Tom Bliss:

Hi, L. It's such an honor to interview you today. Thank you so much for agreeing to join OUTWORDS. We start with the same question with everyone. And so I'm wondering if you could please tell me your name and spell it for me.

L. Frank:

L. Frank. L. F-R-A-N-K.

Tom Bliss:

Great. Thank you. And you were born in 1952 in California.

Tom Bliss:

Can you tell me the circumstances when you were born?

L. Frank:

The circumstances when I was born? Well, there was an earthquake the day before, so I was rolling around the hospital room in Santa Monica. Yeah. Well, the circumstances, that's a funny question, I traveled around the world for about 12 years deciding where to be born, so I

L. Frank:

chose to be born here and be a California Native and come from this spot in the world. So those are my circumstances. Otherwise the circumstances are pretty much the same as everyone else's.

Tom Bliss:

So you say 12 years, do you have a previous incarnation memory or is it a sense?

L. Frank:

I always have a sense. Do I have a pre-incarnation?

L. Frank:

Yeah. I always have a sense that there is, and I do, I just don't like it because I don't like the idea of it, but the knowledge of it outweighs whatever I feel about. That's just the way it is. Yeah. I traveled with another Native before I was born, who then chose Canada and I chose California and our lives were similar yet very, very different. We chose for cosmic reasons. And

L. Frank:

I don't think we had a choice in that either. Really? So I dunno if I answered your question, but yes, I guess I believe in that, I have to, because I remember the traveling.

Tom Bliss:

Yeah, yeah. I sometimes wonder if I chose my family in the same way thinking it would just be a pit stop onto something greater and then the pit stop almost always turns out to be

Tom Bliss:

much longer and much more impactful than you think. What was the family you chose? Can you describe them?

L. Frank:

The family that I was born into was really quite typical for California Spanish history. It's a very same chunk of history. My Spanish ancestors came over with Portola and the expedition and my Indian ancestors were here.

L. Frank:

It's at times pretty awful, but always interesting mix of cultures clashing because I was always a throwback and my family always wanted to be Spanish and white. I was always just this 'dirty little Indian', they'd call me, because that's who I heard and what I listened to. The person I traveled for 12 years wondered, when we re-met again, why I had chosen such a hard life, and the only answer I had was because they needed me and I don't know really what that means,

L. Frank:

but it was a family struggling in America to live up to the Joneses, and yet they were not Jones. They were Hispanic names, and it's hard to live up to a Caucasian name when you're not Caucasian. So it was the usual strife. Then I had a German stepfather, so I was exposed to Europeans and people who had escaped the iron curtain. It was

L. Frank:

always interesting, quite fascinating, often volatile, but there was always good music and great food.

Tom Bliss:

Can you tell me about your father?

L. Frank:

My real father.

Tom Bliss:

Yes.

L. Frank:

Because that's an Indian joke. I'm gonna tell you real dad. Yeah, I first remember meeting my real father when I was almost five and he was attempting to kidnap me

L. Frank:

and kill my brother who was not yet born. That was my first solid memory of him. Even though that's a terrorizing scene, a terrorizing memory, I still had a feeling for this human being. Then when I re-met him purposefully when I was around 23 or 24, I understood that this is where I belonged my whole life, that with this man and this side of my family, my dad

L. Frank:

was a funny guy. At first, I thought that my grandmother told me he had fallen off a roof and bumped his head, so I thought, oh, that bump must have took, but I didn't mind, having a bump head dad, but it turns out he was just different. He's a poet. I was real surprised to have a poet dad and yeah, he was a hellraiser and he and my mother tore up cities, but he understood his place and he was trying to figure out how to be in that place. He was a very

L. Frank:

interesting man and I was very happy that he was the Indian family that I knew I belonged with.

Tom Bliss:

And what tribe is your father from?

L. Frank:

My dad is Tongva and Ajachmem in the school books. They call us Gabrielino and Juaneno because we were enslaved and built those missions, the San Juan Capistrano mission and the San Gabriel mission. But we

L. Frank:

call ourselves Tongva. The Tongva don't all call themselves the same things, but my family, we call ourselves Tongva and I'm a Ajachmem from the San Juan Capistrano area. Our islands were out Pimu, which is Catalina, the center of our universe, which was bombed by the Navy and we're not allowed on, is in Spanish called San Nicholas, but we call it Minar. It's the Mother Earth's outie belly button.

L. Frank:

So those are our homelands and the Tongva are in the entire LA basin, some into the San Fernando Valley. We're extinct now.

Tom Bliss:

You said you were kind of ostracized by your family growing up, and I think I've heard you also say in your prep that your father was also ostracized. Did you have any connection

Tom Bliss:

to your Native American relatives? Can you tell me about being ostracized and how you got through that?

L. Frank:

Yeah, when I was a child and my family recognized that I was different from them, I didn't aspire to be a Catholic nor Caucasian, nor be a secretary in an office, that I really liked listening to the land and the sky and the water and the birds.

L. Frank:

The ostracizing came in the form of, when you're a child, it's your birthday and everyone goes to Disneyland but you, which was okay because I was much happier when all those people who really had it in for me were gone, so it was okay, and I got to be left with my grandfather who was also somewhat ostracized because he was a wee bit too Native for them also. I didn't actually handle being ostracized.

L. Frank:

I learned about animism. I learned how the world really works. I learned from the perspective that resonated within me. I mean, sure it hurts being left on your birthday, but then there are other wonderful surprises and there are too many things. People always tried to hurt me or fold me into some shape, and boy, they were thrilled when they realized, oh no, she's two spirit, now what? But

L. Frank:

my ancestors talked to me when I laid on the ground, my ancestors talked to me, I could see them, I could hear them. I was never alone with the people who were against me. I was always with the people who were with me.

Tom Bliss:

Can you tell me about animism? Can you describe it for our audience and how you learned about it? And some of the amazing experiences you've had.

L. Frank:

Animism is about -- Some people are humanists and they believe, I don't know what humanists believe. And some people are capitalists. Animists believe that all things have life, all things should be respected. I think I knew it way before, but when I was around three and a half or four, I found a bird. You know how kids often, I found a bird and its wing was broken. I took it to my grandfather and that's when he started. He whispered it to me. I don't know why, I guess he was a quiet guy, but he whispered to me, and he

L. Frank:

only spoke Spanish, but he told me how, as he's tending to the bird, how human beings, all animals and people are the same thing, but human beings had done something incorrectly and most of us lost the ability to communicate. That if we really listened, we realized that we're a part of all things and that this bird's existence is exactly the same as my existence. Then he peeled Pinto beans and we fed it Pinto beans because Pinto beans

L. Frank:

are the food of the gods, the Mexican tonic for strength. As we brought the bird back and she healed up and flew off, well, he would tell me about the plants and even that the wind has memory. So animism is a belief in, we are not at the top of a food chain. We do not have dominion over all.

Tom Bliss:

And you have a story of lying on the ground and hearing voices. Can you tell me that story?

L. Frank:

Well, when I was a kid, aside from the adults not being so nice to me, I didn't really enjoy the company of other children. They always wanted like get dirty, and I wanted to read books and be nerd. I had different ideas than they did so I always played by myself. One of

L. Frank:

the places where I went year in and year out from the time I was teeny was this large field at the time. And at that time it was right below Loyola University. Now it's Loyola Marymount, but then it was just Loyola. It had that big L and I would see that lit up at night. Think that's where the Catholic Lord lived. So right below where the Catholic Lord lived, and a little bit over to the right of the L is where I would lay down and people would talk to me. They were women, they would

L. Frank:

talk to me. Sometimes they would ignore me and talk to each other, but they knew I was there, but they were always aware that I was there no matter what they were talking about. And that made me incredibly odd and not fit with my family once more, because I had different ideas that I had acquired from them. And this field, it, once the archeologist, now it's full of condominiums now where I exactly laid our tennis courts. It was a graveside of over 600

L. Frank:

of my people and over 400 of them were women. I use the words inside my own head and heart, that those were the people who raised me.

Tom Bliss:

That's beautiful. Do you think that children have the capacity to see the world in this way or not?

Tom Bliss:

And if they do have that capacity, what do you think happens to it?

L. Frank:

As to what children can see or remember or know, my friend that I traveled with in Canada, at this age, and she's 12 years younger than I am, she still remembers the language of pre-birth and before babies start talking

L. Frank:

to their families or to whomever, at one point, she got in trouble, because she taught her little brother. He helped him retain the language and he refused to speak neither Indian or English and they didn't know what he wanted, so they made her stop. There are some people who never lose the memories and the language of before. I was reminded of it. I was very slow, but then the Ravens told me I was very slow, but then when I get things, I get it good, but I was reminded of it

L. Frank:

and then I could feel it. I was reminded by the person I had traveled with. So children know everything and if it's supposed to be kept, it will be, if it's not, it's always there anyway. Sometimes it's what people call intuition and feelings, but they really are memories.Sometimes we just beat the heck

L. Frank:

out of kids for what they feel and know. It's very hard for it to exist. But I had a very unpleasant, most of the time, childhood, but it never touched what I actually know.

Tom Bliss:

I thought I would ask about the traveler later, but when you brought it up again, I'd already forgotten it. Can you tell me about the traveler and how you met up again?

L. Frank:

Which traveler, the Raven

L. Frank:

or that 12 year person?

Tom Bliss:

Well, I'd love to hear about the Raven because I love Ravens, but first if we could do the 12 year person. Yeah.

L. Frank:

Oh, well, I was working language in -- I do a lot of language work, creates programs for Natives to reclaim their languages. I was hanging around selling language t-shirts in New Mexico when somebody kept walking by and I can hear what people are thinking at times I have no control over it. It's not like a

L. Frank:

trick or anything, but I kept hearing this person. Then I was under the table fixing the t-shirts when this person talked to me. I sat up and out loud answered. She was surprised that I had heard. She talked to me for a minute and then a year later I get invited to Canada and it's to this person's reservation in Canada. I come and I work language with them and they keep me an extra day and she starts talking to me. Well, our first

L. Frank:

encounter was with a Raven, we're driving in the truck, in the snow. So it's all white, the sky, the ground, everything. And we're driving in a pickup truck. And a Raven out of nowhere, out of nowhere comes and crosses itself, opens its wings full wide and comes and keeps pace with us backwards as we're in the truck driving. And it just looks in at us both and I just looked at her and thought, what the hell is going on? But you know, Indians, you just gotta like, wait, because something's

L. Frank:

going to tell you. And she looked at me and smiled and then the Raven was gone and I looked everywhere for that. Raven could not find it in the sky and the trees were hundreds of yards away. So when we went to the reservation, she kept telling me more. And I kept, I felt as if I were going to explode because all of a sudden I had memory of what she was saying. She was reminding me, but I had memory and I could tell her the next step of the memory she reminded me of.

L. Frank:

And so that traveling with her it was really dynamic and scary, but not in a frightening way. One of those moments that changed your life and allows you to believe in what you really believe in. Despite not having a tribe, we don't have our ceremonies, we don't have our religion intact. And so I have to do different things. And this said to me

L. Frank:

you have enough, you have exactly what you need. You have everything, that this is part of the path to be with this person again, after all that time of being apart and having traveled together all those years.

Tom Bliss:

I think one of my favorite things that I read about Native cultures, and I don't know if this is true for all of them, but I read an excerpt from someone's account that

Tom Bliss:

identity isn't the way we do it in the Western world. As far as the Western European world, a Native American will observe a Raven and their consciousness will be with a Raven and they'll fly off and experience what the Raven experiences, their consciousness will be with a river. So there's a much broader sense of a personal identity and consciousness that comes with

Tom Bliss:

that broadening. Do you have any thoughts about identity and where you are with your conditioning, I guess, but with the truth that you keep tapping into from your ancestors?

L. Frank:

Hmm. Well, age is a trippy thing. When you're a kid, you hear people saying the youth is wasted on the young and you can kind of feel that way.

L. Frank:

I'm now minutes away from being 70 and where I am is very interesting to me. First, there's a physical part, parts keep falling off, you know, and you have to go to new junkyards to get parts that you can put back on. So that catches your attention for a while. And that catches how you start to talk to people. I caught myself doing that and I stopped. It's like, nobody wants to hear about your parts falling off, but it is true. And it's good to know that

L. Frank:

the flower loses its bloom y'all, but this getting older and being at this age and being indigenous, the responsibilities have all come to this point, everything I've done, my whole life has been in service to my people in my place where I belong and at this point that responsibility has become more focused. People might say crabby ,

L. Frank:

but you get to a point where you realize that this has to be winnowed away because it means nothing and it never will mean anything. What is left is it means everything. And everybody's everything is different, but you start recognizing what that everything is. You really start caring for it in a much more stringent way than you did before.

L. Frank:

Where I'm at, like I look around and I see two spirit youth, and I don't want them to waste any more time, not being who they are. I look around, I see Natives and don't waste any more time, be who you are. I'm looking around and I'm kind of thinking that

L. Frank:

we're still in the mode of, oh, we've got all the time in the world. No, we don't. The planet needs us to be awake. Now that's the mandate from creator. Doesn't matter what your thing, you're a singer, a dancer, a scientist, a doctor, it's time to give more. I guess I'm at that stage where I'm saying that to people, but then again, I'm looking around at the planet and the food and the water and the air. It's not like when I

L. Frank:

was a kid in the sixties and we were rebelling against things, there was food, there was water, there was air.

Tom Bliss:

You talked about a moment with your grandfather that made you an activist where he looked sick. Can you tell me that story?

L. Frank:

Oh, sure. The two people I loved in the world most, or who related to me and could see me were my maternal

L. Frank:

grandmother and my grandfather. I called them mama and daddy. To me, daddy, it's funny to me that I grew up to be his exact height, he was like my God, he was just so beautiful. He was the kind of dark that people think, oh, no, that looks greasy because he was just dark and beautiful and kind of shiny. He just looked like the sun to me and everything he said to me was gold, even though he rarely spoke. He would walk me places.

L. Frank:

He bathed me every day, braided my hair, tied my shoes and we would walk. This one day we're walking together and I think I'm three and a half. That's where I'm seeing this, and my hand is in his and I'm so happy. As we walk, we meet a pair of shoes and stop. And I say shoes and a pair of like pants, trousers up to the knee because I'm just a baby so that's all I see. I see my grandfather's shoes and I see these other shoes

L. Frank:

and there's shoe to shoes. I'm looking at those while they're talking, and then I realize that there's something wrong because I can feel it through his hand that there's something wrong. I looked up at him and he'd look so sick. I thought cold or flu, something is very wrong. I was so worried. And he was moving funny as if he didn't feel well, like something hurt him. He was not looking at the man. He was looking kind of down and shifting his head from side to side

L. Frank:

and his feet were moving slightly. I was so upset and then he cut my eye and he looked down at me and he winked at me and he gave my hand to squeeze. All right, I understand that. That means to wait. So I waited, the conversation continued, stopped. The shoes went off and my grandfather came down to my level and he put a hand on my shoulders and in Spanish, which I don't speak fluent Spanish, but he said, "Mahita", he looked me in the eyes and he says, "This is the way

L. Frank:

the gringos wants us to be." I thought, no, no, I don't like that one bit. As a matter of fact, I don't like it at all in my little head. I'm just like, I'm rebelling because nobody's grandfather, not mine, not anybody's God should be. And my little baby head is like fighting. He's looking at me. His hands are still in my shoulder and I looked at him and I pulled back and I said, no, he just looked at me and he got a funny little

L. Frank:

smile in his face and he got a regular smile and he just took my hand and we walked on. But from that moment on, I was totally conscious of people demeaning themselves just to please others. And by please, it means to be safe around others or whatever it means. I was just not down for it and have remained not down for it this whole time.

Tom Bliss:

Can you tell me about your school experiences? Elementary school, junior high?

L. Frank:

Yeah. Well, I started out going to school, my school experiences in kindergarten and I found, I didn't like playing with other kids and I got the mumps and so I was so happy to have the mumps. And then they sent me to first grade and second grade and I was unhappy again

L. Frank:

because I was odd and I thought the kids were kind of dumb. First of all, they couldn't read. I'd been reading since I was three and a half, but that actually has more to do with my autism than their lack. But at that age, I didn't know, and so I wasn't satisfied with them and I would often -- Well, school wasn't the best thing even as an elementary child, it got a little bit worse when we moved to Palos Verdes

L. Frank:

and it's an affluent area, but there were no people of color in the area when we moved there.

That became another struggle because those kids would beat me up, but I could beat them up because I'd come down from where everybody beats each other up. They beat me up for being the gardener or the maid's child, so that was an experience. I didn't do well in school. Nobody knew that I had learning disabilities. I did exceedingly well in reading and everything else

L. Frank:

went to hell. I punched a girl in the sixth grade. I was aiming for her face, but she was quite tall and I caught her in the diaphragm and she sort of wriggled around on the ground and that was a great big scene because when you hit somebody down in the lowlands, nobody notices you. Hit somebody in the Highlands and they had me going to an actual therapist every day, which again, turned out to be the best thing for me because she never made me speak about what happened.

L. Frank:

But she realized I wanted to read her psych books, so I would read her psych books every day and then we'd have 15 minutes of discussion. There, I learned that there were other ways of existing beyond knocking the wind outta somebody's diaphragm. Although she had set a yo mama statement. That always warrants a little wind being displaced, people should know that. My schooling was hit and miss.

L. Frank:

There were instructors, teachers, who realized what I could do, but most of the time I was a Morlock at Malaga Cove junior high, where they put the down syndrome kids, the other whatever that they had. The school was an old Spanish land grant so it had a Spanish Castle parts to it that were spooky. That's where they put us. I would be there for certain parts of the day.

L. Frank:

I was a Morlock -- the HG Wells -- and the Morlocks are under the earth, and they farm the people up top. It's all about radiation. Anyway, I was a Morlock. None of that was good, but I kept staying in school because it was the safest place for me. There, nobody hit me, nobody beat me. Well, when they tried, I could defend myself, but in my home life that, so I always stayed to school, and then got older, ran away

L. Frank:

to all the colleges I could because I love education. I love learning. And then I liked playing ball in school. In college I played softball, volleyball, basketball, badminton, you name it. I found education institutions, I just loved them. I was the first person to go to college in my family. I haven't graduated, have no degrees, but I teach now

L. Frank:

I have taught university level to kindergarten. I just love school, although it's not always been the easiest of places. Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood was what opened the gates for real, when I was accepted there because of Sister Corita Kent. Yeah.

Tom Bliss:

Before we go to college, can you tell me about your journey

L. Frank:

with autism and with learning disabilities? How did the awareness come? Well, always being odd when I was a child of, in the years when I was a child, nobody ever thought about anything, you were either straight, okay, or you were not. I was in the, you are not group and nobody ever explored with that. You're not group is I confused them. I just found out recently that I have something called hyper Alexia, which

L. Frank:

is why I could read at three and a half, fluently quite well. I shoot, I read all the Shakespeare and I don't know who left Shakespeare at our house, that's the weirdest thing, and that big Catholic Bible by the time I was five, I'd read those each a couple of times. Yeah. That's the autism, the misophonia, the food, all of those things that come with autistic can come with autistic people, those are just annoyances,

L. Frank:

another reason to kind of lock me away or think of me as less than I actually was. It wasn't until I was actually in my early twenties, I think when a friend of mine going to school for a PE major, but theirs was more like pre-med gave me a series of tests and said, oh, well, you're this, this and that. Then the more I looked at it, the more I realized that that's actually what's happening to me. Then I felt okay,

L. Frank:

although there are people who say, oh, you shouldn't label yourself as autistic, but they're not autistic, so don't tell me what I should or shouldn't label myself. Because once I found a label, I was able to grow from that, see how I fit that. And if I fit that and I found I had more control, I made a little book and in it, I didn't bother to write how people write in the little book I wrote, how, how it comes out for me sometimes upside down and backwards, sometimes backwards. And the surprise for me

L. Frank:

about this little book was that Native mothers, it was a little Indian book, would send their kids over to me and they would tell them that L. Frank made it look where she is, look, what they can do, you can do that. So they'd send the kids to me, and these kids were being treated like I had been treated, like they're thrown away. I just would end up talking to them and hoping that they can see themselves outside of

L. Frank:

how these people in this situation sees them. That was a really great outcome to be able to talk to kids about them. This is not a bad thing. They were always us in Indian time and we were treated much differently. So consider yourself special in a good way. It makes life harder. But does it, really? Life is hard for everyone.

Tom Bliss:

Can you tell me from the earliest time about your sexual and romantic identity journey in the face of the dominant culture?

L. Frank:

Yeah. People ask me when they find out when I realized what and all I was,

L. Frank:

two spirit, gay, queer, or whatever. And I just always knew. It was, again, part of the difference and I've never, to this day, have questioned or felt bad. I've seen so many people try to fight it, so many people be ashamed of it. There was just one person that was my grandmother that I kind of danced around, but I don't know,

L. Frank:

that was a whole and different story, but I have always known, again, like from the before time that me being two spirit, it means everything and it means nothing. It's about the kind of person that I am. After that, my orientation, my gender, my whatever's, what does that

L. Frank:

really have to do with anything at this point? I mean, because I've never lost sleep over being two spirit. Now I'm not saying women haven't driven me crazy. That's a whole different thing. But my personal thing is, this is who we are. Why is there even a question? And if you are

L. Frank:

transgender and you know you're transgender, then that's who you are. Why is there even a question? These things, this dominating society has been here, such a blip in the history of humanity and people's acceptances or not acceptances are based on one person's feelings on the other side of a planet a million years ago. I don't think that's realistic. I'm not trying to mock Christianity. I'm just saying it is not the only

L. Frank:

spiritual existence in the universe. We are comprised of mostly Stardust. We have the attributes of Stardust and there is no gender in space. There just isn't. We are comprised of everything we see, we're comprised of each other. So why not stand up and be proud?

L. Frank:

The more we hide it, the more people go, "See you're embarrassed of it." It's like, no, I'm not embarrassed. I just don't wanna be hit by you. Stand up, just be who you are. If who you are is not to stand up, okay. I'm not trying to pressure people, but there is no need to -- Let's put it this way. At least, in the two spirit world, in the Native world, we need each and every one of us, we need all our two spirit people.

L. Frank:

There has always been space and duties that two spirit people fulfill and that has been interrupted. I don't feel Native culture is that different than many other cultures on the planet, they have and always had need for their people. They're two spirit, their queer people. We've just been brainwashed into thinking that

L. Frank:

it's really odd to be needed by your community. No, we are very needed. It's like John Lennon, what did he say? Women hold up half the sky. Well, same thing for two spirits, everybody's holding up their peace and ours has been dropped and we have incredible magic. It needs to happen.

L. Frank:

So I don't know, talking about my gender, my sexuality, my awakening, I kissed a girl because an earthquake had just happened. I thought, well, that seems appropriate. We were both straight just because I hadn't ... Sometimes I'm just a phase hadn't considered a damn thing. And yeah, so that was my first kiss and then I screwed up that relationship by being a jerk. But

L. Frank:

somebody has to be, yeah.

Tom Bliss:

Thank you.

L. Frank:

Yeah, sure.

Tom Bliss:

We have a lot of stories to cover, but can you tell me about your brief encounter with the occupation of Alcatraz and what that was for our audience.

L. Frank:

In the late 1960s,

L. Frank:

mid to late there were a group of Natives whom I've come to know now, and actually one of my roommates, he was a small child. Well, he was a child and he was on Alcatraz when he was a child. His parents brought him there. Alcatraz was -- It's hard to put it into words. It's like standing rock became, Alcatraz is a grand awakening,

L. Frank:

a grand unification for Native peoples in the sixties we Native peoples were holding on. There were a few Indians who were talking to us as hippies, and many of them still say, "Thank you, hippies for hanging on, keeping us sort of viable in the people's minds." And then Alcatraz came, it was very solid, very clear. This is Indian land. I don't know what all the other people are talking about, but this is Indian land and we have rights

L. Frank:

in our own homelands. We deserve our human rights, our creator given rights. This group of people, they were on the island. I'm not sure how many months it was, but at one point just as me and my high school mates were about to head up to San Francisco, getting a little boat and head out to the shark infested waters and get on the island.

L. Frank:

Our parents caught us and then the government started putting boats around the island, stopping that, cutting off all sources. A big reason it stopped is a child lost its life out there, a Native child, but Alcatraz was a prison. Before it was that kind of a prison for everybody in the country, it was where the white people would put the Indian men if they didn't pay their taxes or

L. Frank:

send their children to school. Then it became just this. I don't like going to Alcatraz, the closer I get to it, the more I want to get further away from it. It needs to be sung to and sung to and sung to because there are too many hideous, hideous things still in existence on that island. But for a moment when the Indians took it, there was just the 50th anniversary of Alcatraz, it was glorious.

L. Frank:

It's what gave birth to so many Native movements. Many indigenous movements along with standing rock. Standing rock became that sort of thing. Also indescribable that you were compelled to be there and to do this the same with Alcatraz.

Tom Bliss:

We'll jump ahead and we'll come back. Can you tell me about the speech you gave at standing rock?

L. Frank:

Oh, I don't know that I can tell you about the speech I gave at standing rock, because I made sure I didn't give any but I did give one and I'm not sure exactly, but because I actually am not gonna remember what I said here in a few minutes. I think my speech then was just supportive of the moment of what was happening. But at standing rock,

L. Frank:

I really went out of my way not to be L. Frank and just to be a person who was there to see what was needed and to pray. I spent my time doing that. The first time, mostly. The second time, it started snowing. The third time, it was a blizzard. So a whole lot of different times it was different, but I was there for different things. Like when the soldiers apologized for taking the Indians lands and killing them.

L. Frank:

But I tried to avoid being somebody, I just wanted to be somebody.

Tom Bliss:

Yeah. Okay. Let's go back to college. Can you tell me about your first day of classes and how the college experience changed you?

L. Frank:

Well, my first college experience was at Santa Monica city college and I had a boyfriend that tells you how long ago this was. I didn't last much long after that. Had a boyfriend

L. Frank:

and I had just come back from Europe. I was with my high school mates for six weeks with a foreign study league, studying photography for six weeks throughout Europe. When I was gone, he had enrolled me in the junior college and I was pretty surprised. And when I got there, I was very pleasantly surprised because a lot of the high school stuff is gone. It's entirely different, and the world was so open to me.

L. Frank:

First, I could play softball, but it's a whole new library to explore all these really interesting classes. Then when I ended up, I think one of, I then went over, I just went to schools where I wanted to learn this. I went there, I had never taken an art advertising class because I hate advertising. I went to Otis Parsons

L. Frank:

Institute of art design and that was another thing that opened another door to Long Beach state. I got to the head of a hundred person waiting list with this art instructor there. So my college experiences are, I've gone where they have a stat camera, you know, an acid bath so I can put metal plates into acid. And yeah, my college experience has been if this is what I need to know, then this is where

L. Frank:

I'm going and what I'm gonna do. You don't make money living like that. But I just couldn't bend and fit. I have to know things. And now that I'm at this age, all those things are actually quite useful. The things I'm being applauded for now were all those times, and travels to different universities.

Tom Bliss:

And then after college, what happened?

L. Frank:

I got a wild hair and joined the military. After college I got a wild hair and joined the military. And that wild hair was not so wild. I thought, oh, I'll join the Air National Guard, that way I can come back home and I can further help my people of California. I can be of more service. And of course, when I'm standing in line at basic training

L. Frank:

with this huge pack on my back and we're opening up orders, everyone around me is going to Korea. And I was like, it never occurred to me they might send me to Korea and they didn't. But they sent me to, I was quite the hippie in the military and I'm a real peace nick and I was queer. And it was very interesting because after a certain point I was a squad leader. After a certain point, my squad were all the queers. I look back occasionally, think, wow,

L. Frank:

how that happened. That was kind of cool. Yeah, I was AWOL four times in basic training, which only made them love me. They being the military, they thought, oh, you made good decisions. A good decision was the air conditioning broke and it was 115 degrees and I opened a window so I'm yeah. Actually, somebody in my flight realized that I was a bit stressed and they snuck me out. We smoked a dubber down at the Coke machines.

L. Frank:

That was great. That helped me get through the next three weeks. But I also ran, they wanted me to stay in and run some track for the Air Force, but they don't know that the reason I was running so fast is I was thinking I could just run all the way back to California from Texas, it just made me run fast, but I didn't get to California, but I really did go to serve my state. When I came back, I worked at the space and missile division in El Segundo where I was the lowest ranking

L. Frank:

person ever there. So I became an object to like a zoo. People would come and stare at me, look the airman basic, which was an interesting thing about the military, that I, as an airman basic, a pot smoking hippie lesbian, had a super top clearance because my job was to get all that top secret information and lay it all out. I thought that was an interesting

L. Frank:

way for a military to work. But yeah, I joined the military. I got hurt in basic training, but that was because a Sergeant did something really stupid. That ended up me in the hospital, which ended me up in the system, which ended me up yelling at sergeants. But once again they said, "Oh, what a wonderful decision will you stay in?" "No, I'm a hippie." Yeah. I did have one moment

L. Frank:

about homosexuality and the service. You have to go to class every day, you sit at attention and they have class. First class is about not being sexist. At the beginning of the sex and second class, which is about complete tolerance of others, the Sergeant walks in and he says, "Okay, who called Sergeant Rodriguez, a male Chau in his pig." I raised my hand and I said, "Sir, I did not say pig because that would've been rude." We got over that and so, okay, we're gonna see a film and in this film there's gonna be a homosexual

L. Frank:

and the guy like gets spooky posture and he says, he's gonna sound like this, whatever. In the movie, the lights come on, I raised my hand because he asked if there were questions. I said, "Why did you set us up?" And he said, "What are you saying?" I said, "Well, had you not said there was a homosexual and made that would we have noticed?" And he goes I don't know. And then he ignores me for a minute and then he says, "You are not to be with any known homosexuals.

L. Frank:

You have sworn on oath." So I raised my hand, he wasn't happy, but he answered. And I said, "Sir, my brother is homosexual. Am I not allowed to be with him?" And he says, "Well, you can be with him because he's your brother." I said, "Does it say that in the laws?" And he says, "No." I go, "Well, what other laws can I do that aren't in the laws?" So they started sending me up the ladder about this homo question, up the ranks, past Sergeant fury up and up and up. Finally, I'm knocking on a door and it says 'General' and sure enough, this dude, I knock on the door and this

L. Frank:

come in and I open the door and, and he's got those stars up here and he got like a movie, right? I'm a Hollywood Indian. So this is like a movie, he's got a big cigar. I come in and I do my thing and he says, "What's the problem?" And I said, "I've been asking this question about homosexuals and what can we not do, but each door I go through, nobody can answer it. And I keep going after door, after door, after door." And I just feel like when I get to the last door, there's gonna sit Woody Allen. Oh man. I've never been kicked out

L. Frank:

so fast to some place, my whole entire -- "Get out." He started to get up. I pretty much ran, but yeah. So I was a wee bit different for them in the military. I took the somebody came running up to you, there's a surprise inspection and they had an extra sheet. How the hell do you get an extra sheet? I didn't ask. I said, okay and I put it in my bag. Sure enough. They look in my bag now I'm in holy heck trouble, but I didn't care. They weren't my mother, they weren't gonna hit me or anything.

L. Frank:

The military was interesting and I could make it a lot better. It would serve this country. Old people would have houses. The roads would be good. They'd be, yeah. So that's the military, plus I know everyone's secrets around the world.

Tom Bliss:

You mentioned being a Hollywood Indian. Oh, can you tell me what? Yeah.

L. Frank:

Yeah. I tell people I'm a Hollywood

L. Frank:

Indian because Hollywood is in our homelands Tongva and that's that whole LA basin, the Hollywood Hills. In, I think, '24 or 1928, it was either by a phone or by a graph, the very first movie studio, not the one when they were in Long Beach, but when they moved up, all of us, California Indians, or many of us, were in the very first movies, but my great grandfather, he was in and he was in over 200 movies. My great aunts were all in

L. Frank:

movies as extras. They were in movies because the early ones were Cowboys and Indians and all of us Natives were working on the ranches, all around Los Angeles county all around there. It was just huge ranches and so we could ride a horse. We were in the films. My great-grandfather was even in Captain Blood with Errol Flynn. I can't find him, but he's in the last scene of when they're fighting up there, swashbuckling up at the mass. He's one of those dudes up there

L. Frank:

buckling his swash or whatever, but yeah. Many of us, our peoples were in the movies, we were there, they needed us, and so there we were. Then we'd work in the movies, different things. And they were filmed all over our Homeland. So yeah. Hollywood Indian.

Tom Bliss:

In your early twenties, your mother asked you a shocking question,

Tom Bliss:

if you wanted to meet someone. Can you tell me that whole story?

L. Frank:

About meeting my father?

Tom Bliss:

Yeah.

L. Frank:

Yeah. That was actually the day two sets of siblings were getting married. I was, I think, 21 years old, 21 or 22, driving along with my mother, which was a weird thing for me because she scared me. She was only 5ft1, but my God

L. Frank:

I'd seen her put 6ft7 men in the hospital with one blow. She made me a wee bit nervous and we're riding along and she's strangely quiet. Then she says, without looking at me, "Would you like to meet your uncle Bob?" And I said, "What do you mean? I know my uncle Bob." I stopped because I realized she was saying something different. And so I said, "Yes." She says, "Turn right here, turn left, turn right." We end up at this house, which is no more than two miles from where I've lived my whole damn life.

L. Frank:

We go in and there are these brown skin people. It's like, oh, brown skin people. This is where I belong, I'm thinking that. They start talking to me. First this young man starts talking to me and they start showing me photos of this other man, but they don't tell me this man's name, but they continuously talk about him. And then his mom and dad, they give me hugs and a grandmother walks out and looks at me and thinks that I'm her granddaughter, all this stuff is happening, and that was my father. They were trying

L. Frank:

to show me who my father was. This is my father's brother, my father's nieces and nephews. They were trying to tell me I belong to them. But my mother, this confuses me, I understand Spanish, and she knows that, but I heard her then say in Spanish, she doesn't know anything that went on. Oh, I remember every single moment of it. I remember the police coming and taking away my father, him lurking outside,

L. Frank:

wanting me to come out and then all the cop cars coming and wrestling him to the ground. I remember when he made to stab her instead cut off a finger. I remember every single moment of it. The thing I remember the most was how, when a finger flew through the air and went on the ground of that event, it was a wooden floor with, you know, there's uniform slats. I remember my little four and something year old brain thinking, it was an art thought, 'look at how neatly that finger -- it shouldn't be by itself -- but look

L. Frank:

how neatly it fits between the two lines' . Here I am making art while terror is going on. I knew he was my dad, but yeah. So re-meeting him when I was older was quite -- It took a lot of thinking because when I met him and I met that side of the family, I knew immediately that's exactly where I belonged. Exactly who I was and sure enough, they accepted me for every

L. Frank:

single part of me. But meeting my dad was, again, the second time was beautiful and tense.

Tom Bliss:

Did you develop a relationship with your father?

L. Frank:

I did. I did develop a relationship with my father and his mother. I got a grandmother and

L. Frank:

I loved her because, man, it was hot where she was living. The sun came up, it was hot, at six in the morning, her and her sister, my 80 something year old grandmother, and her something year old sister out there having a beer, I'm thinking right off, these people, they just like to party. They were just full of life, all the way to the end. But she kept asking me about men, "Honey," she'd say, "Do you have a boyfriend?" You know

L. Frank:

that thing. And I felt so rude. I'm not used to being rude to elders. I wanted my grandmother to love me for me, but I didn't know her. I just totally dug her and was in love with her. I felt like a teenager and here I was 20, what, four or something. I just felt like a child. And that's how I felt with my dad when I finally called him up. I felt like that little kid in that child's book, are you my mother , but I felt this way again with my grandmother.

L. Frank:

I didn't want to disappoint her. I didn't want her to tell me to leave. But I sat her down and I said, "Well, I feel I've been rude to you by not answering you directly and you deserve that. That's the only respectful thing to do. I am gay." And she looked at me and I thought, oh no, does she know what that means? So I said, "I am a lesbian," and I thought that should do it. And she looked and she put her finger on her chin and she looked one direction.

L. Frank:

Then she put her finger on the other side of her chin and looked another. And then she said, "They say on the TV and the movies and the magazines that that's okay now, so, okay. But we won't tell you grandpa Louie." He wasn't my real grandpa so that was all right . Then that was all there was to it. It's like, thank God for TV movies, magazines saying it's okay now. I got to see that side and my dad, he was just so

L. Frank:

proud of me. He was so proud that I just hadn't, like all the people in his neighborhood, come outta high school with four children, nothing wrong with that either, but he was proud I hadn't. And he's proud I wore a cowboy hat and he was just proud I was an Indian. There was not one turn that he'd make where he wasn't proud of me, and I was not used to that at all. So going and meeting my uncle, Bob turned into finding my exact place. Yeah.

Tom Bliss:

And at some point you became very responsible for your tribe and in the nineties, you co-founded AICLS. Can you tell me about that organization and how you grew into that role?

L. Frank:

Well, sure. I grew into the role through which I found myself

L. Frank:

being useful by listening before I was born, by listening after I was born, by paying attention to all of the correct things, as best as I could. I AICLS, Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, and it's funny when we thought of the name, somebody said, there's a gay magazine called Advocates and everyone went okay, and we still was fine, you know, Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival.

L. Frank:

Everything that I do, I do for my tribe. But I do it in the context, in the place for all tribes in California and even thinking of these things, being boilerplate for other tribes in other places. I've gone to Australia a couple of times and up where Sanity Clause lives up there in Nunavut. It's always for my tribe, but it is actually for everybody. So AICLS or the Advocates,

L. Frank:

we are from seven tribes throughout California. I was on, for about 20 years, the board. We created a couple of programs that I have now gone internationally for indigenous peoples to acclimate their languages. I created this conference called Breath of Life, actually it's called Breath of Life, Silent No More. It's based on my Hawaiian Apache sister and a man from a Ajachmem tribe.

L. Frank:

He told me that every breath has consequence. And she taught me that the 'ha' in Aloha is the breath of life from the ocean. And so this is our breath of life. This is what our languages are. If y'all want the world to spin the right way, then we've gotta get that breath of life, that language back, because we are the tool that makes that happen. We are a big part of this earth healing. This is a big reason why this language is so important. It's not so we can speak behind people's backs. And so we can

L. Frank:

breathe life back into world renewal ceremonies. So AICLS, we put together programs, there's a -- Used to be called a master apprentice program, but we had to deal with that language of that.But it's that thing where you take speakers and you pair them with non-speakers and breath of life is where we go to all these archives and you're assigned a linguist who doesn't tell you what they want, but you tell them what you need, so that we're taking control of our own existence,

L. Frank:

and what we need Breath of Life does that. Because of Breath of Life, I can sing a song in language. This is a song that I made for Los Angeles. It's in that program on Netflix called City of Ghosts, episode four. But I made it actually for the LA River.

L. Frank:

Where we're from needs to hear the language, the land, the air, the animals, the plants, the people, the language has to exist. The seven of us got together and created this program. It's been about 26, 28, something over 20 years, 25 years now

L. Frank:

in existence, but it's spawned other language programs throughout California. That's why now, throughout California Natives, more than ever, because they've never stopped, but are singing and dancing all around people and they don't know it, but we're doing it so that the places where everyone is treated properly. So AICLS is a very important movement. And as I say,

L. Frank:

Natives have never stopped. There've just been two here. Like I think there were three speakers in LA left maybe. There were 24, 1 year up in Northern California and the next year there were 12, because they're of an age, but now we have speakers we've worked hard at it.

Tom Bliss:

Can you tell me about the first time

Tom Bliss:

you heard the Tongva language spoken aloud?

L. Frank:

Oh, you mean not from the people under the ground? Because the first time that I heard Tongva was from the ground, from the people under the ground, they spoke. So the first time I heard Tongva and understood it, we were building the first canoe in 220 years, something like that. This is a steamed wood glued, sewn together, plant canoe.

L. Frank:

And we were in a yard and this man who collected sea animals and then he collected them for rescue, but he used to work with Jacques Cousteau. So in this backyard with sea animals and cages who were trying to heal and we're starting to work on this canoe and one of my tribe mates, her dad, he starts speaking. He was an elder man and he was raised hearing and speaking the language and he started speaking. Up until that point, I had heard it through the ground

L. Frank:

and I had read the words from ethnographers, linguists and all. But when he started speaking, the first thing that happened was I closed my eyes. And when I hear Native languages, I just try to go for the resonance because I don't know what they're saying. And while I'm thinking of the resonance, all of a sudden I realize, I do know what he's saying. I do know what he's saying. He's naming all the people, all the different birds and the animals. I was so excited that I almost yelled it out right in the middle of prayer. Fortunately, I contained myself,

L. Frank:

but that was the first time that I heard somebody voicing it. It was better than expected. It was so incredible. It was so moving and all I did was understand the names of different animals, but it meant everything. It meant all things are possible. With all these learning disabilities, because everybody around me, I can do everything for them

L. Frank:

to help them learn language. I can see all the tricks. That's my gift. I can see what they can do. And I go, let's do it this way, and then they get success and I'm so happy, but I've yet to find that success for me because my learning disabilities. I can hold on to pieces of it in song, but I'm working on it and I'll never stop. Yeah.

Tom Bliss:

During this time, when you're doing

Tom Bliss:

all this work, taking responsibility for your tribe, you're also an artist. You did an artist and residence at Headland center for the arts, you started the acorn soup graphic contribution. Can you tell me about the intersection of your tribal work and your art and these events specifically.

L. Frank:

Which events?

Tom Bliss:

Well, I guess the acorn suit.

L. Frank:

I would talk about how things come together that they're intersections or that they're just unveilings because I have learned -- Always thought of the existing life as a circular, not linear as most Natives go for.

L. Frank:

I've noticed lately that those circles are actually smaller than I thought and overlap more than I thought they did. My art and my culture and my tribe have always coexisted. They've just had different voices. They express things differently. There's no separation or compartmentalization between pretty much anything in my life.

L. Frank:

It's funny to sit here and think I've worked whole lot so hard to have more of a holistic life and I'm sitting here realizing that I do have quite a holistic life. I do think in the ways that I've hoped I would one day. That's kind of nice. Thank you for that. but everything is related far more deeply than people think, so that these simultaneous

L. Frank:

things are happening, we just don't realize it. Like I'm a real, one of the language program I created, we are in libraries and like the five libraries of Congress in DC and Maryland Suitland. And so when my brain is looking at, when somebody has written about us and described about us, and the way before time and all of a sudden then it's and not just to me, but we remember our hands and our genetics

L. Frank:

remember things, and then I make art or somebody writes something, but it's as if I'm just unveiling what has already been there, it's always been a piece of it. It's always been mine to express. I know that's true for many people. Artsy kind of conversation like that's hard sometimes when you're a non-artist, but it's all this seemingly nebulous things and unrelated, but when it comes together, you realize how integral they are

L. Frank:

and always have been that it's not an intersection, but a completion or a satisfaction of events and things. That's pretty artsy. So sorry. But that's, that's how it is, it's like explaining the spark of life. You can't quite do that either. So yeah.

L. Frank:

I made the first stone bowl by someone in my tribe in 200 years, and I didn't know I could make a stone bowl. I never even knew we made stone bowls. I saw it and went, holy, somebody better make one and then I got the stone, I dreamt the bowl and I became artists in residence at the Headlands. I was there ... I'm not sure why I was there, but there were only like three or four of us Natives there, and while we were having lunch, which was rather extravagant, it was a big, soft, white,

L. Frank:

like a gift box and had a ribbon around it, and it had like a pair and it was wrapped in special tissue. It had a sandwich wrapped in special ... I thought, my God, what a lot of trash, just for lunch, whatever, the pain and the butt I am. And well, I was enjoying and appreciating my lunch. I looked around at the Headlands and I said, "How does one get to be here?" A few months later, a check came in the mail and a thing said, okay, your artist and residence for a month. All right. So I showed up with a large stone and actually

L. Frank:

my partner had crashed the car behind me. She was in that car and rammed us and the stone had moved around a little bit and my back was hurt. So for the first three days, I could not move. I would drive the car to this one spot, and I just watched nature from that spot at the Headlands. And what I saw, I realized that everything has a place. Everything has a place, there's an order to that place. And you have movement within that place, but there's still this order.

L. Frank:

And that my grand order of the things was to become an artist, get your butt down there and do the work. I went down and I joined the Haida Indians, who I was kind of sharing space with. I made that first stone bowl, which I still maintain was actually made by my ancestors because it's just too perfect. I could not have done that. The Haida Indians even were curious, they said, how are you doing that? You're carving blind. I didn't know I was carving blind because I didn't know how to carve,

L. Frank:

but here is this 60 pound cooking pot, the first and 200 and something years. Yeah. Making the art is often -- I'm a museum geek, I pay a nickel to go to a shaker museum in someone's basement in New York. I've gone to Europe like four or five times and worked in museums there photographing artifacts taken from our Homeland so others can see

L. Frank:

who they are. It's as if I already know these people and I'm just finding them again. By people I mean what people call artifacts.

Tom Bliss:

You have a story at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.

L. Frank:

I have many stories there. Which one are you --?

Tom Bliss:

Photographing the stone bowl,

Tom Bliss:

I believe it was.

L. Frank:

Well, not the stone, but the stone, yeah. I went to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. I got a grant. It was just enough for an airplane fare. I stayed with a man who had just escaped an insane asylum and a woman who needed to be in an insane asylum, but it was free. I would take the Metro, it was the wrong Metro every day, for like two weeks, the French people thought I must be stupid because I was getting off and on the same Metro, but

L. Frank:

I don't speak French. Finally, I figured it out. So every day I was working at the Musée de l'Homme and I was photographing the Leondis Sack collection that he had come to the states, to California, taken back to France and just gathered from up and down the coast. I went to see these things and to bring back these images. I had some exciting adventures. Even the first day I got to the museum because I got to the first floor, someone let me in. And then as we went up the further floors,

L. Frank:

I started getting more like an entourage of French scientists, all wearing lab coats, till there were like, I don't know, 12 of them who followed me up to the floor where I was going. They pointed down a very long dark hallway and there was one room you could tell it was a room, the light was on., it was shining into the hallway. They pointed. As I went down my first day down the hallway, I'm very nosy, so I saw that light. I went straight down the middle of that hallway, straight to that door. I had to tiptoe up and look in and,

L. Frank:

oh man, the room from top to bottom, wherever you looked was filled with human skulls. It was a mammoth room in this museum, and there were just human skulls everywhere. And I just, whoa, jumped back and I just ran down the hall. Every morning, those same scientists and they'd get their friends, they would line up and I'd get down the hall, when I got to that door, I'd run. And that's the part they waited for and they'd laugh and then they'd leave. So every morning I was escorted and laughed at, as I ran past that

L. Frank:

room full of skulls. And then the French people I was working with didn't understand me and they'd do things like pull up shrunken heads and I'd have to yell at them. Don't you ever do that to a Native again? Or the first day I saw the collections, the French didn't hear it, they showed me the collections and they're talking to me and I'm looking at this huge wall, then everything in those boxes just started crying and it just was so overwhelming I started crying and now the French really don't know what to do with me.

L. Frank:

I keep saying, "Can you not hear this?" And so for many days I just sat with all of those objects and touched everything, there's over 5,000 objects. Good thing I was there for a month and I spent photographing these things that needed to really come home. They needed to come home to LA. They needed to come home to Santa Monica. They needed to come home. These things shouldn't have been gone, but as the museums tell you, they can't give them back otherwise they wouldn't be a museum.

L. Frank:

I worked there. I had many run-ins there because the neo-Nazis would chase me through the streets of Paris. One of 'em slugged me at a party. I was so surprised. I thought it was just a bad TV show. The Hollywood Indian thing. The neo-Nazis, they make it hard to run with all your luggage, all your camera gear. But yeah, it's not just Paris. There were other places the neo-Nazis were at.

L. Frank:

But our things, our goods, our lives are spread across the planet. That doesn't feel good, so that's why I do it. I mean, it's not just me, it's our people. These are things that our grandmother's great grandmothers touched, cared for.

Tom Bliss:

Would you like to take a break at all? I realize I haven't asked for one.

L. Frank:

Oh, no, I have water here. I'll just drink it.

Tom Bliss:

Okay. I'm gonna pour some too. Thank you so much. You're such a good storyteller. A life teller, truthteller. Okay. So before I get into your writing and more of your art,

Tom Bliss:

you wrote in your questionnaire that your pronouns are Po' and Cham.

L. Frank:

Mm-Hmm .

Tom Bliss:

I'd love to hear more about that.

L. Frank:

Richard, he's my best boyfriend, he just cracks me up. Because I'd been thinking about why am I stating my pronouns in English when I worked so hard to learn my language and sure enough, the next zoom meeting, Richard introduces himself as

L. Frank:

Po' and Cham and I just started laughing. Of course, he does. He's a fellow language worker. Lately, I've been telling people when they ask my pronouns, I say they're contextual, and that really confuses people, so I said Po' and Cham because that means contextual because if in my language we say . That means he, she, or it is happy. And I'm a he, she and a they,

L. Frank:

or a sir, or a lesbian or a two spirit or a queer, it's all contextual for me because one, the B of the AB thing is -- In the sixties, we really worked hard against labels, and now we're nothing but labels, which I understand. I understand the change in the need and all, but the 'A' part, in my language worldview,

L. Frank:

it is contextual. I'm using the contextual and however it fits I'll fit in it. It just comes where if all of us indigenous start using our true pronouns, we're gonna get a lot more than you/they/them/their. The 'wes' and the 'I don't knows'. Yeah, we're gonna really muck it up. It'll be great. It's an opportunity

L. Frank:

for everybody to speak some Native. Yeah.

Tom Bliss:

How did you come -- Oh, go ahead.

L. Frank:

It's just kind of a joke, on the whole, not a joke on people and their feelings, but it's just an Indian joke, and our Indian jokes are not that funny.

Tom Bliss:

I mean, humor, what is humor? So Acorn Soup,

Tom Bliss:

how did you get involved? How did you decide to focus on Coyote?

L. Frank:

It's funny, I'd been asked before by a Native rather sternly, she says to me, "Who gave you permission to draw Coyote?" I didn't know I had to ask anyone, who am I gonna ask? My people? well, we're extinct, can't ask them. I don't know, Coyote just popped out. Like those pink flamingos people put in their yards for a long time, they popped out, and I don't know where they came from either,

L. Frank:

but I called them Samuel and Barbetta. When I was reading and reading and reading all the field notes, all the geek field notes, I would read things like -- written better than this -- "If the Indian's going hunting, for two weeks beforehand they only eat deer food," which then led me to all the plant names and different things. It's all scientific, but they ate the deer food, and then they wear the deer skin over their head

L. Frank:

and they drape the skin over their back and they use the bow in one hand and the arrows the other, and pretend that they're walking. I thought, yeah, right, like deer gonna fall for that. Because I'm an LA Indian it's like really, are deer that gullible. I don't know any deer personally, but that seems like a farfetch, just ridiculous thoughts, but they were my thoughts. Then I thought, well, where do you get this deer stuff that you put on your head and you walk like this. So then I did a drawing, it was Deer Decoys or Us,

L. Frank:

it's like, you gotta go shopping for something that fits. And then there's a, I can't draw humans, but there's a human, in my little Acorn Soup thing, and he's trying on the deer thing in front of the mirror. The word that comes out of his mouth is yikes. It's like, is this really it? I can't believe the deer fall for it. And then I have the deer meeting each other at the bus stop, the deer and the deer hunter. Another day, another buck. Everyone's going to work.

L. Frank:

So Acorn Soup -- And it's about the mission response, like, well, they did this and killed us this way and did that, and everybody knows that, so I'm not gonna respond that way. Some of the mission art is Coyote leaving, and I don't know why Coyote, but Coyote leaving and people inside yelling, "Hey, come back. Didn't you like the food?" It's like, yeah, that was it. It was the food, not the beatings, the whipping, the murders and the rapes or Christopher Coyote, the Coyote comic for the missions. No, really,

L. Frank:

please take my wife. And that's all because of the history. Actually, when it was in print, there were 10 different people at 10 different universities using it as a history book, which is really what it is. You'd be hard pressed to find a Native Californian's response to colonization and the death of their peoples and culture. There's just not that much out there. That's why this is an odd little book.

L. Frank:

It's kind of my -- I guess I'm kind of a smart ass. I don't think of these things. As I explain, there are magic glasses. I'm wearing them right now, and a drawing appears sometimes once somebody said to me about my drawings in Acorn Soup, "Oh, I love your double entendres." I said to them, "You oughta see my triples." Because I had no idea what a double entendre was. yeah. I've had to ask my partner quite often, "Why do people like this drawing? What is it about?" And she explains it to me and I go, oh,

L. Frank:

okay, so it's really just a Native response. Like, I have a little painting that Coyote is selling maps to the stars, because in Hollywood they used to, I don't know if you still do, but they were maps to the homes of the stars and you could have tours like, "This is where Bob Hope lives. He doesn't like you looking at him." They'd shout things out and annoy people in their homes. And so Coyote quite often in our stories throughout California helped place the stars in the sky.

L. Frank:

So these cartoons are about my existence as a Hollywood Indian maps to the stars and as an Indian Indian and the maps to the universe. Acorn Soup is pretty much a response. Like there's some cartoons in there about some of the art I make. If you look up in the appendix, it says, I sure hope it's worth the price of the parking structure because yeah. It's just real life. How we Indians get around. Now we see each other

L. Frank:

at board meetings and at art shows. Our lives are very different and Acorn Soup just kind of captures it. One of them is Coyote leaning back, looking at an acorn and just an acorn is an acorn is an acorn. It's giving people vignettes of Indian life and even just other Indians, and actually

L. Frank:

Natives are very silly. That's why it comes out in that nature. Indians are very silly. People don't know that because we have to live up to that stoic thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Bliss:

What went into the creation of First Families?

L. Frank:

From my perspective,

L. Frank:

First Families is this book, it was a job that I dreamt of as a child. I didn't know anything about it, but when it came about, I thought, huh, that's my dream. I was staying at a friend's house in Berkeley and she comes in and says, "The job description's out, you should call Malcolm." He was the editor of News from Native California, associated with the book and the library of the state of California. She says, "You should call him."

L. Frank:

I said, "I will," but I was watching Cleopatra and that's a very long movie so it's only the thousandth time I've seen Elizabeth Taylor do this, but no, I can't. I have to know what happens. She came in and she stood there and she says, "Malcolm, we have somebody for the job." I heard him go "Who?" And I hear her say "L. Frank." And he goes, okay, good. I got the job. I visited every tribe, even the extinct ones

L. Frank:

in California, and I disregarded, don't tell the car rental companies, the borders of California because those are unnatural to our peoples. I looked at their private photographs and some were daguerreotypes, tin types, that they chose photographs of the story they wanted to tell of their family. I would record their stories of those photographs. It's a job that really

L. Frank:

should have taken maybe two years to do, but we did it in six months and that was absolute insanity. My friend, who was helping me set up and all, she came out one of the times and she says, "I cannot understand why I'm exhausted after three hours." I said, "That's not three hours. That was 80 to 100 years, if not more that we spent with these people, the things that they told us.

L. Frank:

It sounds so trite to say it was an honor, but it was an absolute honor to have visited every single one of these people. People sent us to the elders. I had wanted all ages, but they kept sending us to the elders and the elders would tell us one thing always. And that was, make sure you eat a handful of walnuts every day. It's like, okay, thank you. And then they would tell us really deep and old things and, and how they felt about the new things.

L. Frank:

One of the things that really struck me was no matter where we went each and every time, the people, when we got there would tell us, we have been waiting for you. We have been waiting to be heard. What that means, I mean, people don't understand what it means to be extinct, you never show up anywhere. You're always something or someone else and to be seen for who you are and to have hung on to that, through hundreds of

L. Frank:

years of colonization, is a miracle. That's why that book First Families is somewhat of a miracle. People can look at that and see, these are the people who survived and not just survived, but have moved into thrivance.

Tom Bliss:

I particularly love hearing the effect it has on children. Can you tell me some stories about that?

L. Frank:

Oh, about children being able to see themselves

Tom Bliss:

To see the book. Yeah. What it means to children, your interactions.

L. Frank:

Well, when children look at First Families, I think what happens is ... When I was a kid, I had a Catholic household and had that big Catholic Bible, and it was supposed to mean everything to everybody, but you quit writing in it after the third child, and so it actually meant nothing to anyone. This book, when I see it in people's homes --

L. Frank:

When I come to people's homes, the kids come running to me with a book and they show me their grandma or they show me their grandpa or they show me their uncle or they show me them as a baby, and their babies themselves, they're now older. This was when the book first came out, but people still come up and show me, this was me here. It brings not a validity to them, but I'll use that word like a validity, and it allows them to actually

L. Frank:

feel that sense of history and connect across time. It allows them to move forward and see what their responsibilities are. Just a book, that's why I love books and education. The right book, in the right hands. But I've seen this book in the hands of elders because I tried to, there's always some of us who are always in the book, whichever new book comes out there is my face or there's somebody's face. I really

L. Frank:

worked hard to get other people and that didn't go unnoticed with many of them. It led to other projects that they were doing, like the younger people, "Oh, I can do this with a story." "I'm a filmmaker I can do this," or "I'm a writer and I can do this." It gave people another avenue. It was already there, but it just showed them, just opened it wider. Look at this, you can do these things, you can

L. Frank:

tell your own story. You don't have to complain anymore how the world doesn't hear you, the world doesn't see you. Make it happen. First Families. Yeah. I got some good food going out for that book. Some places they'd make that where they're like -- Up Northern California they'd take the salmon steaks and they'd put them on sticks. The stakes are filet

L. Frank:

on these sticks along long beds of coals. Sometimes these long beds of coals are like 30 feet long. And, oh, I once ran a bear off over the -- I don't even like fish, but oh, that is the most delicious, it's a very old way to cook. Oh, it's so good.

Tom Bliss:

Can I ask what it's been like to be two spirit and traveling in these spaces and being in these homes?

L. Frank:

I have never hidden my life as a two-spirit person. My mother raised us all. She has eight kids and four two-spirit, but raised us all androgynous. I mean, we just all did the same things, wore the same things, mostly male. The girls,

L. Frank:

they didn't like that, I did. But we were raised like that. Being two spirit openly and just being who I am is actually quite easy for me, except for that one or two grandmother thing, the run-ins I had, but I take it very seriously that I never thought of it, but I take it very seriously because now

L. Frank:

people have convinced me and I've had enough young people speak to me that they are watching me. That was a little stunning because I never think anyone's looking at me. I think I'm just like this doe face moving along. But it's important that I live the truth of two spirit, whatever that is for me, and that I support others by just being myself. It's important. A friend of mine,

L. Frank:

Richard LaFortune, he lives in Minnesota, but he's a Native from where there's a lot of snow and ice. He told me that because Natives have the highest suicide rate of any racial groups and that the largest clump of that within that group are two spirit youth who feel they have to choose between tradition and being two spirit, which

L. Frank:

tradition is two spirit. Once he told me that, that changed everything and the way that I behaved in that two spirit is something, it's a place of honor, it's a place of respect, it's a place of work. I am surprised like I've been for, I think it's 12 years we've had the Bay Area two-spirit powwow, largest two-spirit powwow in the world and

L. Frank:

I've been co-MC. Again, I find it funny because I'm a California Indian. We don't have powwow, I like powwow, but there I am, and they put me there out of respect, on several different issues, but out of respect. And I take it very seriously. I've seen what it can do, what has happened at that powwow, and I do my best to be, not in a deceitful way, but to be

L. Frank:

as full of pride, not like a big head or something, but be proud of two spirits because there are too many, there are too many lives at stake. The way that I move is now in that I find everyone so valuable and I'm afraid to lose any one of them, just afraid to lose any one of them over nonsense.

L. Frank:

I was worried about being me when I was working down in Australia, because I don't know what their thing is. Do they hit you? Do they throw you out? Do they refuse to talk to you? I didn't wanna push it because I wanted to be able to help, that was my job there, but I was very conscious of it, but I was also, I didn't change a thing about me, but I was conscious.

L. Frank:

I put on a language conference -- not me by myself, with the organization -- and I was walking around. I don't know what got into me that morning, but I woke up and I put on my leather cuffs and a red t-shirt, that's a two-spirit and some other stuff. I mean, it was a little more overt than I usually am, but I just woke up and wanted to do that. When I got there, this family ran up to me, and several did, and they have, at many other conferences,

L. Frank:

but this was the first time that it happened. They ran up to me and they said, L. Frank, we knew that whatever you put on is going to be good for our families -- and they had little kids -- and that whatever you put on, we know we can come and have a good time and it's good for and safe for everybody. I realized that clear as they see that I'm two spirit that I'm this

L. Frank:

Fraidy Cat butch, but they don't care because they see that everything that I do, I try to take care of them, and that's the job of us two spirit, is taking care of we're extra hands for the people. That's our job. I'm really very happy that if I'm not seeing the other stuff, well, thank goodness I'm not, but I'm very happy that

L. Frank:

the people just love us. I just spent a whole weekend with a bunch of Natives up in gold country, and they throw their children at me, "Here, take this small child." "This child loves you." There's none of the modern thinking, the dominant society, there's no religious thinking. There's nothing that indicates

L. Frank:

that there's something wrong with us or me. When something has come against those very same people have always had my back, always. I'm very lucky. We're very lucky.

Tom Bliss:

I love hearing that. I love hearing, when we make

Tom Bliss:

the two spirit statements, queer statements in our clothing, which we often think is gonna be perceived as a threat, that these people, these families, these children see it as safe and trustworthy. I just love that.

L. Frank:

I'm not saying it's safe. I accidentally showed up at the wrong set. Richard said there's filming some stuff, but there's a documentary called

L. Frank:

Two Spirit: the Fred Martinez Story, that did not go well. I'm not saying that all is good, but there's a lot of good. There's a lot of good.

Tom Bliss:

Can I ask for the story behind your tattoos? I hear there's a Maori connection. I'd love to hear the story of each of them.

L. Frank:

Yeah, no Maori, no Maori at all. Some Pacific, but not that.

L. Frank:

My chin tattoos, at first, I got these little tattoos you can sort of, I think this side, you can see a little bit, there are two lines. Because I had seen Wendy Rose had done her dissertation on tattooing in Aboriginal, California, and looking around and I'd seen a woman who had them and took them off. I was very curious because if we are supposed to have these, then why don't we?

L. Frank:

My starter tattoos, the actual tattoo was supposed to come across like this. I didn't quite have the nerve for that yet, so I called it my starter kit, didn't know if that was disrespectful, meant, hoped it wasn't. But I did that and I did these chin tattoos. They were thinner when I first put them on. These are more typical throughout California. Some are wider, some are thicker, some are dots, some angle out, they can tell you what moiety or clan you belong to or your marital status depending on the tribe.

L. Frank:

Because I don't know historically, exactly the meaning, my intent was simply to hold hands across time with the women, because if this is how they look, this is how I look little. Did I know that it would change me and make me even more responsible because I consider myself quite the selfish person, but now it's like, oh, no more responsibility. It's like that dude being bit by a spider, and now I've got to do these things. Yeah. Well, I got tattooed. Now I've got to do these things

L. Frank:

in a different way and carry myself in a different way. It's become, I was just up, as I said, up north where we've been up three times, me with the Hawaiians, and they have tapped -- It was taught in like from Samoa, I think, and then he's a Hawaiian tattoo priest, Keoni, and he's coming, he's tattooed the California Indian women and men in their proper marks. And it's a stick with a little sharp comb, different sizes on.

L. Frank:

He hits that stick and two men are two people's stretch and while you're being beat, so he made my lines wider for me. And then one year he showed up here to head north and he showed up with another Hawaiian tattoo priest who had this. And I saw that and I looked at Keoni and Keoni said, yes, he will give it to me. Good. This is part of my Raven, because I have tattooed beaks up my leg, which the Raven is the mouth of our God,

L. Frank:

the Raven. And that's my amakua, as the Hawaiian say, my spirit guide or family. I had to go to Hawaii where Keoni was living at the time and we drew this on, put it on. You still gotta tap a little more about where the eyelashes come out from under the eye, but it's pretty excruciating right there, so I'm just waiting till maybe the next time to finish up. But this tattoo, this is Californian, this is Hawaiian.

L. Frank:

It comes all the way to here and it's called Makapuu and Keoni says the word literally means blind, but it means that I can see when others can't. And the tattoos change you, I've taken several women and gone with people and I tell them, you will be different and sure enough, they realize, yes, I am different now.

L. Frank:

It's part of the resurgence along with the language. This is how we are supposed to look also. We're not trying to go backwards, we're moving forwards, but we're moving forwards as ourselves as much as we can.

Tom Bliss:

Great. I have another question. Thank you for that.

Tom Bliss:

I heard recently you did the opening prayer for LA Pride.

L. Frank:

Oh.

Tom Bliss:

This was the first. What was the prayer and what was that like? What's it like to do a first, when there hasn't been a first.

L. Frank:

Well, when I had been asked to do the opening prayer, I thought bitchin and then Southern California's so bitchin man. Then I

L. Frank:

realized as I'm listening to them, they're saying, none of you have ever done this. There's been no Tongva opening the prayer. And of course, I knew that, but somehow it still struck me so hard. It's like, well, why the heck not? It's like, what is up with these people? My brain is like rolling around all these things. Good thing I kept my mouth closed, people think you're wise that way. They don't hear the turmoil inside. But these people, these lesbians who asked me,

L. Frank:

I am so grateful to them for realizing that this was an error and for rectifying it, and so I felt just very, very glad that the minute they saw the error, they took care of that. I invited another two-spirit person in my tribe to be with me. That was really a big thing for me also. It was overwhelming. I've opened up

L. Frank:

for pride up here in San Francisco, a lot of years and for the dyke march and once for the trans march, but in my own homeland it was entirely different. My only wish is that for each of these things, because they always let us Indians do the opening prayer, but they let us do the opening prayer, and it's just blessing the grounds, but it's not talking to the people. They don't really see us because they're all marching or they're somewhere or they're dancing, we're still kind of invisible. So my only wish is that it would be in front of people, to actually see us that we exist because

L. Frank:

people think we don't. But that aside, I was grateful. I was glad, it was about damn time. And the prayer, it's a prayer that I use ... We used to speak at least three languages because we had marital exogamy, we'd marry 7 to 11 villages out, so there were many languages spoken in one place, not just this is Tongva, spoken Tongva, you had everything spoken. The prayer that I use, I use

L. Frank:

because it's very, very, very old and it talks about the magic and the magic that's involved, that also is part of Tongva religion. It's .

L. Frank:

It's always funny because a lot of young people, they do prayers and then they translate the prayers, and people often ask me to do a prayer and either before or after, and then they go, "Oh, that was so beautiful, what does it mean?" If it's we're leaving, everyone's going home and go, it means that may all of your cars have a flat tire and

L. Frank:

your dog runs away, and it's like all good stuff, they didn't translate Latin for a long time. People always want to translate. I said good stuff, what do you think? I'm not like talking behind your back to God, take these people and make them lose gravity, fly off the planet. But yeah, the song that I sang is exact in the Tongva language and this was in the

L. Frank:

language, but they're both spoken in the same place.

Tom Bliss:

That's expert I want that to be a new adjective, I think expert it's just, I love hearing you just rattle off all your knowledge. We're almost up on two hours. We usually end with a few questions. And these are just meant to be

Tom Bliss:

kind of short, intuitive answers.

L. Frank:

Alrighty.

Tom Bliss:

If you could tell your 15 year old self, anything, what would it be?

L. Frank:

Don't worry about spending money on those cleats, it was worth it gosh, it sounds so trite, but it doesn't get better,

L. Frank:

it gets right. That's about it. I was on one of these climate things, I didn't even know what they were, here I was in the green room, real fancy thing, vice presidents and all, and so a quick fire thing and the man says to me, "L. Frank, when you came here, did you think it was a bastion of white privilege?" Totally got me off guard. So I had to say yes, but that was my funniest quick thing ever. The funniest question I ever had,

L. Frank:

he just went right on. Okay. Sorry. It just reminded me of that.

Tom Bliss:

And can I follow up with that? If it doesn't get better, just that campaign for the Trevor project, do we get better? The whole It Gets Better campaign is to prevent teen suicide of LGBTQ, of queer two-spirit, so why is it important to hang in there?

L. Frank:

Because it gets right? Because when you actually grow into yourself, you become strong enough. You realize you are strong enough and that you will live the right way and you start living the right way now. You start living the right way immediately because good, bad things that happen to you, you are always in the right, and

L. Frank:

cosmically, that's the important thing, that you have done your best to be who you are. We don't have to be so angry at the world. Like we talked about appearances and things. People quite often call me, "Okay, sir, how can I help you?" And I say to them, "It's ma'am." I don't know why I correct them, because I don't give a damn if they call me, sir. But I guess I'm just making a point to them. I say it's ma'am but it's all right. I'm throwing you all the wrong signals. We just need to start taking responsibility for who we are also

L. Frank:

not just be who you are, but take responsibility for who you are because you don't live alone in the world and that'll save your butt a few more times.

Tom Bliss:

Why is it important to tell your story?

L. Frank:

No matter how small someone may think a story is, how large someone thinks a story is, that story has to be born.

L. Frank:

It already lives, and now it has to be born. And by born, it has to be told in any expression that need be. Things already have happened and now they must be executed. Otherwise people will implode. Yeah. It's life. The Lakota have a saying, even the seed burst to

L. Frank:

grow the grass, that there's always pain or bursting or something. In order to grow, you have to outgrow something else.

Tom Bliss:

Okay. The last question, as you know, OUTWORDS captures and shares LGBTQ+2S oral histories through in-depth interviews. What's the importance of a project like OUTWORDS, and can you please use

Tom Bliss:

OUTWORDS in your answer?

L. Frank:

Yeah. The importance of a project such as OUTWORDS, that makes the less visible more visible, is you don't know which little life you're going to save. We have no idea what word a child hears, an adult hears. We have no idea what kind of a change is going to happen,

L. Frank:

and there is always, always a change. If we're lucky, we get to hear about it. I was in a program. I was wandering through a museum on a break. I was working upstairs. I came down, I'm trying to see the art real quickly and this woman with a handbag keeps following me around. I realize she wants to talk to me. She says, "That's my husband over there." And he was sort of looking at me side eyed. She says, "He hates homosexuals. He hates them with a passion. You came on that program last night and

L. Frank:

he saw you, and he turned to me and he said, 'why do I hate? There is nothing to hate here.'" So you never know what is going to strike whom, be it child, be it adult, you never know. That's why you always do your best. That's why you look for the best in everything. And we fail sometimes, then remember that, just get up. Best isn't a one-time thing.

L. Frank:

Just be easy on yourself.

Tom Bliss:

L., thank you so much. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to talk about?

L. Frank:

Oh no, not that I know of.

Tom Bliss:

That was beautiful. Really meaningful.