Matt Peiken: Have you always been connected to your indigenous identity? 

Jared Wheatley: The answer is no. I mean I was raised in a household Like having a strange card, right?

And this card was from the Bureau of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And you get this card and it says certified degree of Indian blood. And so I was raised knowing we're Cherokee and knowing we have this certified Indian blood, but also being urban in Kansas City and growing up in a low income household, that wasn't at the fore of our mind. At the fore of our mind, the first thought every day was, are we going to be able to pay our bills? Where's rent coming from? Where's utilities coming from? I guess we can roll back the clock a little bit. My mom was 19 when she got pregnant with her first child.

And that was. A pretty tough situation. I don't want to share too much of my mom's story and some of her plight, but that first child was a stillbirth and then, roll on really shortly after she's 20 when she has my older sister and then 22 when she has me.

And my old man's a carpenter, so he's just a working class guy trying to get by. 

Matt Peiken: So you had this card that said you were an indigenous member, but it had no meaning for you. Did you grow up among other Cherokee or other Native Americans, or were you more integrated and assimilated into a dominant white culture from early in life?

Jared Wheatley: Yeah, and this just speaks to the complexities of indigeneity. My mother carried our native blood, and so she had those cards of certified Indian blood. But we also had this story of my grandfather, who was raised in the boarding schools in Oklahoma and had a very rough childhood coming through the boarding schools.

He also served, he served in the army. When he completed his enlistment, he moved to Kansas City because he had family there. That's when he met my grandmother, right? But my grandfather had a boarding school problem. What that is, is tough to tell, but that problem included a lot of trauma that he carried and digested in an unhealthy way.

We're talking about somebody who was born in 1934. 1934, it's not even legal for Indians to leave the reservation. So that period of transition in, Indian communities across the country was huge because you also have the urban Indian movement, which is where mass migration perpetuated also with federal funding brought natives off of reservation land into urban communities without necessarily giving them many of the transitional skill sets that may be required moving into a white world. So as my grandfather is processing some of his trauma. He picks up some habits which aren't so great. And that includes alcoholism. And that's where you can start to see as a family, maybe that white side of the family, on my grandma's side, is starting to maybe have some of those feelings that is a native issue. Alcoholism is ingrained with our indigeneity. 

Matt Peiken: You've alluded to a lot of trauma that you had just coming into the world. You were not connected per se to your indigenous culture and roots. You just knew that life was a struggle. Is that a correct way of characterizing it? 

Jared Wheatley: Yeah that's really right. When your basic needs are really difficult to be met, it's very difficult to find your way up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? And self actualization and understanding, getting to the point of me connecting back to our culture and taking the time to also inform our family about our stories and how we got where we are. That's really my privilege, something that I've earned through working through capitalistic society and finding opportunities to explore my family's history, my own feelings, working back through those traumas, that's privilege that many indigenous people never get the opportunity to even pursue.

Matt Peiken: Yeah. When did that even become a conscious choice and decision on your part to hold up that lens? 

Jared Wheatley: So I guess it would have been around 2009 10 is when I started becoming really aware that my great uncle Calvin, this is my grandpa's brother, had taken the time to actually write a book of our family tree and how, basically, our journey on the Trail of Tears. And even before that, to be really honest our last name, my mother's maiden's name is Whitmire. And if you look, there's a town called Whitmire, South Carolina. And if you pay attention around upstate South Carolina, Western North Carolina, even a stadium out at Western Carolina University is called EJ Whitmire Stadium. So we had deep history linking us from Germany to Whitmire, South Carolina, and then we have this connection to the Cherokee through Amy Corn Tassel.

That's when our European ancestors started our family, our Cherokee family and that family traveled the Trail of Tears. That's when we got relocated approximately around 1836, that half white and half Indigenous family makes that journey out to Oklahoma. And that's, that's a lot to digest.

Even understanding that, many people in our community have never gotten back to the point of really understanding who, where, when, why, how they got their Native blood. 

Matt Peiken: And you told me you grew up Cherokee, but there are different strands of Cherokee and a lot of people don't understand that. When did you start really getting granular and knowing more specifically who you were as a Cherokee.

Jared Wheatley: That's a daily journey. It's a situation where it takes a tremendous amount of self reflection. It takes training on a daily basis to say, Okay, we are the Cherokee people. We're one blood. But we have these three nations. That have been really cast on us by colonialism and imperialism. And that's where you get the Eastern band of Cherokee Indians.

These are folks who remained in Western North Carolina around Cherokee on our motherland. They remained through hiding in the hills, through direct combat, through being allowed to stay for being elderly.

There's many reasons why somebody may have remained here on our land. Then you have the Cherokee Nation. You can broadly think about them as the folks who followed the Trail of Tears and there's the United Kiduwa Band of Cherokee and I'm probably the least aware or educated on the UKB but it's my understanding that a lot of them left even prior to the Trail of Tears.

Matt Peiken: When did you start taking, putting aside your lineage, when did art enter your picture? When did you start participating, making in the visual world?

Jared Wheatley: It's, It's funny, I was having this conversation literally yesterday. My grandfather who I reference as living through the boarding schools, I was raised around his art. He would draw really tortured images of his relationship with Jesus and his Christian identity and his alcoholism. We're talking about self portraits of being chained to the floor with broken bottles and maybe not being the person that he had hoped to be.

And I was raised in that environment, aware of his artistic skill and of this complexity. And my mom is an incredible creator. She can actually draw realistic art. I can't do that. So we would sit down and I would have this mom who just go okay, this is a photo of you and draw a picture of me or my sisters.

And she encouraged me throughout my upbringing. Okay, go after that make a t shirt make a belt, maybe Get a computer and work on graphic design and that was really my introduction to it. But I was a vandal. In my teenage years I was into punk rock and being straight edge and being in the hardcore scene and we would explore what is private property?

That's a really interesting question. Why is it allowed for a billboard to exist and for a corporate entity to put on me that they can buy a double cheeseburger for 99 cents? 

Matt Peiken: Even when you were young, you had this sense that this was An appropriation of land that you felt there was an injustice in that even back then. 

Jared Wheatley: That's right. It's why do people, certain people in authority, people in power, they have the right to impress their feelings on you. And then when you have the conversation back, there's always a rule or a requirement or a permit, or there's some reason why you can't speak back to them. But they, because of they've purchased that right from someone else who's purchased that right.

And then at the, of course, at the time I didn't link that back to stolen land. We literally had nothing and I was like How do some people have a bunch of stuff and I don't? 

Matt Peiken: So how did you express yourself through these actions? What did you do? 

Jared Wheatley: Oh gosh, it's so bad.

Nothing. Nothing good. You know, we literally would break into abandoned buildings. If there were buildings that weren't being used we'd go in there and see what was going on.

Matt Peiken: This is in Kansas City. Yeah, that's right. And who were you hanging with? Was it other with the other Cherokee? Who was part of your group? 

Jared Wheatley: It's really interesting. These are primarily white suburban kids, right? But we did have a Lakota in our group, and he was the first person who really introduced me to intertribal racism. And I met him at 13 years old on the bus and we were both into punk rock and I hear like he's, he called it Sioux.

He's yeah, we're Sioux. And I said, that's so cool. Like I'm Cherokee. And he's F you. I don't want to hear about your Cherokee bride, some mythical person who was in your life that makes you native. He told me that straight away and he was my best friend and, still to this day, I talk with him and it's taken him now 25 years to come back to me and I love him to death.

He said, look, Jared, I remember saying that and it wasn't great. And what you're doing for people now is greater than anything I've done. 

Matt Peiken: Let's talk about that trail leading to what you're doing for people now. And I was asking. about your entry point into art and, obviously the indigenous murals project, there's a visual art component, but there's more than that.

There's a social justice component. So tell me, when did you start giving visual acuity to what you wanted to express? When did that take shape and how? 

Jared Wheatley: So I've never been what you would call like a good graffiti writer, but I have put many words on the wall and I would be considered really trash as far as any graffiti writers concerned.

But I've always been interested in just big letters up on a wall and catching people's attention in that way. And so that's where you see me, personally, why I put the syllabary on the wall is because it's a big representation that says, look, you don't know us. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, right away when you started making marks on walls, did they come through a native syllabary? How did you lead to that? Or was that immediate?

Jared Wheatley: No, my first, the first time I started working in graffiti and street art was really when I was in Anchorage, Alaska and my best friend who I mentioned earlier, Trevor, his brother's name is Travis and Travis was working in wheat paste and graphic design, but I was in the military and literally as you know, an airman, I was going into the streets in Anchorage writing Geronimo.

Which obviously is connected to indigeneity, but not specifically to our nation. And when I reflect on it, it was grasping at straws, trying to understand something that I didn't really have any support with. And I wasn't raised in an environment where we said, how do we get out in indigenous communities?

So somewhere along the way, I was always triggered to try and make a statement about indigeneity, and I still to this day don't really know why that push was.

Matt Peiken: That's interesting that you had this instinct to Make a statement about indigeneity and your own place within it without modeling. Even though you had artistic creative people in your family It doesn't sound like and correct me if I'm wrong here.

It doesn't sound like they were necessarily creating from a standpoint of I want to Bring my lineage proud. I want to stamp an identity here. You did. What do you attribute that to? 

Jared Wheatley: I attribute it to a couple of things and I really appreciate you having this conversation because what folks may not understand about me and the project and other indigenous people is we're learning some of this stuff on the fly and we're doing it in a public way and then people are taking our words and they're projecting it beyond one person.

So I always say, I am Cherokee, but I'm not the Cherokee. I'm a Cherokee. I'm not all Cherokee. Getting back to your question, my mother of my grandfather's kids, she was by far the most interested in our Indian blood and our heritage and where he came from. So, I was raised being proud for my mom, but my grandma was really scared of it.

We had to go to Alanon starting when we were like eight years old, I would go into these rooms with these kids and I didn't have alcoholism directly related in my life, but these kids, I'd be hearing about them getting abused sexually, physically, the fear they had hiding wherever they needed to, to avoid these people.

And that was put on me. And that was part of what my grandma basically said, this is who you are. You are an alcoholic somewhere in your blood. 

Matt Peiken: Did you tie that to your heritage? Or did you tie that just, that is just a fact of life growing up in this community that many people are experiencing? Or did you see it as distinctly a burden of your indigeneity?

Jared Wheatley: Nobody really wanted to talk about it, like dirty secrets in a family. Many families have dirty secrets. And so nobody said straight up, don't be an Indian. This is why, your indigeneity is how this alcoholism comes into our family. They just said this, and then there was this other implication, which is you really didn't spend time focusing on it.

So when I moved into, it's really hard to separate my anti authoritarian perspectives from the idea that I was taught to question a part of who I was. Even just going through that now is really complex. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, it's interesting to me you never grew up on a reservation and you were Surrounded by others and people who were not like you, the closest was your Lakota friend and even he pushed you away.

So you were continually Put in environments where you were the other. You saw your family struggling. You were in that struggle, and yet You felt this curiosity to pull this thread and keep pulling on trying to understand Your heritage. What did you discover when you started really diving into the syllabary, making marks on walls, and establishing, I am Cherokee.

What did you discover about yourself that surprised you or alarmed you that you might not have had you not done that digging?

Jared Wheatley: Kind of A shocking, big, overarching question you laid out there. And the real reality is every day I'm finding out more about myself. I'm also finding out more about indigenous communities, indigenous ways of being. And the thing that kind of concerns me the most continuously is the amount of infighting, the amount of inter tribal conflict that we face.

There are more than 500 sovereign nations. Many people, 60 percent of society doesn't even know that the natives remain, that Indians exist. People have conflict over calling us Indian or Native Americans, but we're still regulated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

And what I see on a daily basis is that Our indigenous people get caught up in many colonialist tactics that are deeply ingrained in ethnocide and genocide, and we can sometimes still work towards ethnocide and genocide, voluntarily, without really recognizing where those lines of ethnocide and genocide exist.

Matt Peiken: When you say you get caught up in these colonialist tactics, is it because it's just so pervasive in our culture that the language, some of the ways of phrasing, of thinking of yourselves, just get all consuming? 

Jared Wheatley: Yeah, that's right. So for instance, people will tell me, Native people, will tell me to go back to my land, as in Oklahoma. And that's not my land. It's not my land in any way. I didn't grow up there. I have family there through blood, but no one who knows me intimately. It's not our, I'm going to air quote ancestral lands. So when they tell me to go back to those lands, to me, they're basically, I don't know, they're enforcing the removal again.

Matt Peiken: The Indigenous Walls Project is in Asheville. Did you do anything like this in Kansas City or elsewhere before you moved here? 

Jared Wheatley: No. I didn't even necessarily know if I wanted to organize it. And The reason I do organize it is because I'm a project manager. So my background is in construction and project management, and I'm not an artist.

I tell people I'm not an artist, but the real funny thing is I have to call myself an artist now. I don't do what I do intentionally to be an artist, which I always said, that's what makes an artist, a person who's intentionally trying to be an artist. 

Matt Peiken: I don't know if that's necessarily true, but you deliberately don't do it for that reason. We haven't even established what was the Genesis of this? Let's start with that. How did you even conceive of this? If it wasn't to make art and you had never done this before, why here? And when did that hit you? 

Jared Wheatley: Yeah, the big thing is a wall. A wall presupposes land. You gotta remember, I'm a builder, so I think about the built environment a lot.

When we say the Indigenous Walls Project, people think about painting. I don't. I think about the fact that for any wall to exist, land exists. If land exists, whose land is it? Who's in a relationship with that land, not who owns that land, but who truly thinks about the sustainability of it across a longitudinal timeline, like seven generations, which is what we hear the most in our indigenous communities.

And that's why I say, this is the land of the Cherokee. People say that's, Oh, that's abrasive. Especially progressive people come to me and they say I'm too abrasive with the way that I communicate whose land it is. 

Matt Peiken: I get that I'm too abrasive and it has nothing to do with land. So at least you have a cause.

So you said you didn't approach as an artist. You don't call yourself an artist. Did you bring others into this? Other people who are artists right away? When did this take shape? 

Jared Wheatley: So basically there was a question made to me about what is community and I had a friend being attacked by an air quote community, but really it was just a bar, like a dive bar, didn't like the guy.

And I'm like I hate to say it, but a bar is not a community. It's a place that sells poison for you to put down your throat. Like, Okay, it sells bad decisions. Great. That doesn't necessarily make a community to me. Yeah. And so I said I can do something that's more community oriented. I went out, black wall, white letters, here's the syllabary, here's my nation's name, Cherokee Nation.

Matt Peiken: When and where was your first wall? 

Jared Wheatley: Oh gosh. It would have been early April 2000. 22.

Matt Peiken: Just not even two years ago during the pandemic, you didn't get permission. You just did it. 

Jared Wheatley: We generally work on private property, which makes people upset, surprisingly. We work on private property because those people understand our stories better than trying to go to public property and then have to describe our indigeneity to somebody we don't have a relationship with. 

Matt Peiken: So you get permission from the building owners. Yeah. Did you get in touch with the syllabary yourself and learn it on your own from just a curiosity to know your written language? Where did that knowledge or that interest in the syllabary come from? And I want to point out to listeners, the syllabary is on your hands. It's on your fingers. Every finger has two Letters or two marks from the syllabary, and I want you to talk about did you get those tattoos first before you started Marking walls or how did that start?

Jared Wheatley: So the real answer is The connection process takes forever. Even if I learn the language perfectly now, I'll always be considered a second language learner. I'll never be fluent. And the real reason is, among many circles, we see fluent language speakers as people who spoke Cherokee first and then learned English later.

And the real reason behind that is the culture Is in the language, even what we called ourselves before colonialists arrived and started overlaying their ideas on us. There are many different debates about what we might've called ourselves. But they were all community oriented. They weren't based off of just a piece of land or a political. It was really about the community itself first. 

Matt Peiken: You said the culture is in the language. That rings so true, and from what I understand, there are phrases in your syllabary, there are words, that there is no equal in English. You can say in one word in your language, not your native language, but your second language that is unique even to English.

So that to me that speaks to a certain cultural distinction. Is that what you're speaking to a little bit? Or do you mean something else when you say the culture is in our language or the language is in our culture? 

Jared Wheatley: So instead of speaking about Cherokee, what I'm going to try and do is speak about English in a way that I feel like people may understand it.

English and German and many European countries have been crafted to be directly translated. They've been like that since the 1300s, 1200s, and all of those languages, they've come together and they've provided direct connection points for one reason. Commerce and capitalism. So free trade can exist. So people can go to war and they can get resources and they can trade those resources across economic lines.

In indigenous cultures, we didn't have that. We weren't trying to craft our language to where we could trade easily with other people. The way we had our language was so we could be in a relationship, and just that basic concept that English and other Eurocentric cultures have been adapted to basically make the commercial world exist.

The largest spoken language on the planet is English as a second language. And even just the idea that English as a second language is the largest language on the planet, that's changing the way English is spoken. When I go to a job site, I speak English. But if I'm speaking with Latin construction workers or Eastern European construction workers, I modify my English language to adapt to something that is easier for them to understand and for me to understand and to meet that communication. That's happening all around the world. So even English is changing to meet that commercial demand. 

Matt Peiken: I never knew that. And that's interesting that you have that facility that you can be that agile with the language to pivot it and change it depending on who you're speaking to, and yet you're conscious of that. How did you develop that skill?

Jared Wheatley: The real reality is being a capitalist pig. Like, i've done international trade so I've spoken with Chinese people over the internet. I've spoken with Japanese over the internet. I've been in China and worked with those people in their 

Matt Peiken: factories. How did you get in positions to do international trade? What kind of work, how did you come up to those kinds of positions? 

Jared Wheatley: It's really, honestly, it's being a weird outsider. Okay, so I have a clothing brand, that clothing brand is Épatage. Épatage is not even a word, it's a made up word. It has a French derivative, right? But it's used in the Eastern block to describe this crazy type of person.

And similar to the way we were talking about, there's no direct Translation between many Cherokee concepts and English concepts. There's no direct translation from this slang word, epitage, to English. So the closest it gets is consciously abrasive. 

Matt Peiken: That's amazing. Have you always been entrepreneurial? Even from a younger age, have you always done your own businesses on the side while hustling construction? Has it been that sort of piece together living? 

Jared Wheatley: Yeah it's a situation where when you're anti authoritarian, when you question everything, you're not necessarily built from a mental perspective to go into somebody else's business and do what they ask you to do.

And yet at the same time, you're asking permission from these private building owners to Draw or paint on their buildings. 

Yeah it's because I speak many languages, right? But almost none of which are any but English. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, what are you painting on these buildings? Are there specific phrases and words that are, that, are they unique to every building that you do, or are there commonalities between buildings? 

Jared Wheatley: So the project has been intertribal and we've had people from around the country come and paint about 15, 000 square feet of murals. That's art. It's beautiful work done primarily with aerosol art. 

So it's different artists from around the country that you've become connected to, and they paint what they want to paint. 

That's right. And this is this gets back to being able to speak different languages. When I go to building owners, I have a master's degree in commerce and economic development. That's to say, I'm a nerd, right? 

Matt Peiken: I don't know that makes you a nerd. I think that makes you really smart at what you're doing. You said you just go with the flow, but you're very directed in terms of how to do certain things, it seems. 

Jared Wheatley: Some people focus on being a perfectionist and I've never focused on being a perfectionist. I've always focused on being effective and making noise and trying to have an interesting conversation.

So when I go to somebody who has A 50, 150, 200 million dollar real estate portfolio, I have to know that as soon as they see me, immediately they're going to be turned off. You got this neck tattoo, you got dirty clothes. So then I, okay, let's change that up. Let's start with the vernacular. Let's not even go vocabulary. Let's go to a level of conversation that they're not prepared for. Let's talk about multi-variate regression. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah so I, I asked you a question a little bit ago, and I wanna get back to it. Did you tattoo the syllabary on your hands first before you ever had a wall painted? 

Jared Wheatley: No. I didn't. I tattooed the syllabary on it afterwards because, and what did, 

Matt Peiken: and what does it say on your hands?

Jared Wheatley: So on the top it says, Anigiduwagi. And on the bottom it says Jalagi which is like Cherokee, and there's a location identifier that identifies that as like Cherokee of the West on my lower knuckles. And the way it's given to me is that Anigiduwagi is one of the ways we would call ourselves before we had pre contact, right?

And obviously, Jalagi is what we are known today as the Cherokee. 

Matt Peiken: You didn't grow up with the language. How did you learn it? 

Jared Wheatley: First I'd like to be really clear, I essentially know very little, none of it. Conceptually, I understand it. I have some awareness of the syllabary, but really I'm not a linguist, which is one of the issues of the project, to be really honest, is people will look at me and they want me to be every Indian all in one.

They want me to be a basket maker. They want me to be in the foodways. They want me to know ceremony. They want me to understand dance. They want me to know the language. You can already see the trap that's set up for me is any person who wants to attack me or the project has two, three dozen different avenues to attack me personally, and that's not even getting into the status quo which allows racism every day against Native people. Ourselves and others. People telling me to go back to my land who are Native. 

Matt Peiken: You said, so far it's about 15, 000 square feet of wall that have been covered. I don't know how many different walls there are, you can talk about that, but have you faced criticism? Talk about what you've heard directly and what has come back to you through other channels in the way of criticism?

Jared Wheatley: The criticism comes from basically every direction. I get criticism from local graffiti artists telling me, F you, you're taking up our wall space. What? Yeah. 

Matt Peiken: Okay, now that just sucks. I mean, Graffiti artists, they parrot some of the same things you're saying that we're anti establishment, anti authority. We paint where we want, paint what we want. This isn't their land. It's all of our land. They would probably say some of the same things you're saying. And yet you face criticism from graffiti artists?

Jared Wheatley: Well, it's okay. Like I actually appreciate it. Because they are not just telling me, they're telling everyone, forget you. I'm going to be out here doing what I'm doing. And I've been that person and that's okay. 

Matt Peiken: So where else has the criticism come from?

Jared Wheatley: Oh gosh. Literally, white people every day tell me I'm not Cherokee. White people every day say you're, you are not Cherokee. I carry a citizenship card with me on all times. And even Mountain Express runs articles about us. At the end of every one of those articles, they'll get comments: he's not even Cherokee. Why are you allowing him to speak up? 

Matt Peiken: Wait a second. How does any White person even have the temerity to know or deign to know whether you're Cherokee or not? 

Jared Wheatley: The trap is I don't have a big enough nose. I'm not tan enough. Like, people have told me you're not short enough. People have told me you're not round enough. But at the same time, the interesting duality of it is white people will tell me I'm not Cherokee. And then I'll set up a table in front of The Big Crafty and 20, 30, 40 people will come up to me and they'll tell me, Oh, I have Cherokee heritage. We're not enrolled. They'll have many reasons why they're not associated with a nation, and I accept that and I say let's learn your story. Let's hear it. Let's talk it through I'm not gonna be mean to that person. 

Many people like to jump to conclusions about very complex systems. People who attack me in a racial way, online, they haven't done the hard work of even understanding what indigeneity might look like. It takes acts of Congress, the same as it would any other country in the world, to negotiate with my nation.

The Cherokee Nation? You can't even legally fly the Oklahoma state flag because we're always suing the state of Oklahoma because they're always trying to infringe on our rights. And so for a white person to tell me I'm not native enough, you're really perpetuating systemic racism, no matter what you think, no matter how progressive you are. If you question anyone's indigeneity without understanding that, you are perpetuating racism. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, you know you said something to me outside The Big Crafty and it really opened my eyes. I had never thought of it this way. You said how Only Native Americans are judged by the percentage of blood of whether they are 1/16 or 1/8 or 1/4, whatever fractional divide you want to make that. No other ethnicity or race has to account for what percentage of African American they are. I'm Jewish. I've never had to account for that. Why do you think, is it because there are certain rights that the United States government bestows upon, or is it within the tribes themselves, that the tribes say if you're not a certain percentage, you're not Open to receiving economic benefits of if we have a casino that's making many millions of dollars? Is it all of the above?

Jared Wheatley: Yeah, the answer is yes. It's all of the above. So I appreciate you sharing with me that you're Jewish. Actually, Jewish people are some of the most accepting of me. But you have the issue of the matriarchal setup, as well. So if your mom's not Jewish, there's going to be a certain number of people, maybe they say to you, you're not Jewish.

Same thing in us. Our clanship is passed down through our mother. So if your mother's not Cherokee, some people will straight up go up to that Cherokee person and say, you don't have a clan, you're not Cherokee.

Matt Peiken: All this exclusion. Why can't people be inclusive? I don't understand why everybody wants to just push everyone into their margins and boxes. As you've been doing the indigenous walls project, the more you go in this, has it sort of codified or giving you a sense of oh, I'm doing this for a reason I never knew about before. As you're facing certain feedback, whether it's positive, negative, doubts, questions about your origin, what has this opened up for you in ways you never would have bargained for?

Jared Wheatley: Basically every connection I have now is deeper and more meaningful. I have people I consider my family that share stories with me every day who are indigenous, who live on the Qualla boundary, who have never left this land. And I never had that before, and those people, like Aunt Amy, she'll tell me straight up, stand in your truth.

Look to the East, say your prayers, stand in your truth, go to water, clean yourself, stand in your truth. And she speaks a lot about gardening your heart, doing the hard work inside of yourself before worrying about anyone else. She talks a lot about the longest journey a person will ever take in their life is the journey from their brain to their heart.

And that's really the only truths that I need is to know that an elder loves me, cares for me, supports me, believes in my actions. And Beyond that, it's actually allowed me to have a tremendous amount of resilience and to understand that many of the things I feel, other people in our community also feel.

And the people who attack me the most also aren't spending time dealing with the deepest issues in our community. They're not worried about indigenous issues. They're attacking the lowest hanging fruit, which just happens to be an Indian who kind of presents white and lives in Asheville. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. What has this blazed for you? What's your path forward with this?

Is the indigenous walls project going to continue for unknown amounts of time, or is it morphing or evolving into some other work that you want to do in a cultural, public way? 

Jared Wheatley: I think that Colonialism and capitalism and planning and being in this white, time constrained world where everything's on a 15 minute schedule and if you don't check your Microsoft Outlook calendar 15 times a day, like you're just not a good person, or you're disorganized or you're dysfunctional.

Matt Peiken: I didn't judge you for being late. 

Jared Wheatley: I appreciate you so much for that. So, I managed the new Belgium brewery. So that's a 52 million construction project that I managed all those contracts. And if you fool yourself into thinking that I managed, 1500 drawing sheets done in German and in English and all that, without being that nerd who set up those schedules. I did that, I lived that life and now I've stepped out of it and I really focus on living in the moment, in the flow. You know, as my brothers and sisters will tell me, living on Indian time, that allows me a different perspective. And it's something that capitalism doesn't look forward to people living in that way.

Matt Peiken: But you have your construction, you have your work, your paying work. And This work, is it still close to you, the indigenous walls project, or are there offshoots that you're thinking of? If not on a timeline, but just things you think that might evolve from this. 

Jared Wheatley: Yeah. Well, I think for instance, people in the community reach out to me. So I'll do paintings for Zhishkohi, Birdtown community. That's the community I'm most closely aligned with. I'm a ball player, a stick ball player. I play the little brother of war for Birdtown.

So in that way, I'm representing that community and they asked me, come down and paint. Can you be a part of this? Can you come down and be a part of that? And I spend, I don't know how many hours most weeks driving to Birdtown, being involved in those community meetings and those community gatherings and Looking after people who honestly are not considered the most attractive people to look after, even on the Qualla boundary.

And that's what folks don't understand is that the issues inside the community mostly don't really want to be talked about. And that sheltering some of the outside world from the issues in the community, that's probably a good thing. But to encourage people within the Asheville community to attack me? Probably not so responsible. 

Matt Peiken: Do you see yourself staying more as publicly engaged and involved in your own personal growth? Everything you're telling me, like you spoke a half hour ago, you said, I am not all Cherokee, I am myself. And the things you're doing, they are your personal growth, but you're doing it in a pretty public way. I'm just wondering, is that going to continue? 

Jared Wheatley: The public interest in my project, I don't know what to tell people. It wasn't intended. 

Matt Peiken: No, but it's a public project. People can see it. Exactly. You didn't do this inside of four walls. Yeah. They're outside four walls. 

Jared Wheatley: So just to explain the path a little bit. When I painted the white letters on the black wall, It was like, oh shit, like I had no clue that anything was going to come of it. And then next thing I know, AVL Today's running a story on it, The Cherokee One Feather's running a story on it, the Citizen Times is like everyone got involved all of a sudden.

So it was public to put the syllabary up, but it wasn't meant to be a movement. It was just a nerd painting some words.

Matt Peiken: I think it also comes at a time when we see a lot of public acknowledgment from white led organizations. We acknowledge that we are on original, Cherokee land.

That's right. That's happening now. That didn't happen even two years ago. 

Jared Wheatley: I tell people I'm spoiled when I'm sitting in front of The Big Crafty, and they're like, what do you mean? And I'm like, I'm so privileged. I'm sitting out here in front of hundreds and thousands of people with a land back banner, and I'm telling people about indigeneity and talking with folks. My grandpa grew up in a time and was born on a reservation where you couldn't leave it. You literally would have got shot through most of the entire history of the United States for claiming indigeneity in the center of commercial activity. I'm super spoiled as a native person to be able to come out and say, I'm native.