Episode 124: Raquel Montoya-Lewis
01:22:48
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Show Notes
Washington Supreme Court Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis shares her trailblazing journey to the highest court of her state. In conversation with host MC Sungaila, she shares her experience serving as a tribal court judge for three different tribes (the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, the Nooksack Indian Tribe, and the Lummi Nation), as well as on the Washington Superior Court bench. Her time as a tribal judge taught her to stand up for the rule of law (even if it cost her personally, in the form of expulsion from her own tribal home) and how cultural understanding and empathy play an important role in judicial systems and decision-making. This is an extraordinary and inspiring episode. One you do not want to miss.
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About Raquel Montoya-Lewis:
Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis was appointed to the Washington State Supreme Court by Governor Jay Inslee in December 2019 and took the oath of office on January 6, 2020. Justice Montoya-Lewis is an enrolled member of the Pueblo of lsleta and a descendant of the Pueblo of Laguna, two federally recognized tribes in New Mexico. She is the first enrolled member of any tribe to sit on a state supreme court in the U.S. and the second Native American to sit on a state supreme court. She is also of Jewish descent. Prior to becoming an Associate Justice, she served as a Superior Court judge for Whatcom County for five years, where she heard criminal and civil trials and presided over the Whatcom County Therapeutic Drug Court. In the 15 years prior to her work on the Superior Court, she served as a tribal court judge for multiple tribes in the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest. She served as Chief Judge for the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, the Nooksack Indian Tribe, and the
Lummi Nation. In addition to her work as a tribal court judge, she was a tenured Associate Professor at Western Washington University's Fairhaven College where she taught law related courses and courses on cultural identity development. She has continued to use her
teaching skills as a jurist, teaching a wide variety of audiences including judges, social workers, lawyers, and advocates on implicit bias, the Indian Child Welfare Act, and best practices in child welfare and domestic violence cases. Justice Montoya-Lewis graduated with her BA degree from the University of New Mexico in 1992 and completed her law degree and Master of Social Work degree at the University of Washington in 1995 and 1996 respectively.
Transcript
I'm very pleased to have join us on the show, a Justice on the Washington State Supreme Court, Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis, welcome.
Thank you. I'm glad to be here and be with you to have this conversation.
You certainly are a trailblazer on the state Supreme Court and nationally. There are very few with Native-American backgrounds who are on the courts. I'm very pleased that you are there and that you are here to talk about your journey to inspire other folks to also consider the path that you took or their own path but eventually serve on some of our courts. First, we will talk about all of that. The meanderings of the career that afterward make a lot of sense in retrospect. First, I wanted to find out how it was that you decided you wanted to be a lawyer or go to law school. Was there a particular circumstance or event that inspired you to do that?
I struggled with what I wanted to do when I graduated with my undergraduate degree, and I was an English major with a Women's Studies minor. I had a lot of professors suggesting that I go on to a PhD in one of those. I was interested in doing that. I very much wanted to be a professor. That seemed out of reach in many respects because I didn't know anybody other than those professors that had done that. Honestly, I didn't know anybody that had gone to law school either. Both of those things seemed a little difficult to figure out, even what the process was to get started and even applying.
I remember a day I was walking across campus and noticed where all the cars were parked. I noticed that people were stopping at red lights and going on green lights, and I started to think, “Why is that? Why do we do that?” We are taught to do those things when our parents teach us to drive but why are those the rules and why do we follow those rules?
I realized that, as I looked around, everything was controlled by laws in some form. There are societal agreements that we have with each other but the law itself was a thing that people were afraid to get in trouble with even if they didn't know what it was. That became very interesting to me. I decided I would go to law school. Having never spoken to a lawyer or a judge, I started looking at how you get in. I started studying for the LSAT.
I want to make something clear at the start. My LSAT score was not great. I studied hard but I couldn't afford to take the class. I was convinced by the score that I got that there was no way I was in uni even get into law school, and I almost didn't apply as a result of that. It wasn't a terrible score but it was certainly not what I was used to getting on tests, and I had done, I thought, what my best work that I could do. I applied anyway at the insistence of a couple of friends and got into several law schools, and that was where I started my career. It was very iffy at lots of points along the way and in terms of even getting through the door.
That goes in the category of things that we talked about before we started formally proceeding with the show, which was, “Don't take yourself out of the running.” It was tempting to do that even that early in the process. It is hard when you are used to doing well and used to getting good results, and you are like, “What?”
It was a big surprise. I also didn't understand what the test was looking for, which seemed different from what the law school said they were looking for. That tension has been something that has been a part of my career in terms of talking to people and doing exactly what you said, “Don't take yourself out of the running,” right before you get started.
Don't take yourself out of the race right before you get started.
Now, I'm in positions where it can be heard on these things and have an influence talking about what it is that people are looking for in law schools because what they are saying is not consistent with what they are doing in many respects. That's resulting in there being a lot of people that we would benefit from being in law school, being lawyers to take a look at what is required.
They say to themselves, “I have always done poorly on standardized tests. I'm never going to do well on this test.” As a result of that, I'm not even going to apply. I have talked to many students over the years who have that view. I'm very glad to be able to be in a position where I can talk about those things and say, “Do apply anyway and keep going.”
You have to learn how to take the test or teach to the test, which is very different from what you are doing when you are in class or getting grades, or even what you end up doing in law school itself. That's an important point that you are learning how to take the test, which is different from other things. As you said, “If you don't take a prep course or you don't take something that's very specific to that test, it's hard to figure out what is that test looking for.”
The other thing you mentioned too is that was one hurdle or something where things could have gone sideways but there were several more throughout your career. I hope that the human story from these shows is that people who have succeeded, it's not that they had nothing difficult happen to them. Very often, they did succeed despite all of that, whether they were encouraged to do so at a certain point or whether they had a whole bunch of grit and moved forward. I hope it's helpful to see that because people don't think, “I'm having this challenge, and so I should give up.” That's not what happens to people who are successful.
A lot of those folks are people that keep going for whatever reason or whatever it is that's pushing them. They keep going through all of those challenges. There have been innumerable challenges throughout my career, and trying to sort that out and figure out the next steps and how to get through those difficult things, whether those are personal or professional or a combination of the two. It is important to figure it out as early as possible. At least this has kept me going, what it is driving you in the first place. If you don't have the answer to that, you are going to law school because you can't think of anything else to do. It's very hard to keep going.
That's exactly what I saw when I was in school too. Even if your purpose or what you think is going to provide meaning to you from law school changes during law school or even after, you have to have something at one point in time that says it's all worth it. “I'm doing all of this but it's worth it because I have this larger thing to do.”
Those who didn't have that would tend to either not do as well or not stay in law school because it's hard, and they didn't understand, “What is the greater purpose for my being here?” Can I ask you how you would define your, maybe it's changed to it probably has, what's driving you towards the law? You touched on that a little bit in terms of it having a lot of impacts. You noticed the impact that it had on society at large.
It has as largely remained the same throughout my career, and I experienced some frustration with this in law school. I wanted to do something that had a positive impact on people's lives. I wasn't sure early on what t I meant by that but I knew that I was lucky to be in college at all. I was in a position that, in the way that I was taught and raised by my community, you always turn around and bring people with you, and that was the driver.
When I went to law school, what I expected to learn was how the law impacted people and what things were fair and unfair or just and unjust, however you want to put it. I had a somewhat naive view that everyone else would be there for that same reason. We would be, as a group, trying to solve those problems from different perspectives but that was what I expected to see.
What I experienced from that first day of law school is that we aren't all driven by that. We are not all practicing law or being judges for that same reason. What I learned was that many of us aren't here for that at all. That was another big surprise for me in those first few weeks in law school. I don't want to be heard to say that going to law school for other reasons is a bad thing.
The assumption that I made was the problem. I was expecting everyone else to be there for the reasons that I was there. That continues to be a belief that gets challenged a lot because I will find other places where I'm making that assumption again. That is causing knee pain or causing me to think, “Forget it. I'm going to stop doing this job. It's too difficult,” or whatever it is, and it's my assumption.
I can keep doing what I'm doing, and everyone else can do what they are doing too, and that's okay. We are doing different things. In my first year in law school, I was pretty much keeping my head above water in my first quarter but in the second quarter, we started Criminal Law and I was excited about that class. Once again, I thought, “This is the class. This is the one where we will start talking about how the law impacts people,” and we are.
We were reading these cases. We were learning about the elements of crimes. We were going through things. We got to a case, and I can't remember if we were learning about sexual assault in this section or if it was a case that had that as part of the fact section but it was about something else. I can't remember but I was stunned that we went through the entire class talking about other issues and not that issue or even discussing it at all.
I raised it in class and said, “Are we ever going to talk about the people in this case?” The professor shut me down in a way that was like, “Don't do that again.” It was embarrassing. It didn't work to shut me down but it did have the effect of making me recognize how big an assumption I was making and that we were talking about the theoretical in law school and not about people. My expectation that's what we would do was an expectation based on my own thinking about that's all we could talk about.
That was your orientation and even more so imbued in you because of your upbringing, and culturally, you had that. People have this orientation. As you said, bumping up against that and saying, “Not everybody has that,” which is fine. When it's inherent in you, it can be hard not to keep having that assumption. I get that.
It was shocking, and it continued to be. As you probably know from my background, I have a Master's in Social Work. The reason I have that degree is, again, walking across campus. I walked past the School of Social Work and thought, “What does that mean? What do they do in there?” I went in there, and they were talking about people, about institutions as well but not law because they were doing one particular thing. We were doing something else in law school.
I decided to apply for my Master's in Social Work so that I could combine those two things. After that, it was much better because I was able to put together the two interests in my own mind and know that I was getting what I needed through both programs. It also gave me the energy to go back to law school, which I felt was what we should be doing in law school.
What I felt in the first year was very distant from law school. I felt disappointed in what we were learning. I thought, “If this is what lawyers do, then I'm out. I'm going to do something else,” but I was able to, in the school of social work, not talk about the people that institutions impact but also work with some of them and have that be a concrete thing. This was in the days before clinic in law school was almost required. At that time, it was seen as if you can fit it in.
It was new. There were only a couple of clinics when I was in school, and now, there are many. It's anticipated that you would participate in a clinic, and there’s such a variety of them. I have taught in an appellate clinic for ten years, and I wish that had been around when I was in school. It's such a great experience, and it gives you that hands-on and also to see, “Do I like what this is in practice and dealing with clients individually, real people with problems.” That's such a different experience, as you noted.
I didn't get to have that experience in law school, so I made one happen for myself. That is another theme of my professional career, which is finding my own way to do something.
There are two things. One is curiosity. You are talking about this walking, seeing the building, and seeing certain things. A curiosity about things, how they work, why they work that way, and then responding to that curiosity that you have and doing something about it, which I can relate to. My parents always say, “Couldn't you have a hobby? Instead of making something, everything you do has to be intense and this and that.” I'm like, “It's the way I roll.”
If you are going to do it, you are going to do it right and get committed to it and integrated it into everything else that you are doing. I think of growth when you are talking about this. Let's say if there's a concrete sidewalk, you are going to find a way somewhere in between to come up and grow. That's the image I had from what you were describing.
That's the next one image. That's accurate.
Also, trusting your interest in your curiosity because sometimes people don't do that. They might have, “That looks interesting,” and then they will keep going down the street or say, “That doesn't seem very practical. I'm already doing this. Why would I do something else?” There's a good lesson in that in terms of following your interest and curiosity. Especially if it looks like the path isn't exactly what you were looking for, that's how you blaze new paths or maybe combine things in new ways that people haven't yet.
A big part of my career has been following my interests. It has also been doing what is the right thing to do, even though others are telling you not to do that. I had a couple of experiences early on in my career where I was in work situations, one where there was a partner in a small law firm who had a severe substance abuse problem. I looked around, and nobody was talking about it. I couldn't believe it because there were six of us. Despite it being a small law firm, it had a great deal of impact at the time in Indian country, and I was proud to be doing that work.
Do what is right, even though others are telling you to do otherwise.
I was excited about the potential for my future in that firm, so I guess we are not going to talk about it and then agree to that. I did talk about it, and it blew the firm up, honestly, because as a result of that, I said exactly that, “Are we all not going to talk about what is happening in front of us here?” Some of that was out of concern for the person who was not doing well. We had to have concerns about clients and concerns about the quality of the work and all of those things but I was very worried for her.
Once you start talking about whatever the secret is, everyone has to follow suit. I had a number of people telling me when I went to even my best mentors for advice about what to do, this was a year after my judicial clerkship telling me to get through it and don't make weight. You will be the one who ends up without a job. I was quiet for as long as I could be and was also told, “Find something else and sneak out the door,” but all the advice was, “Don't bring it up.”
That was to the detriment of the firm, everyone who was there and to the detriment of the person who was suffering. Again, I decided I had to do it the way I was going to do it. If that resulted in terrible things to me, it was worth it. It still was worth it, and it was very difficult. It had a huge impact on lots of people's lives but ultimately, it was going to anyway. She was going to fall apart. She drove a car. Lord knows what would have happened. The firm ended up started saying, “You have to deal with this or everybody is leaving.” There are a number of things.
The course of my career where the advice from the people I trusted didn't work for me. It was difficult to decide to follow what I thought was the right approach. The approach that my close mentors and friends gave me was the right approach in many respects. It wasn't like they were wrong. It didn't work for me. I have been in a number of those professional positions where I have had to decide that I had to follow what was the right thing for me to do, even if it wasn't necessarily the right thing for others. That is something as a judge you do every day because you have two parties coming in. They both tell you that they are right, and you have to say, “I'm going to do what I think is right,” and sometimes that's the 4th or 5th thing that they are recommending.
I was going to say that's good training for serving on the bench because you want that judicial independence. Working those muscles to have that confidence in yourself, your own compass, and your core while still listening to others. It can be hard in situations like that, especially when you say people you trust. It's not that their advice is wrong. It's different, and you are taking it all in and then making your own decision based on that.
It can be hard when a lot of trusted people are saying one way, and you are like, “It doesn't quite work for me.” That is important to be able to do that. Especially on a collaborative, collegial bench, you want to have the give and take. You want to have all of the discussions but then ultimately, you need to make the decision or your vote, whatever you think is right.
That's true. On a bench like mine where I have eight other people who I work with, many of them have been doing the job since before I went to law school, and they have great advice because they have seen it all. It is, in part, what I have been taught over the first few years of doing this job. Everyone, including those folks who have been there forever, is that you have to listen to what other people are saying and then you have to decide what you think.
Even if you are off on your own, that's okay. You have to figure that out for yourself. In some respects, that's similar to being a trial judge but there's also the side of you want to get at least four other people to agree with you. You have people to come with you. It is a very interesting combination of those early experiences.
Exactly as you pointed out. Especially if you think it's the right way to go, you want to get the number of votes that's necessary to have that end up being the rule in the case rather than the dissent or concurrence. It's an interesting and different job than being a lone judge on the trial court, where you have to make the decisions without input, which sometimes I like that input. I like the collaboration.
I feel results are better when we have those discussions. I want to make sure I have considered everything and different perspectives to help you do that, on the other hand, when you are the only one on the trial court. You say, “I have looked at everything and here's what I think.” It is a different skillset at both levels. You mentioned that you clerked. Tell me about your clerkship and how that came about.
I clerked for Justice Pamela Minzner, who was the second woman Justice on the New Mexico Supreme Court. The first one was decades before her, and she was the only woman on the New Mexico Supreme Court. I went to the University of New Mexico as an undergrad. I went to the University of Washington for law school, and then I decided I wanted to come back to New Mexico and I wanted to clerk for her.
I had seen her speak at some events before I was in law school, and she struck me with her grace, her intelligence, and the way she saw what she was doing, which was very much framed around what I heard of. Our former Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst on the Washington Supreme Court refers to being a servant leader. We had that language in the same way when I saw Justice Minzner speak but that was what she was talking about.
When I came around trying to apply for clerkships, I was told that I didn't have the grades. I didn't have the law review. I had written one of the journals at the University of Washington. I was paying for law school with scholarships and working on that. I had to work that second year of law school, and it was not going to be possible for me to do the journal and bring the money I needed to stay there in law school, so I couldn't do it.
Career services folks said, “Don't even bother applying. You don't have the journal. You are not at the top, whatever it was, 5% of the class. It's a lot of waste of energy.” Once again, I want to try. I want to at least give myself the opportunity to work for Justice Minzner. I got an interview. I flew down to New Mexico. We had this interesting and long and meandering conversation, and then to my horror, she gave me a writing test, which was something that she kept the lid on. Nobody ever braids the word that you had to do that. When I was a clerk, I was in the fortunate position of shocking applicants with that same, “Let's find a place in the library for you to take this test.”
I did that, and then I left. I have no idea if I'm what she's looking for but it was great. I had a great conversation and a chance to meet her. It was maybe a month before I heard back from her, and so I thought, “I will move on to other things.” She said something that I had never forgotten on that call. She called me early on a Friday morning to offer me the position, and she said, “I have been thinking about who I want to clerk for me this year,” and she meant that. She had been thinking about it.
She acknowledged that she said, “You are a different candidate from other candidates that I have. In our conversation, you made me laugh, and I need that. I need someone who can talk about serious things and recognize the importance of the work we do but who also has a sense of humor because it's very hard for me to remember that we can still have a sense of humor about things.”
I tell that story whenever I remember, to tell Law students, “Apply for the job you are interested in and be yourself and you never know.” She did not hire me because of my grades or what I wrote about in the law review. She had hired me because I was someone who made her feel more herself. It is how she put it late in later years.
Apply for the job you're genuinely interested in and just be yourself.
The two years I spent with Justice Minzner was incredible. She was absolutely brilliant. He taught me how to write at that level. She taught me about what was important. She was running an election in the first year of my clerkship, and it was a highly contested election in New Mexico. This is true anywhere, elections are personal.
As it's such a small state and a small group of people in positions of power, elections can get down and dirty, and that was true. I remember her talking to me one day about how painful it was to have this person who was running against her saying things about who she was personally that weren't her. She was like, “I don't know how not to be hurt by that.”
That was another of many things that Justice Minzner said that I never forgot for lots of reasons. I imagined, again, that people that ran for election, especially judges, had some shield that they could things bounced off and judges are people, and elections are difficult. In the first year of my clerkship, she had me working on an area of the law in New Mexico that had not been well developed, and that was a peculiarity of New Mexico Law around a first-degree murder, which was called Willful and Wanton behavior that results in the death of someone.
There were several cases that were at the Supreme Court with that type of first-degree murder charge. There were questions about, “Is it constitutional at all because there's no end trial?” It was terrible behavior and other questions about what the elements were and those kinds of things. That was all I did my first year, and it was rough because what I saw was the worst of people. It does in multiple cases. There wasn't much of New Mexico Case Law, so we had to look at other states, and it was overwhelming to go from the hopes and dreams of law school to immediate murder for a year.
In my second year, I did a lot of civil work that was all over the place. I learned a lot from both of those things. The way I took away from my clerkship was how to be yourself and be a judge, and she did that in an extraordinary way. She passed away. It has been a long time. My children were fairly little, so it has probably been several years since she passed away from breast cancer, and I still miss her. We had a lovely relationship, and all her clerks felt her loss.
A clerk-judge relationship is so special, and some are very personal and ongoing, and those are transformative. There is so much in there. There's nothing like having that relationship and seeing up close how people handle difficult situations. Working with someone like that in the development of the law and seeing their humanity and integrity as well as their intellect and putting that all together. As you said, recognizing that you can be true to yourself. You can have all of that and serve the public well in doing that.
Seeing the example up close is much more powerful than someone describing that to you. People do things they don't even know they are doing. When you see them, you are like, “You know what you just did,” and it's so natural to them that they wouldn't tell you that's how they do things or how they lead. It's such an invaluable experience.
There are two things for law students in terms of applying. First of all, I know that in my time, at least at the clerkship office, everybody was very focused on the Federal clerkships. District court and appellate but not as much on the state, and especially the state Supreme Courts. That's something to think about. It's not just the Federal courts for clerkships. Some state courts or Supreme Courts have career clerks, and they don't have the term clerks like that but many of them now do.
Even the California Supreme Court used to be entirely career attorneys, and now there's a mixture of term clerks and others. To be open to that and also to choose someone you thought was someone that you resonated with and that you could learn something from her. She clearly had a reciprocal view in that, which is how you ended up being chosen for the clerkship. I put that in the category of you following your curiosity and instincts and then having that connection, which pulled you forward to the opportunity. It's a beautiful story.
I want to underscore what you said about state clerkships because the state clerk, state courts, and the state both at the appellate and Supreme Court level, are doing incredible work. That's interesting work and the structure. I don't know if I would say it's limitations but the formality and so forth of the Federal courts have. It's important. It has its place but what you can do in this in state courts is different. I hope that students put that as part of their consideration. You get to know your judge very well over the course of the time that you are with them. That's something that's invaluable. It was my experience.
Thanks for sharing all of that 360-degree view of the clerkship and what it meant to you as well. After the clerkship, you went to the firm that you mentioned. What was your first experience on the bench?
This was when I was at the law firm, and this was before I went to teach. Probably within the first year of being at my law firm, my tribe and I lived on my reservation at the time. My tribe came to me and said, “We would like you to serve as a judge on this one case.” There was an extremely complicated case involving a train. The Burlington Northern Train that tracks go through the reservation had hit and killed a tribal member, a young woman.
The family was suing Burlington Northern in tribal court. There were all kinds of jurisdictional questions and a variety of other issues, and the judge that was there who was not a lawyer, and many tribal courts have judges who are experts in Tribal Law but are not people that went to law school. They are often called lay judges, and it varies from tribe to tribe.
There are lay judges and judges that have gone to law school. At my tribe, there had been a combination of that. There had been one-on-one, 1 lay judge and 1 judge who had gone to law school. At the time, they had the lay judge, and they wanted someone who had been a lawyer or who was a lawyer who could take this massive case on and do that one case. In the interim, they had found someone who would be a permanent judge there. I talked to Justice Minzner and my dad, who was a very important mentor of mine, although not a lawyer.
My dad said, “You should never try to be a judge or work for your own tribe. It will be a disaster.” I talked to Justice Minzner, and she said, “You would be a great judge. You need a few more years of practice before you are a judge.” I had another mentor who has been a mentor to thousands of Native American Law students and lawyers, Sam Deloria. I talked to him, and he laughed and said, “Let me guess what your dad said,” and he got that right.
“Let me guess at what Justice Minzner said.” He got that right. He said, “Here's what I know about you. You are going to do what you are going to do, so you should do that.” He was right. I ignored both of those recommendations and took the job. I think it would be part-time, and it grew and grew, so I did that one case and then I did a couple of cases. I ended up doing all of the child welfare cases that they had because the judge there knew everyone involved in those cases, so he gave them to me because I did not.
It became a big part of my career early on, even when I had shifted my career to teaching. I went from sometimes doing a few hours a week to doing it full-time. It varied over the course of the next fifteen years of my career, working for all kinds of different tribal courts. Working for my tribe as a Judge was very difficult because often it was the parties primarily spoke to Tiwa language, which I wasn't raised to speak, so I had my own interpreter.
I have an interpreter for the parties but I had an interpreter. Also, in my tribe, women were not to be in positions like that, and I was young. I don't think I was even 30 yet. I got lectured by older men, who before they would say anything, would lecture me, usually in Tiwa, about how I was breaking the laws of the community, which is serious. They weren't kidding around. It was an extraordinarily difficult position to be in. My dad was absolutely right. There was no way to do that job without alienating myself in some form from my own community, and that's exactly what happened.
I got involved in an election dispute. A complicated and long story. There was no way to resolve the case that was going to be satisfactory to anyone. Those were the powers that were in my tribe. At the time, as I said, I was living on my reservation. You have to be a tribal member to do that. The party that “won” dis-enrolled me from the tribe so that I couldn't live in my house anymore. I saw that coming, and that's how we ended up in Washington because I left one of those hearings and went home to my husband with our brand-new baby, and they said, “We need to get out of here because this is going to get ugly very quickly.”
I was lucky to end up getting the job of my dreams at Western Washington University in Bellingham. I could not find a more perfect job that fit my diverse interests and students who were extremely diverse. I went to a particular program that was working with students who couldn't or wouldn't apply to law school without a lot of mentorships from faculty.
I was able to get that job and come back to Washington but it was not without tremendous pain and loss, and during this, it was a very ugly time in my tribe. As we were trying to resolve these issues and get me back and re-enrolled, my father got ill and passed away in a very short time. It was truly one of the most difficult periods of my life. I remember my husband saying to me one day when I was having a breakdown after my father had passed away, and we had moved to Bellingham.
Everything felt wasn’t right. My husband grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “No one tells you who you are. You know who you are.” I have never forgotten that because I very much felt like if the only people who blame me say they don't want me, then I have no community, which is painful. As you probably hear, my voice remains painful. My dad went to his grave saying, “I was right. I said I don't do it.” He was right. There was tremendous and grave loss around being a judge.
I still loved being a Judge and still knew I had more to contribute, and that had happened very early on in my judicial career. It was a place where I could have walked away from being a judge because what I had experienced was so terrible. I got to Washington within a week. There were calls on my phone saying, “We hear you are in Bellingham, and there are a number of tribes around the area. Are you interested in being a tribal judge here? Will you come to help us?” Word travels fast in Indian country, and so I was working as a Tribal Court Judge again within months of moving here, even though I was also a tenure trial professor at Western Washington University.
The two things were a great combination for me. I loved doing the work as a Judge. I worked primarily for three different tribes that were within a 25-mile radius of each other, and they all had different languages. They all had different legal systems. One of the tribes, the Lummi Nation, had a very well-developed legal system and laws that were codified and written.
They had a Court of Appeals, so there was a precedent I could look to. They had been doing it for a long time. They knew what they wanted. I worked for the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, which held court in a tiny little conference room, and the laws were primarily oral as opposed to written. There was a little bit of written law but not much.
That was much more around what we would call a peace-making port. We sat in a circle. I didn't wear a robe. We talked about how we could solve the problems that brought people to the board. It was a remarkable problem-solving approach. I worked for the Nooksack Indian Tribe, which was a hybrid of the two. It was remarkable, and I share that because I want people to hear that there are tribes all around us and they all have the right to have their own legal system.
Not all of them take that on because it can be very complicated, difficult, and expensive to do. There is so much to learn from the way that tribes solve problems, and they have far less of restrictions on how they do that than we have in the state court system so they can be very inventive and creative. The most interesting thing to me about that work, as I said, I worked for these three different tribes that were very close in physical proximity to each other. They had totally different legal systems but also had completely different senses of humor.
If you don't get the sense of humor in the tribe, you are working for, you are dead in the water. We communicate through humor in tribal communities, and it is a foundational aspect of how you communicate with each other. I had to very quickly go into these new communities and figure out, “How am I funny here.”
It isn't just the legal structure or how the legal system is structured and what you are working with, which is very different. The different languages but then there's this cultural overlay too, which you have to adjust to, and I would say pretty quickly because you could only learn it by being in the environment and listening to people.
It's absolutely an under area of the law, and you can learn so much from the work that you can do in tribes. People don't learn about that in law school as an option, and it's not taught in law schools as much. It's beginning to be an area that's taught. The University of Washington has a Tribal Law clinic. There aren't a whole lot of those but it isn't a place where you can learn something new.
You can learn so much from the work that you can do in tribal communities. People don't learn about that in law school as an option.
I'm thinking about all the different ways the different tribes operated with their courts, and I can hear their similarities to different things that our courts are trying. Whether you are talking about collaborative courts, integrating mediation, and the decision-making process. There's a lot of those that it's almost like when you are describing your experience, I'm thinking, “That would be a number of different assignments in one court where you are in different areas.” You had a very robust experience but there are corollaries. Not 100% of corollaries to different departments or different types of courts that the state courts have too, so it’s interesting.
It has been an aspect of my career that I loved and miss quite a bit. When I was working for the Nooksack Tribe, which was going through a tremendous upheaval that is still ongoing. Several attorneys and some of whom had come in front of me there. Some who knew me from Lummi came to me and said, “There's going to be an opening on the state Superior Court in Bellingham, and we would like you to apply.”
This was one of those things where I didn't know anyone. I knew hundreds of tribal court judges. I didn't know anyone that had ever made the leap from tribal courts into the state court system. As far as I could tell, it had never happened. We have a hybrid system in Washington where the governor has the ability to appoint if it's not an election year, and then you have to run for election.
This was a gubernatorial appointment. It seemed to me to be absurd to think that the governor would appoint me. Although I had a very successful professional career as a professor, and I had been a Judge for fifteen years at that point. If you don't know what being a judge in tribal court means, then it might as well not have happened. I had countless people tell me that didn't count.
I was like, “Really? I have done all of these areas of law.” It seems like it counted to me but it was a leap of faith and the governor doesn't make it easy. The application process to become appointed is extremely rigorous. The general counsel at the time was Nick Brown, who is now the United States attorney for the State of Washington. A very serious person who took his role in vetting judicial candidates very seriously, and he had worked to revamp that process. The application alone was probably eight pages long, just the application without even putting your name on it.
Only the questions on the application.
Yes. They wanted every lawyer who had ever appeared in front of you. It took hours of work, and then there were these essay-type questions that also took hours to write. By the time I was done, my application was probably close to 25 pages long. When I was done with it, I thought, “I put everything I have got into this.” If he doesn't want to meet me, that's fine. I had an initial interview with Nick Brown. He interviewed all of the candidates. There were about ten. There were probably three people who the proverbial wisdom said were the likely the front runners.
I was in that group. There was one person who I had been friends with for quite a while since I had come to Bellingham. He had tried to talk me out of applying because he was applying. He said, “I will hope you get the next position.” It was the first time I had ever had someone say something to me that direct that he said, “This is my position. I worked for this position.”
Sometimes that can happen in the judicial application process. Even others in the community can come to you and tell you, “Don't apply. This is so-and-so, and I'm going to make sure that so-and-so gets it, and you don't.” All of this crazy stuff that you think, “What? That's not what I think because this position is about doing the right thing,” and all of this other stuff swirling around it.
There was so much conventional wisdom about, “You have to know the governor.” People were saying that this person who had said this to me he's spent the last five years cultivating this relationship with the governor. It's his position. I even had other people saying, “It's good you are putting yourself in the mix.”
Not this time, maybe next time.
Yes, and that was fine. Like I said, from the beginning of applying, I was like, “This is crazy.” I was shocked at the level of politics swirling around it that I didn't know anything about. I got a quick lesson in politics around judicial appointments. I interviewed Nick and then didn't hear anything once again for two months. It was a long time.
I had people calling and texting me. They didn't hear or know anything. These people were saying to me, “I know that this is happening, and I don't know that was happening,” and it turned out none of that was happening. There were people talking to each other. They think they know something but they didn't know anything.
I finally got a call from the governor's office, and it was very difficult to find a time when he was available, and I was available because I was doing a lot of national work. I was traveling all the time. We found a date, and it was about two weeks out, and they said, “You can't tell anyone that this is happening. You can tell your husband but that's it.”
You have to make something up for your employers about where you are going to be if that's necessary. Take a sick day but you can't tell anyone that this is going on or happening. It was weird to be secretive like that, and I had to lie directly to people who then were like, “Have you heard anything else?” I was terrible. I'm not someone who doesn't tell the truth.
I was going to say, I would feel so badly of like, “I'm bad at not telling the truth,” shall we say.
I ducked a lot. For a couple of weeks, I didn't text back, which is not normal because I'm always texting. I had an interview with the governor. I was utterly terrified. I had never been in a room like that before. I was sitting there with all the fancy paintings and the high ceilings. Nick came out, and he had been extremely formal through the whole process. He came out, sat down next to me, and started whispering in my ear about what the questions would be like, “We are all pulling for you on this one. Go in there and kill it.” It was an amazing feeling that you are wanted here. I sat down, and the first thing the governor asked me was, “What do I need to know about tribal courts that I don't already know?” I could talk about that for days.
I started talking about that, and we had a long and meandering conversation. He was asking me about my own expertise. He wanted to know. He said, “There's such a low high school graduation rate for native students. What can I do about that?” He was picking my brain about my own thoughts about stuff. He offered me the job and said, “Do you really want to do this?” I said, “I do.” He said, “Let’s do this.” He shook my hand and the governor's chief of staff, who was also part of the interview, said, “I want you to know, he's never offered this position in the interview to anyone before. I have never seen this.” That was a lovely moment.
Once again, Nick said, “You can't tell anyone. Getting a press release ready. It will take a couple of hours. You can tell your husband but don't tell anyone for a couple of days. You got to hold onto it for a couple more hours. This is going to be like being shot out of a cannon, so put your helmet on. This is going to be huge news. It's not like our other appointments. Our press team is ready but you need to be ready because it's very likely someone will run against you, so you need to be ready to go because the election starts now.”
I was ready. I had done a ton of work behind the scenes to be ready for an election. He was right. It was national news. I will say that there were a lot of people in the Prosecutor's Office. The public defenders were saying, “She has young kids. She can't do it.” There were a lot of people who said, “She has only been in the tribal courts. She's not going to know the State Law.” There were so many misconceptions about what I had been doing and what my skills were but it didn't take long.
I had a lot of people trying to see how far they could push me, and I had learned in my years of judging you, the judge set the tone for your courtroom on day one, and I did that. There were certainly, attempts to try to see like, “Did I know my stuff or not?” Pretty quickly, those folks turned around, and I had a tremendous amount of support in the legal community. I did a lot of upfront work and was happy that nobody ran against me for that position. I was ready to go but it didn't happen. Nobody filed.
Why do you think that was that nobody ended up doing that?
There's one reason, and that is we worked hard on my swearing. I invited all of the tribal chair people from all over the state. There's an email that goes out from the administrative office of the courts inviting all the judges to attend, and so usually, you get a handful of judges to come. I probably had 25 or 30 judges come. The whole luck of my swearing-in was that like, “We are going to support this person.” We were in a room that ended up being the county council room. It was the biggest one we could find but was not big enough.
It was clear that the community was supporting me. There were still many naysayers out there. We had a reception afterward at a museum that was a two-block walk from the courthouse. It looked like we had spent a ton of money to put that together. We had not. We certainly thought about how to do it in a way because I didn't have a ton of money to run a campaign but there were probably 2,000 people that came to that. It was extraordinary. Anybody that wanted was thinking about running was in that event.
I would think, “She either has a war chest or could get a pretty good war chest, and we have to deal with that.”
All the people that had been saying like, “Maybe it's not your time. You are coming into this late,” or whatever. All those people were at that event and were like, “We are so happy it's you.”
Everybody loves to come onboard when you prevail, they come out everywhere. A lot of people claim responsibility for success. That's okay if you embrace it. You bring everyone in, then everyone is in the fold. That's much better. That's so interesting. Both of those things are things that would disincentivize someone from doing that. They would think that you are the lone sheep or something vulnerable but you created the opposite.
Everybody loves to come on board with what you are doing when you prevail.
I don't think any of us expected it to be as big an event as it was. It did. That was the theme from day one was, “Go ahead and try.”
That's clever. It's resonating with me because of you describing the tribal courts and all the different things you have to think of in operating within that realm. This whole societal, cultural component of how things are perceived and all of that. That seems to me like that's the overlay of what you are talking about at your sparring, in a way. What is going to be read in a certain way?
Since I talked to lots of people who've been appointed or who are going through the appointment process, I have talked about the take the advice the governor's office gives you, which is, “The election starts now. As soon as you are appointed, you need to start and be ready.” The governor too gives that advice and also wants to keep the cities appointed where he wants. We were also lucky. We invited the governor, and he came to my swearing.
That does not happen very often.
It doesn't. He gave a speech at the beginning before I was sworn in and made it clear that he was very supportive of my appointment. He did the same when I was appointed to the Supreme Court a few years later. He has been a remarkable piece of my success.
I was going to ask you about that. I had assumed that the governor was the same from the appointment to Superior Court and then the Supreme Court. How did that happen? That's pretty quick from the Superior Court to Supreme Court.
I was on a Superior Court for five years. I enjoyed being on the trial court. It was an opportunity for me to do the thing I had wanted to do since the day I walked into law school, which was to bring together what I knew about the law and also work with the people. It was impacting.
I was thinking that it's the most direct way where you can impact individual people on a day-to-day basis.
At the time, Chief Justice Fairhurst had announced her retirement. I was presiding over drug court. I was doing a lot of things in the community that I cared about. I was not thinking about the Supreme Court. I knew several of the justices from other work I had was doing in the state, being on committees and doing public speaking and stuff. I looked at those justices, even the ones I knew as being at this other level. They seemed untouchable in a way, even though I would say that I was friends with a couple of them and friendly with a couple of others. I still thought of them on this other level.
That's residual from clerking too. I have always had that. There's an element of you looking up to them. They are a little bit idolizing, especially the ones that you know. It's hard to get over that. It starts with the clerkship, and then it carries on.
Chief Justice Fairhurst announced her retirement, and she did it right around the end of October 2019. As soon as she announced her retirement, a couple of the justices that I was friends with called me and said, “You are coming up to Bellingham, and we would like to talk to you about applying for this position.” I said, “This is a difficult time, personally. My husband had finished treatment for cancer. I had a child who was struggling.” Both my kids were struggling with various issues in school and other things.
The idea of taking on a new job that was that new job. It was like, “This is not the time.” One of the justices said, “Maybe it is the time. Maybe if you shake things up a little bit, it will help. It gives you a new perspective. These jobs don't open up very often, and this would be historic. You have to think about more than yourself.” I was like, “How dare you?” Maybe now is the time for me to say, “No. I'm going to not do that.”
My husband and I met up with a couple of the justices. One of the things that were very stressful, as I talked about the appointment to the Superior Court, took forever. It was months. The governor announced maybe the day after the announcement of her retirement, “This is going to be a quick appointment process.” What I understood later, when I talked to Chief Justice Fairhurst, she said, “I don't want there to be eight justices. There needs to be nine.” When I talked to the governor that I was retiring, I said, “I want it. It's got to be back-to-back.”
In place when I leave, and that is.
She said, “The day I retire, you need to swear someone. At least know that they are going to be sworn in when the term starts.” By the calendar, that was about 30 days, and I thought, “There’s no way. I can't fill out that application.” I thought it was impossible. We met with a couple of the justices and with my husband there, and we talked about what it took to run an election. They both said, “You will get a challenger. Every justice of color has gotten a challenger. You need to know that it's very expensive.” They talked to me about how much money they needed to have a war test and be ready to go. I never had to do it. I never had a challenger. After that first day, it never happened.
Every justice of color has gotten a challenger, and facing them is very expensive.
Running a statewide campaign and having to put a team together, it was all overwhelming. I thought I will apply. Someone, one of my long-term mentors, said to me, “Give the governor the opportunity to apply the first native person to the Supreme Court. If he doesn't take it, that's fine, but give him the opportunity to do so. Think about what it would mean to our communities if you were to get it.” That had a big impact on me because I knew what it felt like to look around and not see anybody doing what your next step was going to be.
I applied. I put my application together very quickly, and then I was not happy with it. I hadn't it in yet, and I woke up at 4:00 in the morning one morning and thought, “It's not my voice. I need to redo it.” I was writing it the way I thought a Supreme Court justice would sound or whatever that means. I rewrote it in a couple of hours and thought, “Now it sounds like me. I have said what my beliefs are about what this job is. If he doesn't want to take that risk, that's okay. I'm not going to pretend I'm somebody that I'm not to get this position.”
I sent him in. The governor cares about the Minority Bar interviews. There are probably ten of them. The Veterans Bar has its own judicial evaluation process. The Latino/Latina Bar has its own process. There are all of these different groups, and so you go and interview with all of them. It's a tremendously time-consuming thing.
The governor specifically asked all of those groups to have a voice. He said, “Put these people in, please. I want to know what you think.” Prosecutors Association does a wide range. I did all of those interviews, and they do. They are exceptionally well-qualified rating. I got exceptionally well qualified from almost all of them. I went to an interview with the prosecuting attorneys, who had maybe six elected prosecutors and a couple of people that ran the organization itself.
That was the most hostile group of people I have ever met to my application. I had one prosecutor physically turn his back to me when I started talking about communities that were oppressed by legal systems. He was totally offended that I would even acknowledge that was the case. It was very hard because it was clear when I walked in that I was like, “This isn't going to go well.”
It was also an education for me because I still had to do the interview. Even though I stayed true to who I was. I didn't try to pretend to be someone else to get their approval because that was so I wasn't going to get it from the beginning. You don't usually have to be in those rooms for a long time with people who are disdainful of your views. I learned a lot from having a conversation with those folks who were not supportive of the idea, even though our systems have a greater impact on communities of color.
Even that simple concept that is supported by every data point you can look at. They were unwilling to recognize. I go back to that conversation in my head a lot now because I don't want to talk to the people who already are convinced by what we are writing as a court now. I want to bring more people into those conversations.
It was a very quick process, and the governor's council interviewed all of the candidates. I can't remember how many there were. I got a call Monday. He can't remember exactly what happened. I got a call on the Monday before Thanksgiving to come in the next day and meet with the governor. I interviewed with him. It was, “Justice, you had said to me once when I was in this part of the applying process.” She said, “You got to know the law. He was going to ask you about the law.” I thought, “I can't know all the laws.”
“What does that mean? Which law?”
I tried. I started looking at all these cases and thought, “This is not how I work. If I get a case, then I learn the law. I don't know what to read.” I gave up on that. Again, it was a very thoughtful interview. He didn't ask me about the law. He asked me about what I do when there are controversial things and how I handle being in the public eye. He did ask me, “What do you think about this thing that the court did? Would you do things differently?” Great questions, and it was a long conversation.
He said, “Do you have any questions for me?” I said, “I want to know if you are worried about me winning the election.” He said, “No. I'm not worried about you. There are other candidates I would be concerned about but I'm not worried about you.” I'm so glad I asked that question because, in the dark moments of the election, I would remember him saying, “I'm confident that you can win an election.”
I then left. He didn't offer it to me at the moment. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, right before I went into our drug court staffing, I got a phone call from the general counsel and he said, “Can you take a call from the governor in five minutes, and you don't say no to that.” He called me and offered me the position. I took it, and then they said, “We are going to announce it the next week.” It was on another week.
There's a formal process for how they announce. It was much more structured than the way they announced it. It wasn't through a press release. I will say that. There's this formal walk where nobody knows who it's going to be, the door is open, and it's the governor and the appointee. The only person who knew was Chief Justice Fairhurst. She knew.
There were people in the Supreme Court building that they were guessing, “It's going to be this person.” I went from being a fairly private person to that walk across the legislative law into the Temple of Justice. I walked from that into my first press conference, for which I had no training and no practice. I had never done that before, and that was being a shout-out. It was remarkable and has been a wild ride ever since.
It's such an amazing story. You said, “It's not a good time. There's a lot going on, personally,” which is so true. That resonates with many women. There are other things that you are doing in your life and that you are responsible for, and you go, “This is not a good time on top of that,” but part of the answer is there's never a perfect time.
There's never going to be a perfect time for me to take this job required to move. To move down to Olympia. There was a lot involved, and I had a great community in Bellingham. Moving down here was a big change. The job itself is a huge change. I did have to run a contested election. I did it during COVID, so it was, in some respects, easier because I can be in 5 different parts of the state in 1 night sitting at my office.
There will never be a perfect time to become a justice. It requires you to move at once.
It was much more efficient. If I try to find blessings from COVID, that would be one of them.
It was a silver lining. I don't know how I would have done it otherwise. People say that I'm sure I would have figured out a way to do it but it was exhausting either way. I was learning the job, and at the same time, I was learning how to run this statewide election in a way that nobody had ever done before. The overlay of the fear that first year around COVID. It was a lot.
There was a lot going on in your life that you knew about at the beginning of the process, and then there was even more, you couldn't anticipate on top of that. You are enjoying it and glad you did it, at least some days.
I am glad that I did it. I have to think hard about what I say yes to and what I say no to. I exhausted myself in the first couple of years by trying to do everything. Do all the public speaking. Do all that the committees do. It was too much. I have done a lot coming in. I was already exhausted because of all the things that were going on in my personal life and the work that I was doing anyway. This term, I have made a conscious effort to say no to most extra things and focus on the work that we are doing in the court and what we are doing, both in terms of opinion writing and rulemaking.
Having these broader conversations about what the court is doing but the extra public speaking thing, I have ratcheted down because it is more than I can do and still be good at the job. The work that we are doing at Washington State Supreme Court is incredible. I forget that sometimes because I want things to move faster and I'm like, “I'm here. Let's go.”
The law moves slower than I want it to move but I'm very grateful every day to be able to do the job, and I have incredible colleagues that I learn from. I learn from all of them every day. The conferences that we have when we are finished hearing cases after oral arguments are often tense because you have different views, and they are totally private like every other Supreme Court. No one else gets to see that but I wish they did because we have tremendous respect for each other. We listen and people change their minds.
I was going to say that with most people, that's always the debate. “Does the oral argument make a difference and all of that?” It's nice to know that it is considered and that it can make a difference.
It can, and I didn't think it did. I know for myself that I don't feel like I fully understand a case until an oral argument. Almost every time, there is a moment where I go, “I hope that's what this case is about.” That's the thing I always tell or counsel if I ever I'm in a position where we have a public discussion after an oral argument which we do sometimes.
It truly is a conversation, and you know your case better than I'm ever going to know it. Even though I have law clerks who are preparing me, you have to bring me along in a way where I can have that moment of like, “This person thinks this case is about this.” I have this moment where everything comes together, and sometimes it's different from either of the two.
If you add that up amongst the nine of us, we have interesting conversations during the conference. Sometimes they are long and short but they are always done in a respectful way. I wish people could see what we are doing in those conferences because it's a model of having complicated conversations in a way that's honest and full of those hard questions and often disagreements. Often very heartfelt disagreements but we still have to maintain those relationships because then you can move on to the next case. It has been a process for me to learn how to do that and be an effective part of that conversation.
What about brief writing? Any tips in brief writing for advocates that would make things helpful for you?
People have a tendency to put everything they can think of in a brief, and I don't think that's a good strategy. I connect with the briefs that are simply written and boil it down to 2 or 3 things that are the most important pieces of the case because that's what I'm looking for anyway. We pretty regularly get requests for overlength briefs, and they are almost always granted. I have never seen one where I thought, “It was worth reading the extra five pages.”
I understand that council feels like I have to say this but I don't think it's useful. The more you can give the case to us and in a way that imagines having the amount of reading we are doing. You want to stand, and the way to do that is to simplify the argument that you are making and tell us what you want. I can't remember if it was me or if it was Justice Gordon McLeod but one of us said, “What is it that you want here? What do you want us to do?” One of them said, “I don't disagree with anything that my opposing counsels.”
That was the genesis of the question. I was like, “If you agree, why are we here? What do you want from us? What do you want us to say?” It was a peculiar case but that's what I would say to anyone who's writing a brief and ask themselves every section of the brief. “Tell me what you want?” It can be the most artful legal argument that has ever been written. If I don't know what you want, it's not going to get me there. That's important to me.
There's a lot of work that goes into appellate work that's trying to read the tea leaves of the court, and I don't think that's helpful at least in my experience with my eight colleagues. It's not all predictable to each. We get these cases that are like, “We have got to learn about Insurance Law and this one issue. I got to figure that out.” The lawyers know it better than I do in many respects.
Trying to think about these minuscule ways to talk to the court about these tiny points of law that's not what we are looking for. You want to tell us, “Give us the context and why it matters.” Sometimes, it's going to be the only time we ever deal with that piece of law. Understanding how it fits in everything else is something that I'm looking for because I want to know why this small aspect of the law matters and how it fits in the big picture.
I think of it as a stream like the law is a stream, and then where does this particular piece fit in that? It's like a rock. Where does it go, and does it change the direction of the stream? Is that okay or does it not? Am I okay with that? That's how I think about it.
Think of law as a stream. See where it flows then ask yourself if you are okay with the direction it is going.
That's a useful way to think about it. Every case is the most important case at that moment, and so we do have to think about what's the impact of it downstream is in your metaphor, I would say.
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this, especially since I know you are trying to streamline anything extra and extra commitment. I'm so honored that you are willing to have this particular conversation, and it has been lovely. You are such an interesting person in so many different ways and the way you think about things. These are captivating stories. I appreciate you doing this. It has been enjoyable.
Thank you. I appreciate that, and I have had the opportunity to listen to a couple of the other folks that you've interviewed. It's a great project that you are doing. I'm honored to be a part of it.
Thank you so much. They are interesting. Everyone is interesting.
Everybody has such fascinating stories.
I'm glad you have been able to enjoy those also. I usually do a little lightning round but I will do a couple of them since we have had such a great discussion so far. If you had a dinner party, who would you invite as guests?
I would love to have the Obamas at my table. I would love to hear what their experiences were. Oddly enough, I would be interested in talking to Jimmy Chin who's a filmmaker and a rock climber. He made extraordinary films about climbers. I'm not a climber myself but I'm very interested in people that do physical things to the extreme. I would love to have him and his wife. Both have made films that I find to be incredibly fascinating. I would also have a comedian who is my favorite podcaster, Jimmy Pardo, who is ridiculous but somehow, because I listen to it twice a week. It feels like a friend of mine.
You are like, “I know him.”
I certainly don't. His particular sense of humor is fairly unique, and I would love to hear that from him. Any number of folks from native communities that I would love to hear from but I always learn from elders in communities, particularly the women. I would love to have a couple of local elders come and talk about the native communities in the area that I have moved to because I don't know a lot about those tribes, although there are 4 or 5 of them.
You mentioned about climbing too because the climbing community is supportive and collaborative. I have noticed when I have done that there's a focus on what you've talked about in terms of helping each other and having that sense of community for a greater interest. The interest is in conquering the mountain or doing something that you share and it's not ego-driven in that same way, at least amongst each other. Interesting group. Last question. What is your motto, if you have one?
I have stolen it, and it's a tattoo on my arm. I love standup comedians, and I don't know if you know who Patton Oswalt is but he was married to a woman who was a true crime writer. She passed away a few years ago, and Patton Oswalt finished the book she was writing. It's called I'll Be Gone in the Dark and is a terrifying book. She solved the case even though she was not alive to see it. She had all the pieces, and a couple of other people put it together through genealogy and police work and arrested this person who was a long-time serial killer in Washington who had turned out to be a former police officer.
She would say to Patton when he was frustrated and trying to do the thing that all of us try to do, which is to try to organize the world in a way to try to make it make sense. She would always say to him, “It's chaos, just be kind.” It's a standup piece, and it's available on Netflix. It’s called Annihilation, where he talks about the loss of his wife and tells his daughter that her mom died. He talks about that theme, and it struck me. My motto has been, “Do justice.” I added that to my motto. “It's chaos. Be kind and do justice.”. It's partially proven.
It's lots of different things. You are an eclectic thinker, so it fits with all of that. That's a beautiful way to end and encapsulates a lot of our discussion and who you are. Thank you so much for doing this and for joining the show and having this great discussion.
The world will always be chaotic. Be kind and stay on the side of justice.
Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.
It was beautiful. Thank you.