Episode Three - Interview with Lola Jean Darling | Music by Merry Cherry Bomb

Full Episode Transcript

Ladies and gentlemen, and all of us who are neither and/or both, welcome to Trans Louisiane, the podcast of the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project. My name is Sophia Ziegler, and I’m so happy to be here today with you.

This podcast features selections from the oral histories gathered by the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project, which aims to gather, share and preserve the voices of Louisiana’s trans and gender non-conforming communities. You can learn more about us at Louisiana Trans Oral History dot ORG, and by finding us Facebook, Twitter and Tnstagram. 

This podcast also aims to lift up members of our communities in other ways, including our song of the month selection, in which we feature trans musicians. So be sure to stick around till the end of the show to hear our song this month. 

This episode features sections of our interview with Lola Jean Darling, an indigenous trans woman living in New Orleans. She and I spoke in August 2021, and we discussed life on the Pearl River reservation where Lola was born, as well her current work in cultural revitalization and recontextualization. 

We start here with her answering a question about her early life. 

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Lola Jean 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sophie Ziegler: 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.

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.

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. 

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.' 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: 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: I … oh god … think that whatever’s going on, we just physically don’t have the capacity to understand it. It’s so far beyond us. 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 don’t know. I don’t know, Sophie. I’m not religious. I hate religion. Choctaws didn’t have a religious practice. Hashtahli is a deity of sorts, but using that word is weird. It’s weird to try to describe an indigenous 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; 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 indigenous 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. So it’s important to me to not only reclaim culture but recontextualize it for me and my existence in this time. 

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Ziegler: That is a powerful note to end on. To read our full interview, including more about Lola’s research into the role of trans men and women in Choctaw society, please visit our website at Louisiana Trans Oral History dot ORG.

Before we hear the song of the month, let me just give very big appreciation to Caroline Ziegler for her editorial work for this episode, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities for the funds that made interview transcripts possible. Our theme music is composed and performed by Daisy Ray. Today’s show was mixed, recorded, and hosted by me, Sophia Ziegler. And a giant, giant thank you to Lola Jean Darling for being part of our project 

So much of what we do depends on the support of patrons. If you like our work, you can find us at patreon.com/Louisiana Trans Oral History. All funds are reinvested in the community, this is how we pay the musicians for the use of their work, this is how we pay for ongoing interview transcripts. And I love that everyone we give money to is part of the trans and gender nonconforming communities. 

This episode's featured song is by Merry Cherry Bomb, a project of April Hottenrott, a trans woman previously of New Orleans. This song was written and recorded in New Orleans and was, April says, directly inspired by not only two of the most influential people she met in the city, but also the uplifting spirit and atmosphere of the city itself.

Until next time, friends, stay safe out there. And tell the people that you love that you love them.

[Featured song]