Interview with Lola Jean Darling
Sophie Ziegler interview Lola Jean Darling
Lola is a trans woman and uses she/her pronouns. We talk about growing up on the Pearl River Choctaw Reservation, Choctaw trans identities, colonization, and reclaiming and reconcontextualizing tradition.
Interviewee: Lola Jean Darling
Interviewer: Sophie Ziegler
Transcriber: Sophie Ziegler
August 27, 2021
Sophie Ziegler: And now that the recording is in progress, let me just pull up my little script. This is Sophie Ziegler, sitting down remotely with Lola Jane Darling. Lola is a Trans woman and uses she/her pronouns. Today is Friday, August 27, 2021. We’re meeting remotely because the Covid-19 pandemic is just always, always always.
Lola, as we discussed before, this interview is part of the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project. The goal is to gather real-world examples of what it means to be trans in Louisiana here in the early 21th Century, and to share these with our trans community, and also to the world. We do so by posting transcriptions and interviews, in part and in whole at times, on the project’s website and through our social media accounts, as well as other initiatives to share the stories include podcasts, and zines. You will also have the opportunity, if you wish, to donate your interview to the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at LSU for long-term preservation and access.
Please know that you can stop this interview at any time, that’s very important, and if you have any questions about this or anything else you can reach out to me at any time. Please also know that these interviews are a joint project between me and you; you’ll have a chance to review the transcripts, and any portion of them can be de-identified or restricted as you deem necessary.
I’ll just ask for a verbal confirmation that this is why we are here today
Lola Jean Darling [01:29]: Yes, absolutely
Ziegler: Fantastic. Thank you so much with that level of formality, out of the way, Lola, I would love to just start at the beginning, can you tell us where and when you were born?
Darling: Yeah, I was born on the Pearl River Choctaw reservation in 1982. That's in Mississippi, about a four hour drive from Bulbancha, which is New Orleans
Ziegler: How long did you live on the reservation?
Darling: I lived there until I was 22. I moved to Meridian, Mississippi after leaving the reservation and I lived there for about six months and then Katrina happened. And you know, I wasn't doing anything anyway, so I moved up to Olympia, Washington for a couple years. And then I spent some time hopping trains. And lived in Texas for a couple years before moving here and I've been living here in Bulbancha for close to nine years.
Ziegler [02:53]: That sounds like a lot to circle back on, I wonder if you could tell us, maybe, if you wouldn't mind spending -- .
[cross talk]
Darling: I said I'm complicated.
Ziegler: I love it, it makes for good interviewing. So you are the first interviewee that we've had on the project that has at least spoken about living on a reservation and I wonder if you would be willing to say a little bit more about that, especially for those of us who might not have had the opportunity to visit.
Darling: Do you have any like specific questions?
Ziegler: Yeah absolutely, so normally what we try to do is, we're trying to build a juxtaposition between other places you've lived in the places in Louisiana that you've lived. So I generally ask like big floppy questions like, What was it like growing up in your town in the town you grew up. I'm just trying to get a sense of like the community that you lived in and and you were there until you were 22 so it also be curious about whether or not you are, you know how you thought of your gender, like where you may have been on your agenda journey or however, it is that you tend to phrase that.
Darling [03:55]: So the reservation in the 80s, in the first half of the 90s was almost like a snapshot of 50 years before. There were very few paved roads. Everyone had gardens and animals. Animals you would eat or use for labor. You would walk down the road going to the co-op to get groceries and you'd see old Choctaw women sitting on their porches just in these full, they're really they're not really Choctaw dresses they they're adapted Choctaw dresses but they're German strudel dresses and that's our “traditional”, colonized dress, modern dress. But they just be sitting on the porch in these beautiful dresses, you know, shelling peas, and if they called you over you had to go help them until the task was done.
I think the biggest similarity is community and mutual aid. If you're walking in the middle of nowhere and someone pulled up, they immediately would be like, Are you stranded do you need help? can we give you a ride? And boom, it would happen. If you needed groceries you could go to your neighbor and I'm not saying all that has changed but there's definitely been less focus on a transference of the traditions, since the casinos opened. You know, a lot of our elders have died not just from old age, but Covid hit really, really hard on the reservation. At one point I don't know I don't know what the stats are now but at one point we were the hardest hit area in the country we're a tribe of 12,000 and in two months we buried 120 people. So this past year's been pretty traumatic.
[06:30] Growing up on the rez is pretty traumatic. There's a lot of abuse, there's a lot of alcoholism. There's a lot of colonized mentalities. Especially once the casinos came. All of a sudden it was bad to be traditional. I got talked down to a lot for going to ceremony and going to a ----, which is the sweat lodge. Because we're supposed to be a modern tribe and they talk about how successful we are. And they talk about how successful we are, but all that success is money. And it's not money that the people have, it's money that the tribal government has and generates. But I grew up in extreme poverty, and there's still a lot of people in extreme poverty there.
[07:52] But there's something, and I can't put it into words, about growing up around your people. I realized this going through Boston with my friend Button who's Puerto Rican. She grew up in Pensacola. We happen to pull in to Boston on Puerto Rican Pride Day. And she rolled down her window and started screaming, with tears just streaming down her face That's when I've realized that all these years I've been taking that I grew up around my people, that I grew up with my language. I grew up with people who looked like me. And around my tradition. It was very, I don't know about life-changing, but it was very eye-opening. I don't think I've ever thought about my experience on the reservation the same since then. It really opened me up to appreciating the beauty that's there as well. And just like New Orleans. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in this city that is traumatic. It's traumatic to witness, it's traumatic to deal with the aftermath even if you weren't involved in the actual happenings. And I think that's one of the things that we hold precious here in Bulbancha is the Afro-Indiginous culture that thrives here. It's the spirit. It's the soul of Bulbancha.
Ziegler: [09:46]: Do you mind if I ask, do you make it back to the reservation often?
Darling: I went last year a few times. My big sister opened up a donation center at the old Dollar General when they shut the casinos down. Because the casinos are the main source of employment for everybody. So the casinos got shut down and nobody had money for anything. So I started gathering donations, monetary and material. And once every couple of weeks I would drive down to or up to the rez and drop stuff off. And I'd CashApp my sister all the time and stuff.
[10:44] But I didn't grow up with my big sister. My immediate family that I grew up with, that are still on the reservation, is my mom and my two brothers and their kids, and they all live in the same house. It's been really hard because they don't fully understand what's going on with me and they won't ask questions. It's frustrating. I showed up and I didn't feel like I was being treated like a member of the family anymore. I've talked to my mom and everything about it. My brothers won't walk to me. It's just words. I can't trust anything until I see that they want to take an active role in my life. It's sad but, you know, it is what it is. At the end of the day I'm a more full and honest version of myself and I hold on to that dearly. I take a lot of pride in who I've become and who I'm becoming.
Ziegler [12:12]: Lola, I wanted to ask you also about, while you were living there, whether you were out at all. But let me pause first because I know you just touched on a lot of really heavy things. Are you okay? Do you want to stand up for a minute?
Darling: Oh, I'm fine. If I cry, I cry all the time. I cried watching Vivo the other day.
Ziegler: Okay. I want to be sensitive and responsive and responsible.
Darling: My superpower is vulnerability and emotion.
Ziegler: If you do want to take a break, please know that you can. You're just as much in control of everything happening here as anyone else.
Darling: I appreciate that
Ziegler: So, to the extent that you feel comfortable talking about it, you're speaking as though it makes it sounds like you might not have been out while you were on the reservation and that going home now is the big change. Is that right?
Darling [13:13]: I only realized I was a trans woman four years ago, four and a half years ago and I'm 39. The source of that realization was that I was having a conversation with my roommate about how my accent is an affectation. Because when I realized I was moving off the reservation, I knew that I couldn't have a reservation accent. Not knew. I felt that I couldn't have a reservation accent and not be treated lesser. I'm really good at mimicking accents, so I worked really really hard to affect the flat, Midwestern, white American accent. And the tragedy is I now feel like the reservation accent is my authentic original accent and has become the affectation. Why did I start talking about this?
Ziegler: You were talking about four and a half year ago
Darling [14:31] : Oh right. I process a lot through verbalizing. So this conversation just went on and on, just layers being peeled off. And like four hours into ripping every last piece of skin from my body I was like, Damn, I'm a girl. But as soon as I realized it, I fucking knew. I knew it and there was no question in my mind about when I was going to come out to anybody or anything like that. I was immediately like, 'Yo, so I'm a girl now these are my pronouns. Respect me.' I've been on E for a year and a half and it's been four and a half of the most traumatic, and wonderful, and fulfilling and horrible years of my adult life. And I would never take that decision back. Because when you realize your authentic self, your true self, you can love you and I love me. I enjoy being me. It's pretty great.
Ziegler: That's beautiful. I like that a lot. You're saying four and half years ago, so this would have been while you were in New Orleans.
Darling: Yeah, yes.
Ziegler: That might be an okay segue. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you ended up in New Orleans. What it was that drew you here. You know, so you were in Olympia, Washington and Texas.
Darling [16:34]: New Orleans has that Southern mystique. And for a lot of people in the general area, relative, it's like the big city. What's the closest city to the reservation? Jackson? I'm not moving to Jackson, you know.
I moved to Olympia and I was actually homeless for six years. Ended up moving back to Meridian for like six months to record an album. And I was living under a bridge, the 22nd Avenue bridge. During that time I met my soon-to-be ex-wife. Her name is Darcee, she's wonderful, we're like best friends. We were together for like five years and then we weren't together. I had gone out to California to farm for a season to make some money for our honeymoon that we were about to take. While I was up there she decided she didn't want to be in a relationship with me. Which, all of her reasoning was fine. She was six years younger than I was, and she felt like she was missing out on her twenties. And I totally got that. So I took the money that I made in California I gave her a little bit, and moved to Austin, Texas. We were living in --, Texas at the time. So I moved to Austin. I lived there for about four months and for one of those months I worked in San Antonio, another month I worked in Wimberly, and another month I came here. I had a couple of friends who were living here from Mississippi and one of them, one of my best friends Clair Woods was like, Hey Lola, I really think you should move here. You can stay on my couch for as long as you need to, to you get your feet on the ground or whatever. I so I was like, I hate Austin. Austin is a void of just the worst culture, it's just awful. Being on and off in Texas for a while, I tried to be a musician there but I don't have a weak, white bread voice. So no one wanted to hear it. Which is fine. These are all good things for me because it lead me to Bulbancha and the place where I truly feel at home. I have a community here and it's a strong community and I have a couple of things in the works that are tradition- and community-based that I have really positive feelings about for the future. So yeah, I moved here from Austin, that was eight or nine years ago.
Ziegler [20:34]: Not necessarily to mention people's specific names, but I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the community that you've been able to establish where you are now. Maybe what kind of identities, whether you feel like it's a trans community
Darling: Actually my friend group is truly diverse. I've never fit in anywhere. And I've never wanted to fit in anywhere. I love people but they annoy me. You know, ego gets old and when you're in a homogenous circle then it's an echo chamber. It's not something that I intentionally try to do, it's just that I like hanging out with a lot of different types of people. It gives me perspective and I hope that I give them perspective. I know that I do. It becomes an honest, real exchange of culture and ideas and spirit.
But, having said that, I'm working a little bit with this disabled trans man who's Black Indiginous. His name's Uhuru and he's just one the most amazing people I've ever met. He's an amazing artist. He's an amazing activist. The first time I met him was at a POC music festival on St. Claud called Deep Cuts. I don't even remember how we hit it off. His band was playing the next day, so he wasn't playing, so we just sat outside. My favorite activity: sitting outside the venue smoking cigarettes and drink wine, and I was like, This person is amazing. We just kept in touch, they were from L.A. He eventually moved here. He contacted me maybe about a year ago and said, Hey, I just found out that I have Choctaw ancestry and I was wondering if you could teach me a little bit about the culture. And it took a while because of Covid and everything but every two weeks or so I go to ---'s and we talk about Choctaw culture and we talk about American culture and we talk about colonialism, we talk shit about white people. The last time I was there we started on a piece of art. And we trade each other's music, like we trade each others' Band Camp music. The first little meeting that we had, there was like this palpable electricity in the air.
What I want to do is help to teach specifically Black Choctaw people about their culture, because it's a birthright that was taken away from them and they need to know that this is their home as much as it ours. They have a rightful place in the culture, in the story, and that's been taken away from them. There are so many people out there that are maybe not as knowledgeable as they think they are, or have -- I wouldn't say nefarious, it's the first word that comes to mind -- but not fully honest intentions. There's a lot of focus on white-passing Natives. Because they have the resources, and that's who tends to give the speeches and have the money and get the attention. And I just want to do something to counteract that. I'm beginning to just teach, to teach out ways. And there's not a whole lot of it left. But I grew up in the culture and I know a lot about it and I have the knowledge to give and I want to give it. That's something I'm proud of, that I'm working on. Like, ambiently, because if I try to do something then I'm gonna fuck it up. But if I just let it happen, and let it allow me to be a part of it then cool things happen.
Ziegler [26:42]: You have a beautiful turn of phrase. I know that you have … Sometimes when I do these interviews, Lola, I feel really one track. Because I’m always like, I wanna talk about trans things, when obviously there’s a whole world out there and I want to hear so much about what you have going on in your life. But I do have this question, which I jotted down for myself before our interview started. So you're a musician. You’ve been a musician for a while. I’m actually a really big fan of everything I’ve heard from you. But everything I’ve heard from you has been from the last couple of years. I wonder if you have any thoughts about how as an artist, and in this case I mostly mean a musician, whether or not your coming out as trans and starting to transition, I wonder if that’s affected your music in a way you can recognize or verbalize.
Darling: It definitely has. More recently it has. I have spurts of writing. I’ll write like 15 really good songs and just float on that for five years, like any musician. In 2019, Dia De Los Muertos at the Art Garage was the last show I played. I decided after that show that I was done performing, because we mainly perform in white spaces and it’s always cis white men walking away with money. I just don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t like playing in bars. The whole ego trip of a performance and the exploitation, it’s just too much for me at this point. “I’m in too deep to the revolution, man”
Ziegler [29:17]: Is that your bar performer voice?
Darling: I don’t know! I don’t know anymore.
[Laughing and cross talk]
Darling: I haven’t performed in forever. But last year I was in Montgomery, Alabama with a person I was dating. We had done a bottle of mezcal. You know, we drank it and I decided it was a good time to get a lift over to the garage … Guitar Center, not garage. I was like, Let’s go to Guitar Center and I’m gonna fucking get a ukulele because it’s the perfect apocalypse instrument. Cause I’ve got cute little sausage fingers that can’t, you know, really play a tenor or soprano ukulele very effectively at all. And so we went to Guitar Center and I got this ukulele and I’ve been working really hard over the past year to find myself again. Because I had developed a whole ass style before, which was kind of like, I wanted to be the perfect mixture of Al Green and Tom Waits. And, I was pretty fucking good at it. But I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to find my true voice again.
And that’s part of what the album I put out in February is an attempt at. Dream Queen. All those songs are, the chord structures and lyrics are completely improvised and I did some sound editing adding cute little boop bops stuff. But I have probably a hundred and twenty tracks of 60-90 second songs. And they’re fully realized ideas that are all improvised and stuff and that album grew out of doing that. I would just come home from work everyday and just play for 60 seconds and then say whatever. So long as I don’t think, God forbid I think. I listen to Dream Queen and I’m really proud of that album. It’s an attempt to develop and find a more authentic voice than, you know, Tom Green, Tom Waits, Al Tomson.
Ziegler [32:44]: That’s really interesting. I have a question here that I tend to ask people in part because we’re in the South and also I keep asking because I get some very interesting, insightful answers to this. Do you consider yourself religious at all?
Darling [33: 02]: I … oh god … I hate to say it, but I consider myself more spiritual than religious. I think that whatever’s going on, we just physically don’t have the capacity to understand it. It’s so far beyond us. I think it’s easy to say ‘Atheist’ and rely on, what am I looking for, the uncaring universe. Just everything happens randomly and blah blah blah. And I’m not discounting that that might be the deal too, but I’ve led a really weird life. I’ve led a really, really weird life. There’s no reason. There’s no logical way that I should be sitting here right now talking to you. No one leaves the reservation. And we were so poor. And the sequence of events to even, the big things that have influenced me throughout my adulthood, it’s hard to say that it’s random. I don’t think that there’s some kind of … I don’t know. I don’t know anything, but you know, when I’m creating art, when I’m creating music I do feel close to Hashtahli, which is an ancient Choctaw deity and I do feel close to the ancestors. And there are times when I’m creating something and it all comes together, that moment when you know something’s done. And I step back and I just know that, I just feel that I didn’t do this alone.
I’m a very simple girl. No, no I’m not. Who am I fucking kidding? But, I don’t know. I don’t know, Sophie. I’m not religious. I hate religion. Choctaws didn’t have a religious practice. We were, Hashtahli is a deity of sorts, but using that word is weird. It’s weird to try to describe an indiginous spirituality in English. English is an inherent violence to me. And even something like our word for a trans woman is Hattukholba, meaning a person; --- meaning … something, some thing that can’t be fully expressed in English. I mean something other than a person, or the appearance of a person or something. And that’s kind of a big thing in my life right now, really working to reclaim tradition and also recontextualize. And the thing about culture and especially indiginous culture and why oral history is so important is because the stories change by who’s telling it. It changes in context, and the notes that are important in a story change with what’s going on around you. And instead of relying on text that were written two thousand years ago, it's relevant now. The story you’re hearing, it’s relevant now. Because the person who is telling it is inside that relevance. So culture is never meant to be stagnant, but since colonization it’s stayed pretty fucking stagnant. I mean we haven’t had a new Choctaw chant since 1940, and that’s the Racoon Dance and it’s literally a children’s version of racoon. The word for racoon is Shawi, and the song is ---. For like five minutes. That’s basically it. The dance is Duck Duck Goose. So, almost a hundred years and we have not had a real change in the culture and therefore it’s fading. So it’s important to me to not only reclaim culture but recontextualize it for me and my existence in this time. Unfortunately I can’t like, sit in a hut eating weird herbs thinking about all this shit and have the hunters and the farmers bring me food. That would be great, I would love that. I don’t even remember the question.
Ziegler [39:44]: And that’s why I love this question. I asked you if you’re religious at all.
Darling: Oh yeah
Ziegler: We get some of the most wonderful answers. And I’m really glad that you, that it tied in enough for you to talk about a lot of that. But perhaps mostly the Choctaw word for trans woman or term for what would be mapped on to that. I appreciate that a lot.
Darling [40:12]: Can I tell you about the whole thing?
Ziegler: That’d be wonderful
Darling: So you had the cis women who were the life givers. So they did the farming cause they gave life. And the cis men who were hunters. They couldn’t give life so they took it, they provided meat. Then you had the trans men and the word for trans men is Hattukiklanna, meaning the person who is in the middle, in between. The person who can give life but chooses to take life. To walk the path of the hunter. It’s all about the function, right, those societies were all about what we do to survive and live. Which is why we didn’t care too much about religion. We danced because dancing is fun. We sang because singing is fun. Those were our main spiritual practices, that and talking. If someone wanted to give a treatise on something, like any time, people would build makeshift like cover out of thatch or whatever for people to sit under while the orator gave his TED talk, their TED talk. That’s why Hatkhola, the definition I’m kind of grappling with at this time, is a person who does not have the capability to give life, chooses not to take life. It only makes sense that they would be the person of medicine. They would be the person who figured out what plants do what, who ate the mushrooms and thought weird esoteric thoughts. I’ve eaten a lot of mushrooms and acid and I’m also very bad at growing things and I refuse to kill things. So it all made sense. It’s not a separation of like they’re not a person, but their function is completely different from that of anyone else in the tribe.
Ziegler [43:36]: That’s all wonderful and I really appreciate that. I’ve never had the opportunity to have that explained before. I wonder, how do you know that? In the sense that, is this something that’s openly talked about in the Choctaw community?
Darling: No. Not at all. As far as I know, me and my littlest brother Gomez are the only out trans people who came from the reservation I came from. Part of the reason it took me so long was not having the language. The language that I knew were ‘Transexual’ and ‘Transvestite’. I don’t like doctors or pain. Well, only emotional. I just feel like if I had enough money to get surgery done, I could think of a million other things that have nothing to do with me that I could use that money for. And ‘Transvestite,’ always carries with it a fetish. Not even of stigma, just a connotation of fetishism. And when I would women’s clothing, when I would wear femme clothing, it just felt right. I wasn’t horny about it, I just felt good about it. So none of it made sense to me. And also growing up on the reservation we had the idea that everything was for everybody else and nothing was for you. So it never crossed my mind until that moment sitting at that table on Galvez that I could be a trans woman and then all of a sudden the possibility was real.
Ziegler: So how were you able to educate yourself about the tradition?
Darling: Talking with online communities. Doing my own research. I do a decolonized walk around the French Quarter about the Choctaw history, or indiginous history of New Orleans. So I do a lot of research and once I found out about Hattukiklanna and Hatkhola I had to know. We had words for it, you know what I mean, we had words for it. So the tradition was there. It’s no longer there but it was. And I’ve found nothing. Found nothing. So honestly as a Choctaw person and knowing how we were as a people this is the most logical conclusion I could come up with. It makes complete sense to me and honestly that’s what matters.
Ziegler [47:29]: So your learning of those terms, was that before or after the conversation in which you realized you’re a woman? I guess what I’m doing is trying to figure out if those words helped you figure out who you are
Darling: No, no no. I found out about those words a couple of years ago.
Ziegler: I see, that’s what I was trying to get at. Apologies for being so clumsy with that
Darling: It’s totally fine. I’m a scatterbrain. I jump around, I’m tangential constantly
Ziegler: No, that’s totally fine and all of this is just so wonderful. This is such a benefit I think, to have your perspective on all of this. I want to be conscious that I’ve kept you talking for a whole hour. So normally what we do is we end on this: Just to reiterate this is a project where we’re collecting oral histories with the hope of helping each other now, right, so contextually relevant because it’s our lives right now. And also historically relevant in that at least portions of these are going to saved and be the quote unquote history of Louisiana, or added to the history
Darling: Totally and you know, Louisiana history is Choctaw history. Bulbancha is a Choctaw word. And there’s plenty of Choctaw people still living in Bulbancha. I feel honored and humbled to be able to add to the cacophony.
Ziegler: I appreciate it. And what I was going to ask was, whether or not you have any last, departing words for this interview. If you can imagine someone coming across this interview in about 30 or 40 years, 50 years, either the audio or a transcript of it that they find in an archive somewhere, I wonder if there’s any last thoughts you’d like to leave with them about what it means to you, here and now.
Darling: Me specifically?
Ziegler: Yeah, your experience here, yeah.
Darling: Community is the most important thing. I would not be the person I am today, and I’m so proud of who I am, I’m so proud of the path I’m on and the person I’m becoming, and that would not be possible if not for the people I surround myself with in my mind and the community that I hold in my heart.
Ziegler: That’s lovely. Thank you again for joining us. I’m going to go ahead and stop the recording.