interview angle ideas

I don't watch tv at home but do with the lady I work with and we often watch the HGTV show, NCIS or CSI:Miami and sometimes Law & Order:SVU together since those are the shows she likes. On that home channel though, I have been getting ideas for angles to talk about.

When they go and redecorate an older room and bring it to a more modern one, I was thinking this is something I should explore more with regards to ideas and such. I was picturing myself as a room in an 80's style and how to keep that feel but bring it more modern. I think it can happen easily where your thoughts on things can also get stuck too. Where you first developed a strong idea and viewpoint about things and added bits and pieces over the years but realize 'the feel' is a stuck in the 80's one.

So, I think to begin to empower others truly I should take a look at where I am starting from. Where I keep the best pieces of the look I like but allow it to undergo a change to bring it up to modern times. I can see it in myself sometimes when I am writing a journal and take out stuff to try to keep it within the idea of empowering others and solutions based ideas.

One thing was native pride and was telling the girls of growing up here in Anchorage area and how the white kids treated us native kids. Whenever I saw them ganging up on a kid I ran over to stand by the kid since bullies are basically cowards and will back down when strength is shown. One day I knew something was up because of the way those same group of white kids were acting. They kept looking at me, snickering at each other and at the clock to see how close recess was. The noon duty is a parent and usually someones mom who comes to keep watch over the kids while they play. That day instead of 2 woman one was a white guy and noticed him looking at me.

Not being stupid, I climbed the little monkey bars and stayed up there knowing they would not want attention brought to whatever they were up to. They kept trying to get me to climb down but I wouldn't until one boy climbed up and said if I didn't they would do it to one quiet little native girl instead. I climbed down and went with them close to where the adult guy was standing and heard him telling her (the lady noon duty) she might want to go and watch the kids playing in the baseball field area. Instead of running inside to get the teachers she walked way across the playground. The group of white boys surrounded me and tried to get me to say natives were dirty and I wouldn't. No matter how much they yelled I wouldn't. The one \"leader\" of those boys said he would force me down and make me eat dirt if I didn't say it and still I wouldn't. There were adults around to stop this insanity I thought, even if they were white, wrong is wrong I thought so didn't feel fear.

He tripped me and put his knee on my back and grabbed my hair and said to say it or else I would be eating dirt. I looked over to the adult guy and saw he had been waiting for me to see him, to look into his eyes and know he wanted this to happen. He smirked and turned his back on me and the kid forced some dirt into my mouth. I spit it out and said I would never say it. They left and the one lady came back from the field and looked so torn by it. I know my eyes can be cruel at times so she probably saw very clearly what I was thinking of her right then before I could hide it away. I pretended it never happened and those kids were less violent against the rest of us and many years later one of those boys wanted to date me in high school if you can believe that!

What they didn't know was I had already experienced much worse in my life already so this was really just 'kids stuff' for me and not that big a deal compared to other things that had happened. But the feelings it left me with were that basically I did not like white people much. I felt they were basically a race of cowards too afraid of anything bad happening to them that they were relieved there were \"minorities' it could happen to instead. I always felt it was very false when the Christian ladies offered some consolation in that their God still loved us. While 'the good ones' did not do the bad things they still were there enjoying the good things our home had to offer. That whole sort of 'How the West was won\" feel, of where they said in the old western movies how they did not believe those things themselves about 'the savages' and how they saw them as real people. So, what you are saying is that since you did not have to do the killing or demeaning and destroying of a culture yourself, is not not wrong of you to be living on their lands and letting them be murdered or disgraced? You are fooling yourself, big time, if you truly think that standing by watching it happen is ok so you can enjoy the benefits guilt-free and feel good about how 'open minded' you are.

So you can see where the ideas formed back when I was young and became a bit more open as I grew older but always that underlying feeling was there. It is where I get that feel of the 'malignant hero' I mentioned in some other post. Where if you did not come and try to destroy us first we would not need saving. But to truly change things we need a new and better approach and I do believe that.

In raising my girls I took time to think about it and make choices and they are mostly 'color-blind' where they do not see the person's race before seeing an American. Where they grew up with the idea of Native Pride that my generation fought for. So to them it is 'in the past' and I love that. But my own ideas are sometimes still stuck in the 80's I feel. In wanting to change things and empower others we do need to understand that a lot of the changes we wanted have happened to a degree already. So we need to take a fresh look at how things stand now and renovate our thoughts to bring them up to a more modern feel.

But how to go about this is how I want to do my interview angles. I have emailed many native woman I would love to interview and will give them a call too to try to set up interviews with them. I wanted to figure out my starting ideas and sort of ask the questions in regards to modernizing \"us\" as a culture. But in trying to think of interview questions I sometimes feel I am \"so 80's\".

So, I had the idea of doing a sort of \"To The Future\" series of interviews with strong native woman and get their takes on this idea. How for us older ones we need to somehow dim the hurts and pain of the past so our children can truly have the freedom to find their voices and their views without us narrowing it to the areas we felt needed such work. But I was wondering how to do this, exactly, since it would take many leading questions and that can be a form of bias, too. I believe to truly change things we need to be aware of ourselves and our motives too. So it has been a fun challenge in many ways where I take my thoughts and feelings and wonder 'Ok, are you true to what is going on today or are you just a 'dated' idea I need to freshen up.

I was thinking of writing this up in a shorter thing where it would be like the leading paragraph and how I want to show our progress in new ways. So, help me frame these questions where it does not become one where I expect to get a certain kind of answer from them...

Native Pride Movement

• I love seeing the signs everywhere that pride at being a native is felt and embraced. What makes you feel most proud about the changes happening in our community?




• What event in your own life made you feel proud at being a native?

Rural Issues

• It can sometimes be hard to get real solutions to the problems facing natives, especially those in rural areas. When our governor throws money at us instead of finding real solutions, like the recent extra dividend money for heating costs, what should we do to explain this fixes nothing?




• Many sportsman come here to hunt and kill and they say we need them because of the tourist industry. How can we combat this illogical argument to explain real subsistence issues?




• How can we truly keep our culture alive and thriving when we are constantly forced to deal with energy issues and no real solutions offered?

These are a sample of the serious interview questions I have for them. Do they sound stuck in the 80's very much or have I gotten to be more modern and fitting with the times? I love that one of my best friends on here is a British woman (Tina) and how we can truly show the old hurts are diminishing and we can overcome all the huge obstacles the world is dealing with now by embracing each other in a real way.

Maria