrespect me in front of my dad but on the flip side, having my dad at school I also kind of became a target at times to get back at my dad. There was a student who just really got into it with my dad for some reason. Did not have a good time in his class and he decided, and had told all of his friends, that the way he was going to get back at my dad is he was going to sleep with me and take his daughter's virginity. That messed up, right? What he was not prepared for was when he made a move on me and I punched him in the face on the bus-

MB: Holy crap.

RW: He was like, hey is your dad going to be home tonight? I'm like, yes. He goes, oh that's too bad and he put his hand on my leg. I'm like please don't touch me. He's like why? Like do you not like it. I'm like please don't touch me. Then he wouldn't stop so I punched him. [Laughs].

MB: Damn girl. Wow.

RW: Yeah, so and it's just stuff that I never should have had to punch someone on the bus to get them to stop touching me but I did. Part of that I guess growing up in the rural area that tough down and dirty farm girl thing really helped me out with dealing with some of those guys. I dealt with it a lot in leadership positions. I was always like wanting to get out there and be in charge and be president and make a difference at school and I always dealt with the boys who lost, the boys who were the runners-up just being so bitter about it and just being so mad that they got beat by a girl, especially in things like I was in the FFA where we did things that boys are supposed to be able to do. We did soil judging. We did shop skills, welding and I was beating boys at 00:13:00different things in those events and they were pissed about it. They got back at me for it. I think coming to Oregon State dealing with general sexism I was so prepared from high school that I was like wow, there's more people here but somehow I feel less targeted for being a woman. Coming to college was a really nice refresher, refreshing, it was really nice, refreshing to get away from that very small town vibe and not deal with it as concentrated, not as concentrated sexism but still all the time.

MB: Have you experienced a solid amount of sexism here? I know that you said it was different going from a small town to a really big campus.

RW: Definitely less on the micro-personal interactions level and more on a macro, just a lot of micro-aggressions in classes from male professors and 00:14:00things like that. Things like right now in my pharmacy school classes I'm sitting in my law class and every single example case that we have, the pharmacist is always referred to as he, even though pharmacy is a female-dominated profession so it doesn't make any sense that they would all be like that. Just little things like that that are just you don't belong here. You shouldn't be here. Women don't succeed in this. I dealt with it when I ran for ASOSU senate. It was really difficult to be a female candidate. I got called bitchy and bossy and the general strong woman, let's tear a strong woman down during that campaign. It came out a lot. That was all more on the not necessarily face-to-face interactions but on a broad as I came in the public eye at Oregon State a lot of those things got said, which is fun.

MB: Going off of Oregon State, I guess, what drove you to choose Oregon State for college?

RW: My dad went here to get his teaching degree and he likes to say that he started brainwashing me early. He brought me to campus when I was little, when we were kindergarten through third grade he would bring me to campus and he would bring me to the Ag building, to Strand Hall, to go see his old teachers. They would give me free beaver pencils, t-shirts, and pompoms, and I was like wow this is so cool. Really loved Oregon State, and then solidified it in the third grade when Brad Libel told me well I'm a duck's fan, so I'm better. I was like, oh, well now I'm going to Oregon State to prove to you that I'm better. Yeah, I continued to go all the way through middle school and high school. In high school through the FFA we came to campus a lot. I actually met Wanda, my 00:16:00academic advisor over in BRR, I met her my junior year at an FFA State Convention that they had here and I was really integrated into campus and I think when I was going from such a small town that little bit of anxiety about going to a bigger school was definitely curbed and quieted by how much time I had spent at Oregon State, how comfortable I felt on the campus already.

MB: That's great. Were there any other colleges that you considered, or were you just kind of like Oregon State is the number 1 right away?

RW: I think I kind of considered other schools but not seriously. By the time I was actually applying to schools I was pretty solid on OSU. I had thought about potentially Utah State, which is where my parents met. I was really excited when I first started looking at colleges I wanted to be a soil scientist. I was 00:17:00looking for Ag schools that had cool soils programs and this was one and Utah State was one. For a while I had the like maybe I want to go to a prestigious school, so I thought about applying to Harvard and to Sandford and ultimately the fees for the applications are what kept me from applying, because I was like I'm pretty sure I'm going to Oregon State so why pay hundreds of dollars to apply for schools that I probably won't get into because the system's rigged. It's pretty much always been Oregon State.

MB: I know you were talking about places that have a really good soil science program, and I know you in the end did bioresource research, right?

RW: Yeah.

MB: What drove you to choose to study BRR?

RW: I was all about soils until about junior year when I met Wanda. I met Wanda Crennell is the advisor over at the BioResource Research Department and I was introduced to her by one of my dad's old professors who said you know I really 00:18:00think that you should meet Wanda after talking to me about what I was interested in. He knew that there were lots of different resources paths that I could take through BRR. He introduced me to Wanda and Wanda is an absolute force of nature. You go into Wanda's office and she's just like what do you like? Okay, let's get you hooked up with this program and this program and this program and we're going to do all of these things and you'd be really good at this, let me sign you up for this. She just scooped me up and carried me away. She's like oh, you like soil science, we could do water toxicology and soil toxicology through this. You could look at this through the national resources option. You could look at this through this lens. These are all the ways that you can do soil in this major and you don't have to choose until you're a sophomore. That was really attractive to me. I was really like okay, so I get a chance to explore but I'm still declared and I'm still working towards this goal because finances 00:19:00and money were always on my mind and like okay I can't just get here and explore too much because I got to finish. It allowed me the freedom to explore but also hone in on that interest that I really had as well as there is this great scholarship that was available through BRR. It was a minorities scholars program that's sponsored by the USDA and it paid for $6,500 a year of my tuition and a paid summer internship experience. When Wanda told me about that she's like you'd be a great candidate for this. Make sure you keep track of all of these activities so you can apply for this. I think you'd do really well and you'd get this scholarship. That kind of really solidified it for me that school would be paid for with that and my tribal scholarship and then I could have more time to participate in a lot of activities.

As it kind of progressed I realized that maybe soil science wasn't necessarily 00:20:00where I wanted to be, didn't necessarily want to do a lot of the work, like the extension work in rural areas or things like that, wasn't as excited about the research. So, I moved more towards the human side of toxicology which is where I'm at now.

MB: Nice. So, you were talking about scholarships. I know you also got the Udall Scholarship, right? Can you talk a little bit about that process?

RW: Yeah, the Udall Scholarship was intense. I think I got that one my senior year? Yes? Junior year. Junior year I think. It was another one that Wanda found for me and she had talked to me about hey you should go to this person who works on the Udall Scholarship and chat with them just about your eligibility the feasibility of applying. When I went and talked to them it was a little bit late in the application process, so the gal was like I think you'd be a great 00:21:00candidate. You're really connected with these communities. I'm really excited to see you apply. I think you should start preparing your application for next year to make it stronger. The Udall process was a lot about your involvement with Native communities. At the time I had started working at the Native American longhouse. I was helping the Native American student association plan their annual pow-wow. I was involved in toxicology research and so at the same time I was really involved in these communities I was also really involved in research that ultimately could benefit these communities a lot. The Udall, the process was grueling. It was a lot of documenting everything that I did. A lot of essay writing. Then, a lot of research just about who the Udalls are and what that family has done for Native people and looking back on it, it was one of a 00:22:00really, really interesting time in my life because I felt so steeped in Native culture while I was applying for that because I was just asking all these questions and trying to get involved in communities and help them out to demonstrate my passion to the scholarship committee.

When I got the scholarship, it was so wild. It didn't feel real. It was really big scholarship and the coolest part about the Udall is the orientation that you're required to go to when you get it, where you then gather with all of the other students that got the Udall scholarship in Tucson, Arizona, and you have a week of activities where you work on this case, where you are representing a company or representing a research group, some kind of special interest group in a water rights case. You act as if you were these people. You have negotiations. 00:23:00You present research. You listen to all of these different things and basically perform this giant case study where you are helping this community figure out how to solve this problem. I got to meet all the other different scholars. I applied in tribal health. I talked about how toxicology research would help improve the overall health of tribal communities, especially with cleaning up uranium mining sites on Navajo nation and things like that have really had devastating health effects. There's also a environmental section and a tribal policy section. I think it might have been like the most amount of driven, like high-driven Native scientists that I had been around outside of like a national SACNAS conference. Everyone was together and everybody bonded so much because we 00:24:00were there for a week doing all these activities. I still talk to folks over at Udall. I still talk to the people that I met. It was a grueling process but an amazing experience once it actually all panned out.

MB: That's great.

RW: I ended up using that to go on a study broad. Used that money for that. It was very cool.

MB: I was going to ask you about that. You went to London, right?

RW: Mm-hmm.

MB: Tell me about the exchange process.

RW: Yeah, the exchange process was super cool. I was one of those students that came in and knew I wanted to a study abroad and I was really excited about it the first two years. I really wanted to go on the New Zealand exchange. I came in and I was like yeah I'm going to do it and the Ag program does that and it just never happened. I kept putting it off. There kept being other things that I wanted to do. There kept being courses that I needed to take. I wasn't really ready to take the leap yet.

Then I found this honors college program that was going to be social justice in 00:25:00London. I was like this is the program. This is what will get me to do the application, to do the whole process, to step out of my comfort zone because I was so stoked about the classes. I finally got there and it was so exciting. London was a really cool program. We went with a faculty from Oregon State, Dr. Susan Shaw, in the Women and Gender Studies Department and the entire thing was designed where she was going to basically we'd have a day in the classroom and an experience somewhere in London that applied to what we had learned. It was a lot of reading and a lot of just exploring the city, super cool. We got to stay with host families. My host family, Steve and Jenny, are still in contact. I still Facebook with them and sometimes Skype with them. They're an older couple and they were just the coolest away from home mom and dad that I could have had. 00:26:00I actually ended up living at my homestay with an Oregon State student.

The program was open from people from all different schools. Most people were from U of O. A lot of people in our program, there were some from Montana, some from California and then two others from Oregon State. My roommate was from Oregon State and we're still super good friends, even though we had never met before that. But we were roommates. In London, some of the coolest things that I remember is we got to go on the suffragette walk. We did some reading, learned about the beginning of this votes for women movement in London and then we walked the path that they would have walked on their march and we got to see all of these different monuments and things that have been put up to honor the women who did this: Emmeline Pankhurst and all of her people, which was really, really 00:27:00neat. I think some of the other things that we did, we did race, gender, and class in religion. We got to talk about different religions and being in London, being somewhere so huge, there were so many options to go visit places of worship and talk to people who were part of these religions and talk about how their religion played into their identity. We went and visited a Mosque which was a really interesting experience, having the social justice crew and all of these strong women in social justice having to cover their heads to go into the Mosque and getting to talk with people about how the general climate in London was for people who practice Islam, for people who are Muslim, and talk about struggles on a day to day. We got to just meet a lot of people from London 00:28:00through the class, which was really cool and just learn a lot about life in a giant, giant city, especially for all of these different marginalized groups. It was really, really cool.

MB: That's awesome. How long were you there for?

RW: I was there for 3 months.

MB: Wow.

RW: Yeah.

MB: I know you were saying learning about marginalized groups while you were in London, do you feel-I don't know, I feel like did you feel like your experience was different because you were a woman and because you're Native American?

RW: Yeah. I think that like I was very exoticized in certain aspects. I was one of very, very few people of color on the entire trip, just because it was a really expensive trip. Without that Udall scholarship I wouldn't been able to go and most people had it paid for by their parents and had the money to go out every night and do all these things and I was on a pretty tight budget the whole time. But it was very clear that I was different from a lot of the other students on the trip. There were probably 3 or 4 other students of color, but 00:29:00especially with my host family they were so intrigued that I was Native American. They were always really nice about it, but you could tell they were just like, oh really? Do you know any of your language? Can you tell us about your culture? What do you do with that? People over there love to hear about Native American people and I would go to the shopping districts in Brighton and there would be Native American craft stores and I'm like how? You are the colonizer. Why do you have this? It was always really interesting. I had almost forgotten this giant Native American craft store and I went in and someone saw my earrings and they were like oh, where did you get those? They were like some beaded earrings that my grandma had given me. Where did you get those? I was telling them. Oh so you're really a Native American. Like a Native American.

It was like in some ways being surrounded by all of these artifacts of culture was nice because spending 3 months away from any of that was really hard, especially with how involved I was at the Native American longhouse and how much I did there. I'm trying to imagine how I did 3 months of not having any other Native people around. But in other ways, it was like if you don't know any people who are Native American and it's a huge deal to see me why are you selling all of this stuff? It was really interesting.

MB: Interesting. We're going to switch gears a little bit. You said the trip was an honor's college trip, right?

RW: Mm-hmm.

MB: So, going off of the honors college I know you completed your thesis spring term, right?

RW: Yeah.

MB: Tell me about what you did your thesis on and your thesis process.

RW: I did my thesis on, we'll back up. When I was a sophomore I got the URSA Engage Award. I got a few thousand dollars to start my research project and I got matched with Stacy Harper's Lab over in environmental and molecular toxicology and I was really excited and also super intimidated. I was a little baby scientist and I didn't know what to do. I got paired up with a grad student, Fan Wu, who actually got his Ph.D. a year before I finished my thesis and he did it, he's Dr. Fan Wu. He ended up being my mentor through the process of my thesis. I started really interested in titanium dioxide nanoparticles and Triclosan. Triclosan is an antibacterial preservative, like antimicrobial that gets put into soaps a lot. When titanium dioxide nanoparticles get washed down 00:32:00the drain and soap gets washed down the drain, they end up interacting in the environment and in wastewater streams when they get out from your sink, basically. It was really interesting how they increased or decreased each other's toxicity. Titanium dioxide is really of interest in bioremediation and binding up and neutralizing a lot of toxins in the environment and people want to see if they can use it to treat wastewater and things like that. I started with Triclosan and I was super excited. I was like alright we're going to do all these combination studies and put bacteria and see what happens when I grow them and I worked on that project for three years and I was so excited and then, it was two years. For two years I worked on that project and I was stoked. Then Triclosan got banned by the FDA. It didn't matter anymore [laughs].

MB: Oh no.

RW: I was like, well, I guess we're back to square one and that happened while I 00:33:00was in London my advisor sent me an email that said hey have you seen this press release? Tricosan got banned. She said don't worry though, it's okay. When you get back we're going to look at the alternatives that have been proposed to Triclosan and see if they're actually any better using all the research that you did. In the end, my thesis ended up, well, science never works. It just doesn't. So, I tried all the alternatives and only one of them was soluble enough in water to do any of my experiments because if you have to dissolve it in some kind of solvent there's no way to know if the solvent is what's killing the bacteria or the actual thing you're putting in it. I tried all of these different things. They didn't work. Eventually my thesis ended up being about combinations of titanium dioxide nanoparticles and benzalkonium chloride, which 00:34:00is the only proposed alternative that actually worked in solution. What I found is actually that titanium dioxide was able to mitigate the toxicity at certain concentrations. I'm currently working on beefing up that research and adding to it and hopefully publishing that as a paper. A lot of students are ready to publish right when they finish their thesis. A lot of students never publish and just put their thesis in the archives. I'm taking, just as I took 6 years to actually do my thesis, I'll just take another 6 to actually publish it. Yeah, I'm working right now with my mentor to get that published.

MB: That's great. I know that you, switching gears once again, I know that you had a couple positions with university housing and dining, right?

RW: Mm-hmm.

MB: And then you also had a position at the Native American Longhouse. Can you 00:35:00talk a little bit about the different jobs that you've had on campus with those groups?

RW: I love all of my campus jobs. I think that I love the progression of how I got involved on campus. I started as an RA, so I was a resident assistant in Tebeau Hall the first year it opened. That was one of the first, I was on the first staff of Tebeau Hall. My fellow RAs who moved in earlier than me actually had to live in Callahan for a little while, for a few days, because the dorm wasn't actually finished by the time we had to move in for RA staff training. I loved that job. The fun thing about being an RA and also the hard thing about being an RA is you are a counselor, a babysitter, a tutor, a janitor. You just do everything. On top of that, working with students to just help develop them 00:36:00as well, so you're also a student leader and all of that. I loved my hall my first year. I still have contact with a lot of my residents from my first year, got to know so many people. Also had some super interesting experiences. A bunch of PSU students who came down and wanted to party in the new dorm and were partying in my kitchen lounge at 2:00 a.m. and I'm like none of you even go here. What are you doing? Go home.

Being an RA, what I found that I was missing and lacking was more of a connection to social justice things. I tried to find it. My first year in West Hall as a freshman I worked on something called justice walks. There was a class 00:37:00on campus, I think it was an AAG class, that basically created a social justice guidebook for campus about all these different significant locations on campus, like the school gate down here where the Black Student Union walkout happened or Gill Coliseum where students protested segregation of the basketball team during apartheid. All of these different things. I put together a tour so every week I would take a group of students that signed up to do this to one of those locations and we would have a social justice discussion. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was facilitating social justice discussions and I continued that into my first year as an RA, my resident director from when I was a freshman actually moved to Tebeau with me. I was on his staff and so he asked me to do that program again and I helped to mentor some more students to do it. I worked on all of that and I was dismissing that more social justice aspect. I applied 00:38:00the next year to be a community relations facilitator. That was a position much more focused on doing facilitating social justice conversations in the halls, and I hadn't realized that I had been doing that already.

When I applied I was super nervous. I felt like I can't be a CRF. The people who are CRFs they know their stuff. They know social justice and I don't know social justice so I can't do it. It was from my boss Brandi Douglas at the time who was leading the CRF program that was like are you kidding? None of us knows what we're doing. The way that you know-you're good at social justice if you know that you don't know anything and that if you're okay with constantly learning and constantly trying and asking what communities need and having to adapt because things just change so much in social justice theory. I was really excited to get that job. I did not think that I was going to and I think a lot 00:39:00of people don't have as much confidence as they should in their ability to get people thinking about social justice stuff. I think they always struggle to fill those positions because people are really intimidated by the idea of being an expert and what Brandi always taught us is that we weren't an expert. We had expertise, which was always fun. I loved being Community Relations Facilitator. That was when I really came into my own on campus, I think. I, for the first time in my life, had a solid group of friends who were all also students of color and who were all very invested in making things better on campus for the first time. My freshman year was just surrounded by really white students in the honors college dorm and people who would ask me, I just don't understand why you're so obsessed with race right now. I'm like, right now? Right now?

As opposed to the rest of my life where I haven't been worried about race? Okay, whatever. My CRF year I had a lot of really great interactions with residents and learned a lot just about communicating and asking people questions and getting people to think differently about things. I enjoyed my time in housing but housing was so draining. It had been two years, well three years living in the dorms. The entire time I had been with my partner, Nick, and we were both working as RAs and both working as CRFs, which meant we both couldn't live in the same building. It meant that our jobs constantly puled us to different parts of campus and we weren't getting to spend a lot of time together and I didn't get to spend a lot of time on myself. I love housing but RAs and CRFs and academic learning systems they devote so much of themselves to helping the 00:41:00students that are in their hall that they don't have time to take care of themselves. I kind of realized that I hadn't taken care of myself for two straight years. I decided to leave housing and move of campus, but I was still missing something and I was like I don't know, what am I going to do now that I don't have these jobs to interact with students and so that's when I found I had worked as a liaison from CRF to the NAL, so as a CRF I went to the Longhouse staff meetings once a month and talked to them about our events, and so I decided to apply for the NAL. That incorporated a lot of the facilitation skills and that's where I really found my family. It's really weird, because I feel like people afraid to go into the cultural centers until they really find their place and then it's home and they can't imagine that you were ever afraid to go in there.

But I had always felt like I wasn't Native enough, I wasn't connected enough to 00:42:00my culture. I grew up away from it. I didn't speak the language. I felt like I wasn't Native enough to go in the longhouse. That wasn't a space that wasn't for me because I could just pretend that I was a white girl and obviously other people are going through worse things. That was my reasoning. Then I started working there and I can't imagine a time that I didn't feel comfortable there, because it's just home. I met my current roommate there, most of my current friends and I think my NAL job, so I worked as a peers facilitator and as a leadership liaison that was a time in my life when I became comfortable with who I am as a person of color and I really came to understand my place as a Native person and understood a lot more about Native identity and there is no one way to be Native and a lot of that internalized stuff that I was dealing with was 00:43:00because of colonization. I didn't live on a reservation because of colonization and because my mom moved me from that because of all the negative effects of colonization that are so apparent on reservations. She moved me away from the gangs and the alcoholism and the poor education because she wanted things to be better for me and she knew that things would be harder on the reservation, even though I would have access to the religion and to the culture and to the language. She chose safety and I'd always been really mad at her for that, but it wasn't until I came to the NAL that I was like that really was for me, and I started to understand a lot more of the social issues and the health disparities and things at play in Native communities that I could make a difference in and really developed my passion for working with Native communities through the NAL.

MB: That's great.

RW: All of those were campus jobs. I had a friend who used to say that it wasn't 00:44:00a "real" job because it wasn't at Fred Meyer or in food service, so just a campus job, but those jobs gave such valuable experiences. They were really good.

MB: I know we've been talking about social justice and being Native American, being a woman, and I know you're also on the LGBTQ spectrum, right?

RW: Yes.

MB: Can you talk a little bit about being on the spectrum and what it's like also identifying as a woman?

RW: Yeah. Being Native and being queer. Super fun intersection of identities. Kind of some of the different things at play, a lot of colonization took away indigenous ideas of what gender is and what sexuality is and so in Navajo there was actually several different genders.

There was names for masculine men, feminine men, masculine women, and feminine women. There's just all these different terms for what your sexuality and what your gender identity was. For Native people, a lot of that cultural and traditional identity has been erased and there's a lot of conversion to more western religions that had happened as a result of colonization and through boarding schools and things for people and so now in history we're at a point where there's a lot of stigma against LGBTQ people in Native communities. There's a big push by a lot of folks to reclaim that and reclaim those two spirit identities and those queer identities, and it's always been interesting like being a woman who is dating a straight man but also identifying as 00:46:00pansexual and queer and being Native, there's three different centers on campus that are for those identities, right? Women's Center, Pride Center, Native American Longhouse. I was struggling so hard to find programming that was for all of those and so I never felt like all of those were supposed to go together for a really long time and it was actually my time at the longhouse that I really started diving deeper into that. It was always a lot easier to ignore the fact that I was pansexual and ignore that I was queer because I was hiding in my relationship with a straight man and I could just pretend to be straight and I didn't have to-I was lucky in ways to not have to present that identity in order to be happy with my partner. I could keep it to myself. I could choose who to talk to about it. Then I met my friend and my roommate who didn't necessarily 00:47:00have that luxury and he was always feeling like he was half himself, like part of himself. I think that a lot of conversations that we had that I had with him just kind of really made me feel like I wasn't alone, like wow I'm not the only queer Native person that exists!

Because it can feel like that and I also grew up Mormon. I grew up like being gay was not something that was going to be okay. I dealt with that my entire childhood of like I knew I liked girls pretty early on but I wasn't supposed to so I pretended not to, and I just thought okay hopefully the person that I actually decide that I want to spend my life with by then I'll have figured it out. Then at the Native American Longhouse I met more people who we were finally 00:48:00all talking about what it meant to be indigenous and queer, and I don't even know how we all slowly came out to each other and figured out that we were all queer, but we kind of did. There was a little group of us and we started a club called RAD, which stands for Radical and Diasporic Indigenous Queer and Two Spirit Student Alliance. We're still working on getting it off the ground, but the intention was to have a place where we wouldn't necessarily have to slowly feel each other out and figure out if we were going to come out to each other but a place to just have queer Native students feel like they can be themselves. We can talk about all these weird intersections. Even just telling you about this club I had to explain so many historical traumas and so many different aspects that play into it and it can be so hard as a Native person to bring your queerness into a space without having to bring all of this context with you and 00:49:00so we really hoped to create a space where students didn't have to explain all that context and they could just be themselves and we could explore queerness and Nativeness in the same space, which was really neat.

MB: You talked about how you know being queer within the Native American community is kind of I wouldn't say a weird situation but it's definitely different, how has it been coming out to other people you know who are Native American? Like your family and friends?

RW: For my friends people always say, oh that makes sense [laughs], which I guess tells me that I act a lot queerer than I used to. I'm a lot more open about it now, especially having RAD and having so many friends that are so affirming.

I'm a lot more comfortable with just being myself and expressing that identity 00:50:00and so far I've come out to several people in pharmacy school because I haven't actually started a new chapter of my life since becoming comfortable with coming out to people. It's always been, oh well all the NAL people know, those are my friends, so people know so I don't have to worry about it. But starting meeting a new group of 90 classmates and an entirely new group of people like slowly explaining guess what I'm super gay but also super straight, I'm like explaining that to people is always interesting and I think in a way my queerness is less threatening to a lot of people because they see oh, well, but you're in a relationship with a man, which is always frustrating but also I do recognize how that keeps me safe in a lot of situations and I don't have to worry so much 00:51:00about my safety as a lot of trans folks do who are in the Native community and folks who if they want to be with a partner and express that they have to put themselves in danger, and I don't necessarily have to do that. I have come out-my mom is great. I have kind of expressed to my mom in high school that I might be gay and her response is I will always love you. It just hurts me that things will be harder for you because of this. That was always her sentiment was just I know that your life will be harder and that's the only reason I would ever be sad is because people don't get it and it would suck.

So, I've come out really come out to my mom and she gets it and there's also that aspect that she knows that I'm in love with Nick and that's probably not going to change. I've come out to my dad like 15, 20 times? We just never talk 00:52:00about it and it's interesting. Pretty much every time we get a beer together and I'm feeling good, dad also I'm super gay and then he just, like we're good that night and then morning happens and he just never acknowledges it again. I think my dad for him it is definitely easier. He's like right now you're with Nick so I don't have to-fine, you're gay. Fine, you're pansexual I don't even know what that means because I'm your dad and I'm old. It's definitely as far as other Native family members I have not really come out to anyone but my dad and my mom and my brothers who know and that's definitely been helpful for them, I think. I 00:53:00think if I did anything as a queer person, even if I never end up in a relationship with a woman ever again or a trans person ever again, the one thing that I have done by being out about my queerness is that my brothers feel more comfortable about their identities. I have my brothers come to me maybe I'm trans, I don't know. What if I don't like anyone? I hear about this thing called Ace, what's that. My brothers have been really open with talking to me and talking to our family about sexuality I think in large part because I have been willing to take that first step and come out to dad 20 times. Every time he just ignores it. I'm determined to make him listen.

MB: One day.

RW: One day.

MB: One day. Wow. So, I guess a lot of this you know Oregon State has quite a long history of placing women in a different category than men and how do you 00:54:00feel on campus because you're a woman and because you're Native American and you're queer, do you feel like you're discriminated against by anyone or do you feel like you know you can stand up and just be like hey not okay. How do you represent yourself?

RW: Yeah. I think that as far as discrimination goes, everything's just a lot more subdued. I'm definitely not going to walk across campus in the middle of the night by myself because I'm brown and a woman and queer and I don't feel safe doing that, but I feel fine in the middle of the day. I feel confident in my fellow students that in the middle of the day with people around that outward discrimination is probably going to be called out, which is not something that I could have necessarily said anywhere at all, actually.

But at OSU I do feel on the day-to-day very large outward displays of 00:55:00discrimination are going to be called out, but what I do kind of struggle with standing up for myself and asserting myself are in advising situations and in classroom situations where there's a power dynamic, where you've got a professor or someone who's supposed to be advising the student group and you can tell they just don't take you as seriously. Not so much anymore, because I think that I've built up a reputation at Oregon State that I'm not going to take people's trash. I had to work for that for six years and I think that's what's really telling is I feel comfortable being myself and standing up for myself and being entirely me now but this is also my sixth year on campus and it's my fourth or fifth year 00:56:00working with most of the people that I'm working with and I think that makes a big difference. I definitely see it in situations in pharmacy school classes. Lots of micro aggressions but not a lot of very outward discrimination. I think where the big thing comes into play, being a woman, being queer, being of color on this campus is the tokenization aspect and I think that more than any kind of outward discrimination OSU wants to claim my work as something that they did and though I have been fighting them for five years, six years, to be seen and to be heard on this campus, the College of Ag wants to use my voice to be like, look brown people love it here. I think you know students get so burnt out and we're called on so much and so by being so visibly all these identities I basically 00:57:00put this giant target on myself that says hey everyone at OSU call on me to be on your panel or to be on your committee as the diversity advocate or to do X thing and it's just I love doing that work, but students of color are so disproportionately called on to do that work. Those students are so disproportionality called on to do that work when they're willing to be unapologetically themselves and so I get really burned out. I never necessarily feel discriminated against. I feel very celebrated but in a way that I feel is slightly exploitative and it can be hard to express to people who don't have that social justice background why that's not okay. Why, they're like oh we're celebrating your difference. I'm like, yes and you're making me unpack my trauma in front of the entire university in order to make you look good.

MB: I know you told me about in high school there was someone who you had to clap back at because they were stepping on your boundaries. Have you had to do that at all at Oregon State? Have you had any experiences like that?

RW: I definitely, the thing that always comes up in my head when I think about this is student government. Being in student government I had a nemesis is what I called it in student government. The same individual who would just repeatedly come to our senate meetings and talk over all of the women and all the people of color, like interrupt them. This was a visitor to our meetings. We were on the senate and I would repeatedly have to call him out and be like please stop interrupting the women on this board they are trying to do their job. Repeatedly 00:59:00had to call him out and then he ended up on the senate with me. Continued to do it for another two years, well, on the senate with me for one year and then was on the student fee committee this year. There's just a lot of people like that who think that they can get away with it because they're not saying hey you're a woman so I'm talking over you. They like hope that people won't notice and I'm like, oh I notice and do not do that! I think in student government I've had to a lot like call people out and be like, hey, you realize you're being sexist. You realize you're being racist and really push back against that and I got into student government to do that, but I don't think I was initially fully aware of how often it would come up.

MB: Yeah.

RW: Most of the time I put myself into spaces where that's not going to happen.

I spend a lot of time with DCE, my academic advisor was great. I spent so much 01:00:00time in these very insular places where I was safe as a student of color and I think that that's a survival instinct that a lot of us have. I know that in this community as a student of color, as a queer student, as a woman, my supervisor at the Native American Longhouse is never going to treat me like that, but as soon as I stepped out of those things I definitely dealt with more of those situations. I'm finding it a lot more, gosh, it's still student gov-I was like oh with an advisor that I have on the student fee committee, still student government, who has a way of saying that he's proud of me... but in a way that's like I'm proud of you for expressing yourself in a way that's wide enough to be palatable. He's telling me thank you for your voice and thank you for expressing 01:01:00your voice in a way that's diplomatic that makes people listen to you. But he's saying that after my friends and other students of color have come and very emotionally shared their story and why they're upset that DCE isn't getting funding.

I'm like okay so you're basically saying thank you for being whiter than your friends, and I don't like that. I'm having to sit down and have intentional, or deciding if I'm going to sit down and have an intentional conversation, like hey I know you're trying to do something good here but do you understand what the implication was when you said that? Right now actually just coming off the tail end of doing a lot of clapping back at student fee members and congress in ASOSU who were pitting athletics and DCE against each other for budget funding. There's been this huge dramatic unrolling of all this stuff happening on campus for the last two weeks and it was a lot of sitting in meetings saying hey I want 01:02:00to push back on this notion that we have to be fair. DCE exists because none of this is fair. When we're looking at giving funding we can't give the exact same percentage of increase to athletics as DCE when for one group of these people it's not fair. A lot of just especially in student government, which is very white and one of the areas of campus that I participate in that's very white, I've experienced a lot of having to speak for an entire group of people and tell them, hey, stop being so white.

MB: Do you think having a position as a CRF helped you facilitate that a little bit?

RW: Definitely. I think that being a CRF taught me about asking people a lot of 01:03:00questions to get them to think about what they're doing and while I think there are several different ways to be an activist and I think that my friends who can show up and emotionally tell their story and to be pissed and to be angry are doing work that needs to be done in activism in being able to ask people, hey, I'm really interested in why you said that? Can we unpack a little bit about what makes you think this thing that you just said about all Native people on campus or things like that? Being in the student fee committee and being able to say hey so can I just ask our we looking at only this lowest fee amount for any specific reason or can we unpack what senator so and so just said about DCE's programming? I learned all of that though CRF for sure and I think that having 01:04:00several different styles of communication all aimed at the same goal really helps in those situations.

MB: This is a bit different, but I know you're in the pharmacy program, yeah as a grad student?

RW: Yeah.

MB: What influenced you to stay at Oregon State and do pharmacy versus something else?

RW: My biggest driver for pharmacy like why pharmacy was I did that thesis project and as one could understand from the convoluted from story that I told you about my thesis project, I don't like research anymore. I really thought that I would like it but I hadn't necessarily understood when I came in how much trial and error, how much failing is involved in research. It just felt like I wasn't getting anywhere. I wasn't doing the work that I wanted to be doing.

I realized that I really wanted to be doing work in communities. In pharmacy I'm really excited about working in Native communities and trying to reconcile western medicine and traditional medicine and give folks who come in more of an ability to trust a healthcare provider to understand and to respect their traditional medicines because pharmacy's all about interactions and traditional stuff and herbs and things that are not technically drugs still interact a lot with drugs and it can be really unsafe in a lot of ways for your pharmacist to not know what your traditional medicine is, but they're not going to tell you because pharmacists and healthcare providers have a history of being kind of crappy about that stuff. I want to build that trust. When I was looking at pharmacy schools I was really excited about OSU because I've been sitting here talking to you for an hour about all of this stuff that I have done at OSU and 01:06:00the idea of starting over and having to rebuild all of those relationships in order to keep doing the work was terrifying to me. I've never been afraid to strike out on my own. I went to London, finally. I've done these things.

I've gone on these trips but how there's so much work that goes into getting administrators to trust you and listen to you and getting advisors to actually hear your voice and listen to your ideas that I didn't feel like I could have the same impact anywhere else that I could continuing having at OSU. I had seen graduate students, graduate students mentored me when I was here and they had come here as graduate students. They got here when they were 25 and figured out the ropes as they were helping mentor me and I thought, how much good could I do 01:07:00as a graduate student mentor for these students who has been here, who knows how to navigate this system, who has figured that out already specifically for Oregon State. How much more good can I do continuing to be here? I also knew that I was entering pharmacy which was going to be a pretty white program and that I needed that community behind me. I don't know I could make it without the NAL folks and without having a solid community of people of color to run to when pharmacy just gets too white, when it gets so overwhelming that I haven't seen another person of color in three days and I can't do it anymore! [Laughs]. So, Oregon State I put my heart and soul into it and I wasn't ready to leave it behind. So I stayed.

MB: I know you were talking about how you know your goal with doing stuff in 01:08:00pharmacy is education and everything like that, how does your family, like how did they-do they support you in this? I assume they do, but what's kind of their view of what you're working on now?

RW: It's really interesting. I'm now to the point where I'm going farther than anyone in my family has gone. My parents both got bachelor's degrees. My dad got a masters in teaching and now we're at the point where I'm getting a doctorate. We don't have doctors in our family. They're really excited and they're very supportive. I think that where the challenge comes in when you're kind of in that I'm not a first generation college student but I am a first generation doctorate student is that they're super proud of me but they can't help me at all. They have no idea what I'm doing, no idea what I'm talking about, ever. They don't have any concept of how busy it is or how all-consuming and how 01:09:00time-consuming it is. There's definitely still a lot of expectation from my family that I will be involved in family things. They would never say that they expect me to get my brothers scholarships but they kind of do expect that I'll be helping Levi navigate this system, but at the same time I'm also taking 20 credits and doing an internship and also doing the mentorship and doing the work that I'm doing in all these other areas of campus. My parents love it and they're super proud of me and I have no idea how to explain to them the magnitude of what I do on my day-to-day because I just don't think that they have ever been involved like that at the same time as doing all this stuff.

MB: Then what is your end goal when you're done with your doctorate? Do you hope to work with low-fund communities? Do you hope to work on a reservation? What is 01:10:00your end goal?

RW: I really want to explore the idea of working on a reservation. It's always been kind of-ever since I had that first thought it's been a little bit tearing me apart a little bit because my mom moved me off the reservation, and so if I go back and I want to have my own family what does that own mean to have undone the work that my mom has done to get us away from that to then try and raise a family on the reservation? I think it's still a lot up in the air. I definitely want to work with underserved populations, however that is. Maybe that looks like going back to a rural community and having a pharmacy somewhere like North Lake that's really small and really medically underserved. Maybe it looks like working on a reservation. Maybe it looks like working at a larger IHS hospital and not living on the reservation but still being able to provide that care, but 01:11:00what I do know is I won't be happy being a pharmacist in downtown gentrified Portland handing out pills. I really want to do a lot of public health projects and I really want to be in the communities that have that need. My passion is working for underserved people and I think wherever I end up in pharmacy it will be helping people who are not getting help from other people.

MB: I guess my last big question for you is what's something, I mean you just kind of said it, but what's something you're really passionate about right now? It can be a class. It can be a movement. What's something that you're really focused on?

RW: I think right now having transitioned from undergrad here to grad school here and having amassed this giant pile of OSU knowledge what I'm really, really passionate about is mentoring other students. I've tried to find ways to do it 01:12:00informally and formally through being involved in the old clubs that I was involved in. I'm still a part of the Society of Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science and I sit on their advisory board and help their new president who took over for me from last year navigate the ropes. I go back to the Native American Longhouse a lot and I have students who are like wow, you made it to pharmacy school. I can make it to grad school, right? And helping them as they figure out where they want to go. I just think that I got here from having so many mentors and so many people who were willing to believe in me and tell me, Raven, you're not average. You are above average, so go do above average things. Don't settle. I think that my big passion I think that if I'm 01:13:00going to be at Oregon State if I'm going to have not taken this opportunity to go move on to a new institution and start something new, I think that my passion has to be continuing to build upon the students that helped get me here by continuing to help someone take my place. There needs to be another Raven to mentor the next group of students, right? That's my big passion right now.

MB: I guess the last thing is, is there anything I haven't asked you about that you feel like you should talk about or would you like to talk about?

RW: I think you asked solid questions. You covered it. Thanks.

MB: Alright, cool.

RW: We did it.

MB: We did the thing!