Erin Grace: Native spaces

As a Chetco and Tututni member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, Erin Grace brings her love of language to learning and documenting inclusive spaces for Native Americans in tech. We learn more about her expertise as a technical writer through read the friendly manual, the questions she has to face when considering a facial tattoo, challenges to BIPOC and blood quantum.

If you want to learn more about the Dee-ni project or learn more about the tech natives affinity group at PDXWIT, don’t hesitate to reach Erin at eringrace@pdxwit.org.

Transcript

Introduction: Welcome to humanizing tech. We interview people to dig below the surface of their achievements and challenges showcasing the story behind the story. We believe that focusing on the person and humanizing their lived experiences will help us shape the future of tech.

Dawn Mott: Humanizing tech is brought to you by Kiva. Kiva is an international nonprofit working to expand financial access to help underserved communities thrive. 100% of every dollar you lend on Kiva goes to funding loans, 

By lending as little as $25. You can be part of the solution and make a real difference in someone's life. More than 80% of the borrowers Kiva serves around the world are women. Learn more at kiva.org. 

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the humanizing tech podcast. I am Dawn Mott, she, her, and unfortunately my co-host Jesselle Hedman is not able to make it today. She is at home recovering from what sounds like a pretty bad migraine, so let's wish her the best, but I am so excited to have a guest on today that I have been wanting to talk to since I started on the podcast, I have met her in person a couple of times.

I've seen her give a talk. She is absolutely amazing. And let me please welcome you, Erin Grace. 

Erin Grace: Hello. Hi, I'm Erin Grace. I'm a Chetco and Tututni member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and a senior technical writer at NWEA.

DM: And I'm so excited to share this conversation with the whole community. So thank you for being here today. 

EG: Yeah! Thank you for having me!

DM: Like I was saying, I kind of already know, since I've met you once before, about your journey into tech and as a technical writer, but I'd love for you to share that with our audience. 

EG: Yeah, absolutely 

DM: When did you get started? 

EG: Oh gosh. I always like to start right after college. I had no intention of being in tech. My major is in Japanese and I had fully intended to be an interpreter, but after getting a job in interpreting… in translation right out of college I discovered that the office culture of that particular office did not jive with me.

And since it was my first experience, I thought, Oh no, I just hate, I just hate translation. I hate working in an office. I hate all of this. And so being a 20 year old, 20-what, 22 year old who like understands nothing about life, I was like, well, then I'll just go become a waitress. And I'll just, that's just going to be my life now. 

DM: Yeah you want to make money, just go.. 

EG: Exactly. I want to be able to pay my rent. And so I'm in the middle of waiting tables and I have a friend who comes up to me. He works at a help desk, a town or not a town at a company down in Salem, which is where I was living at the time. And he was like, Oh, Hey, I work at this help desk. You should totally come and work here as well.

And I was like, no, I hate offices. I don't want to be in tech, it sounds really boring. Also I'm in the middle of being a waitress. So that's my life man, don’t you get it? But he kind of badgered me about it a little bit more. And finally I was like, well, it pays pretty well. I think it was paying like a couple of dollars more than I was making at the time. So I was like, alright, I can work that in the morning while we're waiting tables in the evening and then we'll have two jobs, and it will be even more money. Cool. Rad. So then I got into the help desk and I actually found out that I really, really loved it because the help desk that I was on it, wasn't some like big faceless help desk, like Comcast for example, where you're just getting bombarded with calls instead, it was from a very set number of users.

And so I got to know them and I got to really empathize with their problems and understand the kinds of interactions that they wanted to have. And I felt really proud to be able to answer the questions and get them help and track down solutions and just all of that stuff. And I loved it so much that I kind of was climbing up through the ranks. I managed to get up to manage the entire help desk. And then the recession hit and most of my help desk us got laid off and it was a giant nightmare. But finally at the end of it my help desk keep him whittled down to just a couple of people and I thought to myself, you know, I gotta get out of here. They finally came up to me. I think I had three people left at that point.

They said, you have to lay off someone else. And I'm like, lay off me. I don't care at this point. I just save my people, let it be me. And the place that I was working at the time, they had a program where if they'd select you for layoff, they would give you two weeks to find a new job internally. And then you were let go. So I figured, I have management experience. I have all this good customer service experience. I should be able to be fine. So I thought, well, I really love to write. And I obviously have this good customer service background. Maybe I should get into technical writing. And so that's what I did. I sent out resumes for internal recs. I got a couple offers. And so that's where I got started. And I found out that my intuition was correct. I love tech writing because it's everything I loved about support. Plus I get to write all day. 

DM: Awesome. 

EG: It's my jam. I love tech writing.

DM: Will you explain a little bit more about tech writing for people that might be like..  

EG: Yeah. Of course. The simplest way to explain tech writing is just that you're the person who writes down the help for your users. So from my perspective, that's usually I'm helping the people who are going to be using the end product. I'm an end user tech writer. So it's people who maybe don't necessarily have a lot of tech experience and they just need a set of steps to follow, to set up their account or to achieve some goal, or maybe they need to, maybe they're having trouble and they need a troubleshooting guide. I'm the one who writes the troubleshooting guide.

DM: Oh thank you! 

EG: And a lot of other kinds of things like API docs, but like that's the basic idea is you write the stuff that helps the user.

DM: Wonderful. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for explaining that. Thank you for writing the docs. I definitely have used them hopefully you write the nice ones that are like, here are the steps that you cannot possibly get wrong. Like at the end of this, if you've done this wrong, like, I don't know… 

EG: That is always my goal, my website is read the friendly manual, which obviously is, it kind of relates back to this old, snarky read the f-ing manual thing that like the tech bros used to espouse. But I mean it in the non-snarky way, like I honestly want my documentation to be friendly and approachable and like that. So that's my, my ethos, I guess you could say.

DM: Nice. Yeah. Ethics. F is for friendly. 

EG: Ethics. F is for friendly. 

DM: Well, thank you for writing this nice, friendly, non-violent instructions on how to use their tech. That's wonderful. So what else do you do with your time when you're not writing us wonderful, helpful manuals?

EG: Oh gosh. One of the biggest things that I'm working on right now is learning my tribes’ indigenous language. I am Chetco and Tututni, which are tribes from the Confederated Tribes of Siletz. And I am trying to learn that language, which is quite a challenge because it's very different from English.

DM: Does your background learning Japanese and like your college education help in these areas?

EG: You know it’s funny, it actually does. I guess in a way it also kind of hinders it. In a way it's very, very helpful because I already have the experience of the mind space you need to be in, in order to learn a language. And also our language, I call it Dee-ni. It's also known as Nuu-wee-ya'. Dee-ni is very similar to Japanese in that they are both more synthetic languages than English, which basically means that rather than each word having its own distinct thing. Each word is like an amalgamation of parts. So an example of like a non-synthetic word with like door. There's no other parts to that word. It just door means door. Whereas a synthetic word is something like preamble where you have the pre prefix and then amble, which means walking around, I guess I'm actually not sure of the etymology of preamble, but anyway, it's a word that's made up of smaller component pieces and a synthetic language like Dee-ni, for example, a lot of the words are put together in this like chunked up way so that you get a lot of context about the meaning of a word from a lot of small pieces.

DM: Oh interesting. So like you said door, so we make it doorway, and that becomes.. 

EG: Yeah, exactly. And it starts to get synthetic. English is not like a completely, I can't remember the opposite of synthetic is, it's not a completely non-synthetic language. It does have elements, but then there's this whole continuum, right? Where you have everything from the least synthetic to the most they're called poly synthetic languages. And I think Japanese is like more on the poly synthetic side and Dee-ni is even more on the poly synthetic side. So having that brain space is really helpful. 

DM: It's so interesting. Is it a written and spoken language?

EG: It's written now, but it wasn't written originally. We didn't really have a written language to speak of. Back in the seventies, a bunch of what is it? So my tribe is very closely related to the Tolowa tribe in Northern California, we’re, I don't want to say we're the same people, but we are very, very closely related. And so quite a lot of Tolowa scholars and a couple Siletz scholars got together and they came up with an alphabet that they thought would work really well. Unfortunately, people didn't tend to use it because you couldn't type it on a keyboard. So then we updated the alphabet, what's called the practical alphabet. So now you can type it on a keyboard. I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, I find it a little clunky just because, it's some of the sounds we have in Dee-ni don't exist in English. And so we have to like come up with these amalgamations of existing symbols on the keyboard in order to make it work for typing. And it's, to me it's a little bit awkward, but I don't know that there's a better alternative in terms of… 

DM: I think this is very interesting and kind of a segue into something else that we're going to talk about. So I remember watching something on PBS and it was about the keyboard and how in China they have each key you can map to a different sound or symbol. So like, I wonder if we got together with some other technical native Americans, if we could come up with keyboard mapping to make these sounds map to certain keys that are useless on the keyboard or something.

EG: That would be totally rad. I hadn't even thought about that, but I'm pretty sure that's the way that a Cherokee, like typing in Cherokee works because a Cherokee does not have any English letters in it that I'm aware of. But they can still type it out on a regular keyboard because there's a, what is it? I use this for Japanese. There's a keyboard setting that you can choose at least on a windows computer. I'm not sure about Mac, where you can add on like different kinds of keyboards. And I am certain that that would be possible to do with Deeni. And then we could use unifon. That's the original alphabet. That'd be so cool.

DM: Awesome. See! Well, let's talk about your other endeavor. I think you're working with PDXWIT to create something that sounds really awesome to me - a native American affinity group.

EG: Yeah, basically I'm trying to come up with a space for native Americans who work in tech or aspire to work in tech to come together and hang out, share experiences, be around people like us. It's a space that I've wanted to have for a really, really long time, but there's just not.. the, the frustrating thing is that native Americans are such a tiny part of the population, kind of a little known fact that I find it's very illustrative is that the number of native Americans today is currently back to the number of native Americans there were in pre-contact times. So basically there was that big of a die off something to the effect of like 90% of the native population died as a result of first contact. And we're only now recovering that original number of people.

And so we account for in the US something like 1 to 2% of the population. And as you can imagine, at best, we would represent 1 to 2% of tech and I strongly suspect that the numbers are much lower than that. And so the only other, the only other natives and tech that I know are a couple of people on Twitter. And then one person who I knew in town who was my brother, he works at Wacom, he's a Java developer. And so it's been a little bit of a struggle trying to figure out how to get together other natives who work in tech or are interested in tech so that we can all start to help one another when the numbers are so low. But I reached out to PDXWIT to try and see if, you know, maybe there was some interest there or maybe some help. And they've been amazing. The idea that we've got going right now is that rather than trying to focus on Portland, we want to open it up nationally, which should get us a much better number of people so that we can actually build it into a really robust community, which is what I'm really looking forward to. I can't even imagine the kinds of conversations we're going to have, or the kinds of things we're going to come up with, but I can tell that it's going to be amazing.

DM: Yes. And for folks, since we have one to two percent of people that might be aware of some of these conversations that you'll have, do you want to share like a glimpse of like what you might talk about or things that might be important?

EG: Yeah, actually for me like the big thing that I get really obsessed about, no surprise,  is the language learning aspect. So I should have mentioned this earlier. One of the things I do, like one of my side projects is called the Dee-ni Project. And what I'm trying to do is build out a curriculum for other people who are learning my tribe's language. But obviously that's a little bit complicated because there's, although resources do exist, they're not centralized very effectively. And so it can be really hard to go through and learn, not just like, how do I say I went to the story yesterday, but like the deep questions about the language, like, how do you conjugate this kind of verb? How many kinds of verbs are there? What kinds of sounds actually fit together in the language, in a logical fashion, according to the principles of the language? Those are like these big linguistics questions that I don't think anyone has answered with regard to my language and indeed probably a large number of native American languages.

And I really want to get some machine learning experts in on this, because there are dictionaries we can scrape and tons of data we could feed into a machine to answer those questions. That, to me, would be amazing to be able to get my hands on some native machine learning experts who can help me answer that kind of question. And again, I'm sure that there are other huge issues within the native community and the world at large, that having that native mindset could be really helpful to solve. Yeah, I'm really excited. I feel like we can do a ton of cool stuff together.

DM: I agree. So like, as an urban native, how often are you able to find yourself in these community spaces?

EG: It's pretty rare. I'm lucky in that despite being an urban native, I am somewhat close to my reservation. My reservation is about a three hour drive away from my house. And so even though it's not it's not super convenient, I can't just go visit my grandma and the Rez every weekend... I could, it would be hard. You know, when there's like a really big event, I can usually manage to make it happen. For example, there's one really big celebration called Nadosh that happens every six months it's a solstice celebration and I can normally get back for the winter Nadosh. I can't as often do it for the summer Nadosh. And it's hard also for me to get into our tribe's pow wows, which are normally in Lincoln City. So I'm not completely disconnected, but it is really hard to be able to feel like I'm in good contact with my people and with my culture. Yeah, probably the closest thing I have is I'm part of another group that's learning the language and we meet every Wednesday, but it's a limited time thing, we're only going to be doing it for a little while. So I get like this hour long touch point every week, and then I have to kind of fly solo which is hard.

DM: Yeah. I think anyone who's ever learned a language would say like, if you have, you don't have the discourse it's really difficult to progress. Did people speak your native language on the reservation?

EG: There are a few who can, but it's mostly old people. A lot of the young people, it's not that they don't want to, and it's not that my tribe isn't trying to teach them. It's just really that once a language starts to die, it is extremely difficult to recover. Because what you really need is people to speak constantly. Which when you're a new language learner, first of all, you just kind of can't do. You don't have any words, you don't have any grammar, you don't have anything. So that makes it hard. But then also, like, even as you're progressing, you still need someone there to listen to so that you know what the words are supposed to sound like, you understand the cadence, you begin to absorb things from them. That's been one of the most frustrating things actually about attempting to learn Dee-ni is that, you know, all of the I've looked up all of the recommendations on how to learn a language as fast as possible or how to learn the language really, really well.

And everyone says the same thing and it's not wrong, but it doesn't apply to my situation. What they say is you need to get as much input as possible. You need to watch TV in the language, you need to listen to music and the language, you need to have conversations with people in the language. And the problem that I have with Dee-ni is that there isn't a TV in the language, there aren't movies in the language, there isn't music in the language… a little bit, but we're not supposed to record it because it's ceremonial music. There's no one to talk to. And so you have to find other people who are like a little bit below, a little bit above your level, and you have to try to bolster one another through that wall. And that's really tough. My goal for the languages - I want to be able to talk to people about my job in the language. I want to be able to say something like we have a release tonight so I'm going to need to pull down the get repo and then like make the changes, do a commit and push. I want to be able to say that sentence in Dee-ni. And I am nowhere near that point yet. And honestly, I don't know that the vocabulary is at that point yet either because the number of native fluent speakers, we have both at Siletz and in the Tolowa Dee-ni' nation, cause like I said we’re very closely related.

We, I feel like we might have a hundred, that's probably an overly sanguine estimate, but like there might be as many as a hundred people who can really hold down a conversation, but most of them are in Northern California and I have no access to them.

DM: I want to talk about the first time I ever saw you. It was at a PDXWIT event. And I noticed you because you had what I thought was a tattoo on your face. 

EG: Yeah. 

DM: Which was clearly a native American tattoo. So please like tell other people what I saw, what was going on?

EG:  Yeah. So I had mentioned previously that we have this solstice festival called Nadosh and there is a very specific way to celebrate, but as an urban native, it's really hard for me to celebrate in the traditional way. And so what I do instead is I paint on with eyeliner, this traditional tattoo. So in my tribe, traditionally, when women come of age, we're supposed to get a tattoo on our face. It's three lines on your chin that just go down, not quite from the corners of your mouth, but almost in the center all the way down your chin in native spaces there’s the concept of the auntie, the older, not older woman, but the mature grown-up woman who is here to help and support and drive other people forward, protect people, educate people, every good thing that you, as an adult woman can espouse.

And I feel like as an auntie, like my job is to show people that they belong in tech, show other native people, they belong in tech. But on the other hand, I feel like, you know, one of the best ways I can do that, other than the things I'm doing is I want to be able to put some representation on my face that, hi, hello, I'm a native woman. And then people can just see that as soon as they look at me, which yeah, my face doesn't look that way. A lot of native American people, like we're not… we're multiracial in a lot of cases. And so I don't quote, unquote, look native in the way that non-natives expect a native person to look, that’s the way I'll say it.

DM: You can kind of step out of central casting and into your role.

EG: Exactly. Like no one would look at me and be like, Oh yeah, her hire her for the, you know, racist movie we're attempting to make less racist by hiring a native actor. They would be like, no, you're Oh, you're Brazilian. Oh, you're Iranian? You're something, you're definitely not white, but I can't tell what you are. And I kind of want to change that. I want people to be able to look at me and say, there she is the strong native auntie pulling people in tech. 

DM: Which is amazing. I feel as though, and I mean, maybe you do as well. There's a lot of like erasure and people like don't even understand that native Americans are like right next door, you know?

EG: It’s true. I have never gotten the comment You can't be native American, they're all dead. But I know natives who have heard that exact thing, which is terrible. 

DM: Heartbreaking, terrifying. 

EG: Yeah, exactly. And I feel like the heart is willing, but possibly the career is weak because like, I want to get these tattoos when I have the eyeliner on Nadosh. And I look at myself in the mirror, I always feel like more myself. I feel super proud of who I am, the strength that represents, like the connection with my ancestors. Like it's this very heady amazing feeling. But then on the other hand, the reality is that I work in an extremely white industry in an extremely white town. And although I have mostly met people who are totally chill, they're curious, they're interested. They're not hostile. On the other hand, I have to consider the fact that, you know, I'm going to have the tattoos if / when I get them, when not if, when I get them, I will have these tattoos for the rest of my life.

And that could mean not so good things for my career. You know, to what extent can I guarantee that I'll be able to get hired going forward? And that's super scary. I'm the sole breadwinner in my house. If I don't have a job, we don't have a house. We don't have our apartment or food or electricity. So it's this weird thing where I want to be able to have this thing that encourages other natives and shows my pride in who I am. But on the other hand, I also still want to eat and it's a really weird conundrum. 

DM: I think it's a really interesting and important conversation because, why do we feel that a facial tattoo isn't professional, you know.

EG: Like the negative reactions have been very strong and yeah, it's not great. I don't wanna name names, but one time recently that I did it, someone reached out to me and they were like, listen, I understand this is important to your culture, but you should understand that people who get face tattoos are more likely to commit suicide within five years. And I'm like, Whoa, 

DM: Woah. 

EG: Hey, first of all, that's a lot, second of all, suicide is like a really big issue in native communities. And I feel like discouraging natives from living their culture is actually the reason not the solution. There's clearly like this negative undercurrent about, do not get a friggin face tattoo that some people just have. And I'm, I don't know how, I don't know how to square that circle.

DM: People really don't like it. But I think people just really don't like anything that they haven't seen before that makes them uncomfortable.

EG: It's true. Yeah. I don't know. 

DM: I think people are afraid of what the colonialists came and did 

EG: It’s true.

DM: More than anything I think that reminds them of our terrible history...

EG: Yeah. Like, bare with me, but one of the things that I think is so interesting specifically about the…  so there's this word BIPOC, right? Black indigenous people of color. And it specifically calls out like Black and indigenous people as having gotten like really the worst of it. Let's be real. And it's so interesting to me because in some ways Black people and Indigenous people, we have gotten the worst crap, but the way in which we've gotten crap in some ways are like totally opposite. And so in some ways I feel like it's so important for us to like, as Black people and as Indigenous people to be able to help one another. But sometimes that's super hard because for example, with Black people, like obviously native Americans have had like a form of social segregation on reservations.

But on the other hand, the quote unquote solution to Black people was segregation. Keep the communities totally separate - do not encourage any intermixing. Do not encourage, we got to keep the black people over here. Whereas with Indigenous people, the quote unquote solution was, we need to get these people into the population and destroy their bloodline as quickly as possible. We need to inter-marry is a little bit strong, but like let's force them to be as white as humanly possible. Let's put in place policies where if you’re if your blood quantum falls below a certain level, Nope. Now you're white. Get, get out of the reservation system, stop being Indian, go away, disappear. And I feel like Black and Indigenous people have that opposite oppressions that have resulted in the same thing where we aren't welcome in spaces because people don't even realize that we can be in that space to begin with. And it's so frustrating.

DM: You are creating a space for natives in tech, for tech natives to come together, to talk about the same things and to maybe all show up, you know, you choose a day, you all show up with your facial tattoos, like across US. And everyone is just like, Oh, hell yeah. This is what we've been missing. There you are. We see you now. We can open our eyes and be like, wow, let's kind of face these atrocities. Let's work towards the future. Let's get computers out to reservations. Let's bring, you know, I don't know.

EG: Let’s get coding classes for these people. 

DM: Yeah! 

EG: Yeah, I have ideas. I want to get, I want to get like robotics programs into rez schools. I mean robotics programs should be everywhere, but especially red schools. 

DM: Machine learning!

EG: Machine learning, coding, we could get some people into bootcamps. My brother, I think is kind of an interesting case study almost, where if you have an encouraging enough environment, kids of all stripes will go for it. Like his…  he is like I mentioned, he's a Java engineer and he has been into computers and coding literally as long as I can remember. And he's barely a year younger than me. He has always been tinkering with stuff. And we had this Commodore 64. He taught me how to code in basic when we were five and six. I mean he is into it! 

DM: Wow. 

EG: And that's the thing is that like, I think it's so important to know that there is no quote unquote kind of person who belongs in tech. Like we all belong there and all people need is the encouragement. And that's what I want to do. I want to give people the encouragement. I want it to look at them and say, Hey, you little native kid, hey you native dude, hey you native lady, native non-binary person, two spirit people, let's get in there and like change things. Let’s make it happen. You belong. All of you belong. All of you belong right here with me in the tech industry. One of the big, like intertribal problems that we have is blood quantum, which I don't even know if people who aren't native, even know what that is… 

DM: Tell us about blood quantum. 

EG: Blood quantum is basically a set of rules about how much Indian blood you have to have to be considered a tribal member. Maybe what we need is direct descendancy - are you related to someone who can prove that they were part of our tribe? Yes. Congratulations. You're also part of our tribe. That's the way that our people did this traditionally. 

DM: I feel like I have heard about this, but I always just assumed that it would be like you were saying like, can like, where's your lineage or whatever, like who was in our tribe? Just weird. 

EG: Yeah some tribes actually do do it by descendancy. The Cherokee nation is one of the tribes that famously is direct descendancy but a lot of tribes are not that way. And it's very, very frustrating. I think it's frustrating for everyone who is not full blooded. For full blooded people they're like, no, this makes perfect sense. And we got to keep it. You have no idea how important this is and for the rest of us, we're like, no, no, no. This is a slippery slope. 

DM: Yeah. 

EG: Some of us are at the bottom of the slope. Some of us have already slipped off of the slope. Please undo this.

DM: So, okay. Let's go ahead and quickly give a shout out to any of these places that people can follow up with you.

EG: Yeah, absolutely. So if you want to learn more about my technical writing career and also just read about technical writing best practices. I have my blog, it's readthefriendlymanual.com/. Also, if you want to reach out to me about any of my projects, you can just email me erin.rtfn@gmail.com. Again, the F is for friendly, not the other word. And if you want to help with the Dee-ni project, you can visit a github.com/erin-rtfm/Deeni or Dee-ni. Which again, I believe will be in the show notes. And if you want to email me about the tech natives affinity group, you can reach me at my PDXWIT email address, which is Erin Grace, E R I N G R A C E @ PDXWIT.org.  

DM: Thank you. I appreciate your honesty. How open you are. I don't know how brave you are thinking outside of the box, being your own person, passing it on to the next generation, both tech and your history. Like, I don't know you're doing it all!

EG: Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. It can be hard, as I'm sure you're well aware, It can be hard when you feel like you're alone and yeah, this has made me feel not as alone. I like that.

DM: Wonderful. That makes me very happy too. I hope that you feel less alone as people start joining your affinity group, we're calling it tech natives. So seek it out. Hang on, wait for it. Just hold on to the edge of your seat. You can be really excited to learn more. We can't wait. Well, thank you so much, Erin Grace for being here with us today. Thank you Max, for doing our sound engineering wherever you are. Jesselle I hope your headache clears up real soon and you can start seeing light again because migraines are no joke. April - thank you for being our wonderful producer and making this all happen. We have a team of transcribers. We have a team of podcast  innovators, or other podcasts. Listen to them. Listen to us again, come back. You’re friends and family, want to see you. Thank you, bye. 

EG: Bye!

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