The New Face of Arts Leadership in the West - westaf - The Western ...

have a couple of different radical opinions.
One is to totally open the border between
Mexico and the United States, to dismantle it
immediately, and let there be free passage
back and forth. I also think we should do away
with the vote. Those are two things that I
believe are, at this point, holding us back from
changing American society. I don’t know if I
have a total alternative to what the vote would
be yet. But we are in a stagnant situation and
should demand more creative leadership.
So who recognizes who our leaders are? I’ll tell
you that the kids I work with don’t recognize any
of the traditional leaders. They only recognize
the leaders who inspire them to do something
new. I think that’s fine because if a leader
can’t inspire me, then he ain’t my leader. I am
rarely inspired by anyone older than me now.
About the media, I think they do a great job of
telling us who our leaders should be, how we
should talk, how we should dress, who we should
love. And most of us eat it up. “Mmm. Tell me
who I should love. What music should I buy?
What food should I eat?” We are all pretty much
dogs, basically, and that’s what I feel about our
society. I feel that the majority of Americans
are stupid, and I am one of them. I am stupid,
too, because I buy clothes from Calvin Klein
and all these things. And these are the people
who are our leaders. Calvin Klein, Donald
Trump, Gotti, Paris Hilton—these folks who make
money—these are our leaders, and these are
the ones we recognize as leaders because they
are the ones we see being successful, having
nice cars. Leadership in our society is money.
So is justice, for that matter. Justice in our society
is measured by money. When you want to get
redressed for getting beat up by the cops, what
are you going to do? You are going to sue for
cash. You look for money. When somebody
broke your car up or something, what are you
going to do? You are going to sue for money.
So money is justice just like leadership is money.
It’s really a crazy society that we live in, so
that’s what I have to say about leadership.
Annette Evans Smith: My audience is my family
and my close community. It is not the media,
it is not the state of Alaska, it is not the United
States because my message and my story and
my whatever are very personal and are also
for my family. If there were media in this room,
I would be less reluctant to share what I have
to share. And when I think about leadership,
I don’t consider myself a leader right now.
Although I am a leader of an organization, I
don’t consider myself a leader. I am only a
leader when my grandparents ask me to speak
for them, but then I am only leading because
my grandfather asked me to. So if he has an
issue with Fish and Game because they are limiting
the amount of fish he can catch because
he is trying to put up his fish and he calls me
and he says, “Annette, I need you to speak for
me,” then I will exert a leadership position. But
I look at leadership, I think, very differently from
how many in this room do. My message isn’t
for the media, and my message isn’t because
I am a leader or expect to be a leader.
Brenda Allen: This gets us back to the point of
defining terms and connotations and thinking
about contexts and what we mean by the term
leader because I hear you saying that you are
leading, in essence, a movement to keep your
language alive. You, of course, get to decide
how you frame that, but my sense of what you
are doing and your intentions is that I see you
are very much a leader in that perspective. Of
course, as a leader, you always get to decide
who is your audience and who are your followers,
and we are limited again by those terms.
We need to go back to essence and what it
is we are really talking about. That’s what I
hear you saying, and that is who I see you as.
Annette Evans Smith: For me, my grandparents
are my leaders, and my great-grandmother
is my leader, and it is very personal like that.
It is not Bill Clinton or any of those people.
Sunya Ganbold: Audience has a different
context for me. My context for this presentation
was from an ethnicity standpoint where
I stand as a minority person in a dominant
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