All About Change - Lani Anpo: The Erasure of Native American & Jewish Identity, and the Indijewnous Response
Episode Date: July 21, 2025Today, IndiJewnous activist Lani Anpo joins Jay on the show. Lani is an influential advocate for global Indigenous and Jewish communities. A multi tribal Native American Jew, Lani passionately champio...ns the rights and stories of marginalized groups with a focus on protecting Indigenous sovereignty, promoting self-determination, and preserving history and culture. Jay and Lani unpack the centuries-old playbook of “othering” and expose how its tactics are being revived and weaponized today. They confront how the history of Native American erasure is used to invalidate Jewish connection to ancestral land, and why this dangerous pattern poses a direct threat to Indigenous rights globally. Today's episode was produced by Tani Levitt and Mijon Zulu. To check out more episodes or to learn more about the show, you can visit our website Allaboutchangepodcast.com. If you like our show, spread the word, tell a friend or family member, or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We really appreciate it. All About Change is produced by the Ruderman Family Foundation. Episode Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:55 Lani’s Jewish and Native identities 3:36 Hollow land acknowledgements 5:31 Colorism 12:25 Acceptance in the each community 14:56 Indigenous erasure 21:45 Allyship 23:33 Hope for the future and goodbye For video episodes, watch on www.youtube.com/@therudermanfamilyfoundation Stay in touch: X: @JayRuderman | @RudermanFdn LinkedIn: Jay Ruderman | Ruderman Family Foundation Instagram: All About Change Podcast | Ruderman Family Foundation To learn more about the podcast, visit https://allaboutchangepodcast.com/ Looking for more insights into the world of activism? Be sure to check out Jay’s brand new book, Find Your Fight, in which Jay teaches the next generation of activists and advocates how to step up and bring about lasting change. You can find Find Your Fight wherever you buy your books, and you can learn more about it at www.jayruderman.com.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to All About Change.
Now is a great time to check out my new book about activism, Find Your Fight.
You can find Find Your Fight wherever you buy books.
And you can learn more about it at JRuderman.com.
Today my guest is Lani Ampo.
Lani is a multi-tribal Native American, a diaspora Jew whose family found refuge in
America after fleeing the Russian pogroms in 1905,
Lani's family history includes colonial violence and indigenous resilience of two ancient peoples
from opposite sides of the earth coming together in America. Her advocacy work combines grace and
strength, engaging audiences with a balanced tone, compelling narrative, and critical calls to action.
Lani inspires healing and recognition for Indigenous and marginalized communities
and is dedicated to the relentless pursuit of creating a better world for future generations.
Lani Ampoth, thank you so much for being my guest on All About Change.
Thank you so much for inviting me, for having me.
So I'm looking forward to this
discussion. I think it's a really important one to have at this time, which is an extremely
tense time in our country and around the world. You refer to yourself as indigenous and you
connect two different identities that you have. And your work shows many connections between being
Jewish and Native American. But can you talk in your own words about these
connections and and how you put them together?
Yes. So, indigenous is a word that I embraced out of necessity, a necessary act
of resistance and reclamation and empowerment, not just
for myself, but for the Indigenous lineages that I carry and represent.
On a personal side, as a mixed person, not only racially mixed, but ethnically and indigenously
mixed, I endure constant invalidation of my identity, my experience and my belonging.
And because of this, I've struggled immensely with how I see myself with feeling confident
and secure in my identity.
Embracing the term indigenous was an act of embracing my full self.
I'm not part native and part Jewish, I'm 100% both.
And in terms of my advocacy work,
where this comes into play, it's about reclaiming truth
and reclaiming the Jewish people's rightful place
among indigenous nations
and within indigenous advocacy spaces.
It's about pushing back on the hypocrisy
that I see in advocacy spaces, spaces that want to monopolize or support indigeneity for some,
while disenfranchising others who don't meet Eurocentric narratives or stereotypes.
You can't celebrate land back for Native nations here in the US and turn
around and call Jews colonizers and illegal settlers in our Indigenous homeland. You can't
claim to advocate for Indigenous rights while actively denying Jewish indigeneity just because
we don't fit the colonized stereotype that you're comfortable with.
So indigenous is the name for the space that I occupy
and an unapologetic reclamation of belonging
for all of the indigenous nations that I represent.
I wanna talk about sort of what I see as hypocrisy.
And I think most Americans will say
America is a colonized nation, that white people came
to America, there were Native American people living here, we forced them off their land,
we forced them onto reservations.
But I have an interesting story.
My daughter goes to Columbia and we were on one of these pre-visits where we were touring
the campus and a student was leading the tour.
During the tour he said, we are on the land of a Native American people and I want to
pay respect to that.
Every year we meet with the people and we come together and we have a dialogue.
And I'm thinking to myself, if you're on their land, why don't you give it back to them?
And I see this all the time.
I go to films and people say, we're on the land of such and such nation.
How does that make you feel?
Frustrated.
It's performative.
It's a way to bypass any actual responsibility or change.
While I think that there is some positive aspect to land acknowledgments, because for
so long, that was some of the erasure that we faced, just simply not acknowledging that we existed
or that various nations had specific sovereignty
and territories across the US.
But in reality, it's a way to make people feel good
without actually honoring our sovereignty
and self-determination on that land.
I interviewed a guy a long time ago on the podcast, Ben Friedman, who's from Scotland,
who's an activist.
His position is, which is, I think, my position, Jews are not white.
I'll tell you another story.
When my daughter was applying to school, she had to check off what she was.
Was she black?
Was she white?
Was she Hispanic?
There was nothing there for Jewish.
Now my ancestry, my grandparents, great grandparents came from Eastern Europe, what is now either Belarus
or Russia or Poland, and were never part of those societies.
Were always the other in those societies.
But my wife, her family comes from India and Iraq and Iran.
And if you look at my wife, she does not look white at all. So I said to my daughter, check other.
There's nothing else for you on this application.
You you are not white.
We had this whole discussion about this.
But can you talk a little bit about this narrative that's out there
that's so prevalent in so many people who I saw as my allies saying,
you have no right to be in your ancestral homeland.
Because of the color of your skin.
Right.
You know, colorism is something that I've experienced.
I have a sister who has,
she's far more like lighter in complexion than I am.
She has blonde hair, blue-green eyes. But like
our bone structure is almost identical. And she deals with a level of colorism and invalidation
of her indigeneity that I've never had to deal with, even though I deal with it all
the time. And what we're seeing right now is kind of this revival of colonial tools
of indigenous erasure and weaponization of the conditioning that we've had under colonial
societies. You know, race, while there's many layers to the history of racism. It was also implemented to erase Indigenous identities
and Indigenous peoples, along with blood quantum policies. These were used to eliminate Indigenous
societies on a genetic level. And eugenics were used to breed us to be more white or exclude us through being black.
What I see, especially across social media spaces, are people using this to dictate people's
identity, especially Indigenous people's identity.
And so this isn't something that is new or revolutionary. It just died down for a little
bit and then it's risen back up within our society. And what I see is it's strongly connected to the
agenda against Jews and against Israel. And it's extremely frustrating to witness because
the rhetoric that's being used against Jews is going to blow back on Indigenous people
globally. It's not just a Jewish problem, it's an Indigenous problem.
So what do you mean by that? How are Indigenous cultures approaching this issue and why will it blow back on them?
Let's talk about what indigeneity or what Indigenous means according to UNDRIP. This
is the most widely accepted criteria or standard for determining indigenous peoples and indigenous rights. So indigenous people are people who have maintained or revived their pre-colonial or pre-imperial
identity, land-based identity, culture, language, peoplehood, self-identification, and systems
of self-governance that are distinct from the colonial or imperial society.
Skin color and blood quantum or DNA or the amount of ancestry that you have are not considered
legitimate factors for determining indigeneity.
And yet, those specific things, skin color and the amount of DNA a Jewish person has or whether
they have spent too long in diaspora are all ways to limit our indigenous status and our
indigenous rights.
So when I see indigenous people en masse supporting the agenda against Jews in Israel, it's concerning
to me because these are all weapons that can be used against our societies,
everywhere else around the globe.
But how did we become more white than white people?
It's because of success.
Indigenous people are not allowed to be successful.
And we're definitely not allowed to have a sovereign nation
that operates at an international level.
That's what colonizers do.
That's what we've been conditioned to believe.
We've been conditioned to believe that we must maintain a position
of oppression. And because Jews, according to some people's perspectives, are successful
and some of our international alliances are historically colonial, well, we must be an extension of colonialism. But that's not accurate. Any
nation that has international recognition is going to have to engage in international
political allyship. And we're one of the only indigenous nations in existence. Who else
are we supposed to ally with? You know what I mean? Like, it's, we're being put in an impossible position, but it's also something that I think
indigenous nations everywhere should be aware of and paying attention to.
And instead of jumping on the bandwagon to attack Israel, we need to look at what does
this mean for our sovereignty? What does this mean for our sovereignty?
What does this mean for our future?
Are we being put in a box?
Are we being manipulated?
Are our rights being diminished?
And the answer is yes.
And I know that you've had a complex personal history, but in your Native American community, when you tell people,
I'm Jewish, how do they react to that?
It's very complicated. So, I am reconnecting to my Jewishness. I always grew up knowing
that I was Jewish on my dad's side and Native American on my mom's side. We grew up very connected to my mom's side
of the family and very, what I believed at the time, culturally connected to my Native
side. On my dad's side, we didn't really have any engagement with his family or Jewish culture.
He simply always said that we were Jewish and that was that.
Growing up, I would constantly get asked, what are you?
And I would reply, I'm Native American and Jewish.
And I would, depending on who was asking, I would get met with,
so you're a mutt, you're mixed, you're a half breed,
you don't look Native, you don't look Jewish.
Or they would laugh and say, Jewish is just a religion.
That's not your ethnicity.
And because I didn't have a strong connection
to that part of me, I eventually became embarrassed and ashamed.
I thought I sounded stupid for saying I was
Jewish when I wasn't religious. That's something that has continued to this day, only now in
the current climate. I often feel very nervous about acknowledging my Jewishness. Even though I refuse to hide it, I have been met with extreme backlash
from Native communities. And many, if not most of the extremely hateful messages and death threats
that I've received have come from other Native American individuals. And so engaging in my community right now is scary. It's extremely
disappointing to be on the receiving end of it, but it's disappointing because I know
that there are so many other Native American Jews, especially youth, that are experiencing
this. And as someone who's an adult and has experienced this my whole life, it still impacted me deeply. And to know that there are younger generations of Native American
Jews being faced with this, it's heartbreaking for me. So we talked a little bit about the Native
American community and some of the discrimination that you face because you're Jewish. Talk about
the Jewish community. What have. Talk about the Jewish community.
What have you faced in the Jewish community when you say, I'm Native American?
For the most part, I am met with excitement and curiosity.
And in the same breath, there's often an undercurrent of anti-Indigenous or anti-native rhetoric or belief that people aren't fully aware of.
A lot of times I'm met with infatuation, I guess is the correct term to use,
and people want to tell me about all the native artifacts that they own.
A lot of times people kind of have this expectation that I know everything there is to know about
every native tribe, not realizing the pressure that I feel as someone who is also somewhat
reconnecting to my native side.
Or people claim to support indigenous rights, but it's one of those things
where as long as it doesn't actually impact them and the comforts that they've become accustomed
to. Like one issue I can point to right now is what's happening at the border and the rhetoric
and the rhetoric of illegal immigrants. Jewish content creators are pushing this basically
criminalization of immigrants.
But the immigrants that are disproportionately targeted
with this propaganda are people who are visibly or ancestrally
indigenous to this continent.
But one of the things I find most frustrating
is that as you know, as
Jewish people, we can recognize that it's problematic to be called illegal settlers
in our indigenous homeland. Yet we can't recognize that we contribute to the criminalization
of indigenous presence on US soil by calling people who are visibly indigenous, ancestrally indigenous, illegal aliens and
illegal immigrants.
Many indigenous peoples of this continent have been migrating across these areas and
have family and kinship systems across these regions that pre-date current colonial borders.
And I think we need to unpack some of the anti-native biases that we might subconsciously
hold due to the conditioning of U.S. society.
So I think there's this whole
erasure, and I wanted to get into this theme of erasure that your activism has touched upon.
What forms of erasure do indigenous people face today?
Also, not just in Israel, but here in the United States,
and what are people doing to protect themselves?
Indigenous erasure is the systemic attempt
to eliminate indigenous people's existence, identity,
and connection to their ancestral lands and cultures.
And this operates on many different levels.
There's physical erasure, which is actual elimination
through violence, forced removal, genocide,
or sexual violence.
Sexual violence, like what we witnessed on October 7th, militarized sexual violence is
a tool that is exclusively used in times of conquest, colonization, and genocide.
Or the criminalization of indigenous presence
such as illegal settlers and illegal immigrants. Cultural erasure which is
destroying languages, spiritual practices, making policies that criminalize
indigenous peoples practicing their cultures, boarding schools, things of that
nature. There's legal and political erasure, denying sovereignty,
historical erasure, rewriting or omitting indigenous presence from historical narratives.
This is something that's ongoing. It's not one event. It's something that indigenous people
are facing still to this day and have experienced from the onset of colonization. This is something that Jewish people experienced
since the Romans and the renaming
of their traditional territories.
There's a film that I'm an executive producer on
called Bad River, which is about the Bad River
Band, the Chippewa people in northern Wisconsin,
and their fight to remove a oil pipeline coming out of Canada. But part
of the movie talks about these cars would come through their territory and would just grab kids
and take them off and put them into schools and try to Americanize them.
Throughout the movie, people talk about they remember that happening and they remember
the terror or encouraging Native Americans to move off of their land to Chicago or different
cities to get a job, but then all the problems they had not being able to get a job or fit
in and the pain that they felt being removed from their land.
And I don't think Americans are aware of that.
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what we've done as Americans to Native American people.
Yes, there's a significant either denial or ignorance of the history of America. One of the tactics
that are currently being used, that's currently being used against Jews in Israel is the long
diaspora period of the Jewish people. If that is something that can invalidate indigeneity,
you know, what does that mean for Native Americans in the U.S.? Because as you said, many of us
don't actually live on our ancestral territory. We are in diaspora despite living within USA borders.
And if our diaspora status invalidates our indigeneity
and delegitimizes us as indigenous people and our rights,
where does that leave us?
And I want to talk to you a little bit about
navigating this period and what allyship means.
Cause I know as a Jew, I struggle with it.
I struggle with, you know, people that I've worked with for decades as allies.
Who have not been there for me during one of the most traumatic times for my people
since the Holocaust and worse, you know,
working against my people.
So what do you see allyship being these days?
And how has it impacted you?
It's been a struggle to process. Yes, recent events have completely changed my understanding of the world and of my own
indigeneity and connections with my own indigenous communities and allyship means taking the time to reflect and address your internal biases before blindly
taking action.
That's something that I myself had to do a lot of when I started reconnecting to my Jewishness.
I had a lot of internalized biases that I didn't know I carried.
As long as we refuse to step outside of ourselves, as long as we refuse to listen to one another
and take the time to get the facts. I don't know if real allyship can exist in that world.
Lonnie, I want to end with, I interviewed Joe Bates from the Bad River Band about,
you know, we talked about his tribes, you know, fight to protect their ancestral land
and their water rights.
He said that they're protecting the water for the seventh generation and looking forward
to the future, to where their descendants will be healthy and safe.
What are your hopes for both Jewish and American indigenous peoples' seventh generations from now?
I hope that they inherit more than trauma.
I hope that they inherit the land
that we've held onto and fought for
and the languages that we've revived,
the stories that we've protected.
I want them to know that they come from a people
who never surrendered to erasure.
I want them to experience true joy and the ability to express their indigeneity fully,
not the constant demand for resiliency.
And I want our passports to represent our Indigenous nations.
Lonnie, I want to thank you so much for being my guest on All About Change.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
And thank you so much for your support.
I deeply appreciate it.
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