Presentation of Clayton Duncan
Presentation of Clayton Duncan at our December 5, 2024 teach-in.
Clayton is a tribal elder of the Robinson Rancheria of Eastern Pomo in Lake County.
He has the distinction of being the great grandson of Lucy Moore. At the age of 6, Lucy survived the massacre of Bloody Island at Clear Lake where the US Army slaughtered an untold number of Pomo in retaliation for the killing of Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone who had enslaved, whipped, murdered, and raped Indigenous people on their ranch in what is now Kelseyville.
Duncan led a project to erect a memorial at the site of the massacre and later worked to change the name of Kelseyville’s sports teams from The Indians to The Knights. Today he is working to change the name of Kelseyville itself so it no longer memorializes the rapacious Andrew Kelsey and his murderous brothers.
[This talk has been edited]
Clayton Duncan: Yeah, my great-grandmother was six years old [when soldiers attacked them at Bloody Island]. Her mother was in her 20s, and they reamed out tule reeds [a type of sedge that grow in shallow water of muddy shores]. They reamed out the tule reeds, and they hid under the water, and they were breathing through these reeds while all this killing was going on.
And my mom .. was the one who kind of took care of my great-grandma. And when I was born in 1950, 100 years after that massacre at Bloody Island, my great-grandma was 106, and we stayed with her. And so those four years until she reached 110, me and her interacted.
I would do things for her, and she would talk to me in her language so I learned the language. One thing I kind of remember is mom would say, “go get grandma.”
And grandma would be standing outside in the mornings and the evenings, and she'd be standing there, and she would put her palms up to the air, and she would pray, “oh, My Father”. She would do this in the morning and the evening.
And I didn't understand as a young man all that was going on. I heard this Bloody Island story all my life. We were a part of these acts that America did to us.
I remember seeing a movie, The Gladiator, when Rome was fighting Germania. Before they started the fight and started throwing the fire on these German guys, the head guy, Russell Crowe, says “Release hell." So I feel that's what happened here in what you call America.
I spell America, A-M-E-R-I-K-K-K-A, because of what they did. Here in California, only 16,500 native people survived out of four million. So it was mass murder.
I hear Americans say “we're so proud.
This is our country. I'm so proud of who we are. We're a superpower.” And it makes me sick to listen to that.
And as a young man, I was angry. How can I pay these people back? I know math, so maybe I could become a scientist and invent a serum to just kill white men only, maybe a hundred million at least. And my mom, she saw that anger, and she says, “why are you so mad at these folks?”
Because we have that blood in us . My grandfather was part French. My great-grandma who raised my dad, she was half Cahto. Her mother, she's Cahto. She had four sisters, and those five sisters were the only ones that survived out of the Cahto tribe in Laytonville.
So all those people that's in Laytonville today, they're all my cousins, because of those five sisters, having all these kids. And they're in Lake County too, called the Scotts Valley tribe, and I'm related to all these people. But she got with my grandfather, he's a Yuki; out of the 30,000 Yuki, only 100 survived. Again, mass murder.
And my grandfather was a little boy, and this Captain Duncan picks him up, takes him home, raises this little boy, gives him this name, Dixie Duncan. And this little boy finally got raised up and went home, but this Captain Duncan didn't teach Dixie Duncan how to be a father. Dixie Duncan came home, he was an alcoholic, so he must have watched his master/father drinking so he brought that home with him.
And the white people killed him in Cahto. They put a bunch of crushed glass in his whiskey glass, and when he drank that, it cut him up inside.They murdered him. But his son, who is my grandfather, Richard Duncan, was part of the Boarding School Act.
My great-grandma went through the Termination Act and the Indian Removal Act. My grandfather went through the Indentured Act and his son, my grandfather went through the Boarding School Act.
And then the Relocation Act, that was my father. And all these acts was either to take our land, to kill us, or change who we are.
Now they call me a Pomo, which I'm not. They call me an American Indian, I don't call myself that or Native American. I don't call myself that. And I'm talking this foreign language [English], you know, this language doesn't belong here. We had a language here before.
They did what they were going to do, they did it. And now we find a lot of people like me that's trying to find who we are, find our culture again, find our language again, find our songs again. Every one of us has a purpose.
A village, when you have a village, you say this is a village of people right here, but this is our village. Every one of us had a job to do to make our village go. We didn't have homeless, we didn't have starving, we didn't have none of that stuff.
Everybody had to do something. And everybody was fed, everybody had a place to stay. And the Chief, he didn't have all the meat, he didn't have all the furs, he made sure his people were taken care of first.
I've seen this documentary, and I went to a workshop called the Water Symposium, and I got taught about this Emoto guy that does water research [Masaru Emoto, a Japanese researcher who claimed that water can be influenced by human thoughts and emotions. His 2004 book The Hidden Messages in Water was a New York Times best seller]. He researched water and what water crystals do when you put hard rock music to it or you put soft music to it. Hard rock music, the crystals are all nasty and, not together. You put good soft music to it, the crystals are nice and pretty and they're together.
Plants, same thing. You talk good to a plant, the plant's going to grow. You talk bad to a plant, the plant's not going to grow.
That's what harmony and balance is, living with the earth. You have to use that energy to keep that going, and our people did that for over 25,000 years. And every time you try to explain this to a Caucasian person, they say, ‘well, you Indians used to fight each other, you Indians did this, you Indians did that.’
I mean, how do you know? “Oh, well, I read it in this book.” What book? Who wrote it? Okay, you guys just made up these stories. Like, you made up stories before you even got here.
Stories were written in Europe before people even got here, and they knew they were going to run into these dirty, savage, red-skinned Indians. You better watch out for them. So you better have a Second Amendment and a gun, because they're going to kill you if you don't kill them. And so everything happened like that. I call it murder and theft.
And then now you go to public schools, you don't hear nothing about it. I went to Lakeport, I went to Upper Lake, I went to Calpella, I went to Ukiah, three schools in Ukiah, and I never heard nothing about what our tribe was about. It was all about how good America was, how great they were, how tough they are, and all this jazz. They brainwashed me to the point where when I went to these movies, I'd be rooting for the cowboys. So they had me brainwashed as a kid, rooting against my own people.
That's what this school system does, it indoctrinates. It doesn't teach. It doesn't teach you equality. It doesn't teach you the truth, it teaches you just go out and go around the truth.
When I was 19 years old, I ended up going to Alcatraz when they took it over [1969 see https://www.nps.gov/alca/learn/historyculture/we-hold-the-rock.htm]. And when I went to Alcatraz, it lit a little fire under me, and that fire's still burning.
And it taught me how Native people could work together instead of fighting each other. It taught me that this is our land. It's always been our land, it's always going to be our land, no matter what anybody says.
That's between me and the Creator, he's the one who created us. It's between me and the Creator in my life, in my spirit.
I had a dream. Our people are dreamers. I had a dream, and I was asking that questi
And pretty soon, this little Indian girl, she pops her head out of the clouds, because I was like this, talking, in ‘my dream.
She pops her head out of the clouds, and she was talking this broken English, and she goes, ‘oh, those kind of people, those people that rob and steal and kill and rape and do all of that, she goes, they're going to go to the basement. And I go, what's the basement? And I woke up, and so this energy that we put out there, this negative energy, I think people create their own demise when they do that, you know, when they're hateful, when they're, angry for nothing, and I do a sunrise ceremony now. I ran into a document that talked about this flint man, Emily Siegel, her name was.
She was 85 years old, 1935. She talks about this Flint Man from Big Valley. She said, Flint Man had the power of Jesus. He could walk on water, he could bring people back to life, you know, he was a good man, good medicine man, telling people how to love, telling people how to get along and all this. And then one day, he goes, these strange people are going to come here, and these strange people are going to do what we told you not to do, they're going to kill, they're going to steal, they're going to do all of this. They kind of lost their moral compass, but she says, don't fight them, try to get along with them, try to help them.
And then when I see that document, like that anger of revenge or, whatever I had in here, this anger I had, it kind of went away. Hey, man, I got something else to do. So I started the sunrise ceremony of forgiveness to America, plus honor to people at Bloody Island.
And we did this 25 years now. And I had cancer when I first started it. And I didn't think I was going to last this long.
And so I did it four years. I said, well, I'm not doing it anymore, I did my four years, you know, four times. And my brother says, well, I don't know what you're going to do, because if you're going to stop coming here, I'll come up here myself. That's how it was.
I'll keep on doing it. So we did it together. I was going to bring some posters to show you, and I forgot them, but we made 25 posters.
And on each poster, I try to tell a story. So in the future, you know, these posters will tell our kids something. And that's what I'm worried about, our kids.
On the radio, I'll say, all you old farts out there, you know, like me, you grandpas, your grandmas, how are you going to leave this Lake for them? What are you going to do? What energy are you going to put in this to clean our Lake? Or are we just gonna leave this Lake like this for our kids? It's shameful. Your grandparents or your mom, your dad, didn't they teach you any shame?
And I worry about that. I’ve got one 28 grandkids now. I worry about their health. I worry about their food.
I worry about their water. You know, what's going to happen? And our tribe, right now, we've got a lot of young people our council members and stuff. And it seems like they don't think about that, that's the future, you know. They're trying to make money, just like America's doing, I guess, you know, make more money and all that. We have a casino.
We don't get big checks every month. We get something, but we don't get a lot of money. But it’s mostly jobs for the people that's there.
And we've got a lot of non-natives working there also. But when I first came back to town in 1978 and I heard about Bloody Island and I had to go find a document. And I found it.
And it’s by this man named Benson. Reginald Benson, his name was. And he made baskets. [documents on Blood Island https://nwgenocide.omeka.net/exhibits/show/bloody_island_massacre/resources]
His father was Scottish. He was half white. And his father died when he was 12 years old.
So he didn't learn English or anything like that. He kind of like taught himself. He taught himself how to write.
He taught himself on a typewriter how to type. And so when Bloody Island happened, he went over there and asked his people what, you know what happened here. And he wrote it down.
Well, it started with Kelsey and them, how they enslaved the natives. And then when I read that document on the second page, it says, the fathers and mothers of the little girls were asked to bring the little girls to the house, of Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone. And if the parents didn't do that, they got hung up in the trees by their thumbs and their toes were barely touching the ground, and they had to hang there all night.
Then they got whipped. But the guys ended up with the girls anyway. So when I read that on the second page, I kind of dropped it and was really pissed, you know, because I have granddaughters.
I have daughters, granddaughters, and I got great granddaughters now. And I got pissed as an uncle too, about these guys doing this to little Indian girls. And then they got a town named after them.
They got creeks named after them. They got a school named after them. John Sutter's got a hospital named after them.
You know, how can you honor men like that? And that's what I was feeling in here. He said, are you doing this because you hate us that much? You're doing this because you have no respect for us? Just like this Bragg thing, you know. Who is he? Why is he here? Why are you honoring him? This guy wasn't a good person.
Even his men tried to kill him, you know. They didn't like him. Never won nothing. He's always lost. But now he's honored here in this town. And then at a place where they had a concentration camp.
And they had all these natives here. And all it was a place for the settlers, the pioneers, or the army guys coming to get a girl to have sex with. That's what these reservations were.
So they were being used like that. Disrespected. So I'm tired of that.
Tired of our people being disrespected. And so I try to step up to the plate and put my foot in the door and say, “hey, we're still here. Stop doing that in there. I'm alive. I got skin. I got hair. I'm a human being. I'm not invisible. And don't treat me that way. Because I'll be hollering at you.”
I don't fight anymore. I lived in Oakland. And I lived on the streets. My brother was shot and killed over there. So I lived that life. I know what it's all about, man. I know how you get along in a city like that.
You have to juke and jive, they call it. And that's like lying, you know. You gotta become a bullshitter.
And so I kind of figured I was one of them, a pretty good bullshitter as young man. And so I can hear people when they're talking to you and I just kind of feel them like, “hey, man, you guys ain't telling the truth.” Like you're the President. Everything he says, you just feel icky. You don't feel good about things that, are being said.
The people, they tried to stop them from putting that oil underneath the water over there at South Dakota. Well, he [the President] said he signed that blindly to let it go again. And he's smiling about it.
And there's 18 million people, not only our native people, but other people downriver. There's like 18 million downriver. And the oil pipeline is already leaking. [for information on the Dakota Access Pipeline see: https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/plains-treaties/dapl ]
And they just hide it. And so, damn, when is it going to stop? When's all this BS going to stop? I'm glad to see people like you out here and backing native people up or backing black people up.
I have two clips that I played on my show last week. These two white preachers were talking to the congregation of white people and saying, ”We messed up. What we did to the Indian people, what we did to the black people, God didn't like it. God's mad at us.”
And he's going to pay these people for what we did to them. He's going to pay them back. Is anybody hearing that? Does anybody care? And when I saw that, it just kind of made me say, whoa, finally, finally, these preachers are telling the truth.
It made me feel good that finally this truth is coming out. And I feel like white folks think that if we just take over, take our land back, well, we're going to do the same thing to them that they did to us.
Or if the black people get in charge I think they think that the black people are going to do the same thing to white people that white people did to them. But my heart says to pay it back like that is wrong. To do somebody wrong, if somebody does something to you and you do something back to that person, it's wrong. You show our Creator that you have no respect for the Creator. And I feel like America is telling the Creator that, “Right now, we have no respect for you, Creator. We don't care if you gave this land to these people here. We don't care if you blessed them with this land. We got it now. Because they didn't win the war.”
That's what I hear a lot. We didn't win the war. Why didn’t you guys fight? Why shouldn’t you be tough and fight for it? We're not warriors. We don't have no war weapons. We don't have no war songs. We don't have no war stories. When the Creator created our people, he went to the top of the mountain and he told all his creation, at bottom of the mountain, wherever they were created, he told them the responsibilities, what they needed to do.
“When you live in this land right here, this is what you do, bear. This is what you do, rabbit. This is what you do. This is how you get along with the human. This is your responsibility. This is what balance is. This is what harmony is when you live together. This is what you better do.”
He didn't teach us to make a bigger bow or a bigger spear and go next door and kill your brother, take his woman, and take his deer skins. He didn't teach anything like that to us.
So when I go to schools or do presentations, I'll say the first introduction to civilization, to freedom, justice, and liberty, was this [he shows the audience a cannon ball]. I heard that the army didn't send the army out here to kill Indians. I don’t like saying Indian because we're not from India.
This is a cannonball. It was a 19-pound cannonball from a howitzer. And they fired it on how many people at Bloody Island?
And I said, that's what they fired at my great-grandmother as a six-year-old girl. You know, to kill her. All the kids that were on the island that didn't survive, were all bayoneted.
They all got stabbed and thrown in the lake, a lot of the women too. There are stories in the papers that they wrote across the United States. This is in the book An American Genocide [by Benjamin Madley].
After they did this, they went to Texas and they had a big promotion party for Captain [Nathaniel] Lyon, for [Brigadier General] Persifor Smith. Persifor Smith made the Order Number 44 for the complete extermination of the Clear Lake and Pit River Indians. So they sent the army to do it.
And they killed over 400 at Bloody Island. And then they went down to Cokadjal and killed 100 more people.
I wore this necklace today because one of my cousin is from Cokadjal, she made this. And she does good work making necklaces. Her name is Gail.
But that was her family over there. 150 people.
Then they went to Hopland. Then they went to Cloverdale. They went to Santa Rosa. Just village to village to village to village. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill for two pedophiles. Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone. Killed babies, kids.
Then after all of that happened, like I said, they went to Texas to have this promotion party. And they promoted General Persephone Smith to Brigadier General. And then they told him, “now you take care of the rest of the Indians from the Mississippi on.”
They said, “you did such a good job here with this Order Number 44. We want you to take care of the rest of the Indians now.” And his first order to his generals was hunt down, seek out, and exterminate.
So from Mississippi on, I mean, Wounded Knee happened. Sand Creek happened. So many massacres happened during that time.
Vigilantes. They had, I don't know how many vigilante groups out here in California. They almost paid $2 million for bounties in the 1850s. Paying for fingers. They would cut women open and take the little baby out and cut the hair off that baby and sell that hair for bounties. Almost a million and a half dollars were paid for bounties, for fingers, for, you know, hair and all that jazz.
You know, and like, every time I hear these stories or read these stories, I look at my babies. How can anybody do that? That's sick. That's not a human being. That's not being a human being. You know, to me, anyway. I have to say all these things.
I say it's my opinion. This is what I've learned. And this is how I think. And it's not about hate.
If I was out here to hate and talk bad and all this stuff about the people and all that, well, I feel like I wouldn't be blessed by Creator.
We went to Kelseyville for a memorial for the first time in 2005. We went to Kelsey's Monument. And I did a prayer there. There were like 80 of us there. And PBS filmed it.
And we went there and did a prayer.
We didn't worry. But we did a prayer there. And then we marched down Kelseyville. Down the street, right in the middle of the street. And we went to the park. And then we made a circle. And then anybody had the opportunity to get up there in the middle to give their heart and what they felt, you know. And so we did that.
And then I went home. I went home and I went to sleep. And I woke up about 6.30 that night. And one of my partners, I'm on KPFZ in Lakewood. The radio was on. And one of my partners, T. Watts, a black guy, he was playing some music I like.
So I phoned him up and thanked him for it. I woke up to some good music. And he goes, no, thank you. He goes, thank you for doing that this morning. He goes, I was there and I felt the energy, the positive energy.
And I says, we've got to thank the Creator for this, you know. And I said, thank you, Creator. It’s all about him teaching us how to be.
And he hung up. And I kept on saying, “thank you, Creator, for making me who I am and giving me the opportunity to do what I do. Thank you.”
And man, I swear, I kept on saying thank you. And just tears, buckets of tears came. I couldn't quit crying.
And pretty soon, this warmth started covering me. Just went down real slow in my body. And it felt so good. And I felt like it was our ancestors or it was the Creator blessing me for trying to be at least a halfway decent human being. And it felt good.
So now I still think about that. I’m working. I feel like I'm a servant now for the old people, for the ancestors.
I went to a sun dance. Same thing happened over there. And I felt just dancing on my tumors when I was inside the sweat lodge.
And I asked the medicine man if he was doctoring me. And he goes, “no, I didn't touch you but there's old people in there. And they were doctoring you.” They were.
They said that they want to keep you around for a little longer because of what you're doing. And I'm doing that sunrise ceremony to honor them and forgive America.
And so I'm still here even having cancer. Plus my woman over here, she kind of fed me. I'm still here. She did a good job, you know, just keeping me alive.
And so now I'm raising three little babies. And I'm teaching them, teaching them a lot of this stuff. I have a little girl.
She's five years old. And they're ornery kids, man. They got Lakota in them.
They got Crazy Horse in them. And I'm telling her, “you're going to be a lawyer someday. And you're going to sue California back”
I'm trying to teach them this is your land, this is your mother. You have to protect your mother. You have to protect all these veins.
I'll tell them, see all these veins in your arm like this? This is the way Mother Earth was in her creation.
If we plug up a vein in our arm, what's going to happen to our arm, you know? If we plug up a vein over here to our heart, what's going to happen, you know? Same thing with Mother Earth. We plug her up, dam her up and stuff, and take out that natural flow, things happen, and it's not good things. She gets dirtier or whatever.
And so, people got to realize that, I feel. They got to know this, you know? It ain't about us anymore. It's about our babies.
What are we going to do for our babies, you know? This name change thing in Lake County. I started with the mascots, two mascots: the Braves and the Indians. I didn't know the middle school had the Braves, but I went to a tournament, there with my granddaughter.
And when I went in there, they had this little boy and this little round ball. And he had a Mohawk, and he had a Tommy hawk. And every time the team would make a basket or a rebound, he would dance around like this, you know, like that, right? And I'm going, what the hell, man? You know, what you doing? And so every time my granddaughter, she would make a basket or a rebound, I would stand up, and I'd go, ‘ho, ho, ho.’
Then I'd turn around to the audience, and say “we're not your mascot.” And I turned back around and said ‘ho, ho, ho.’
I did that about eight times. That following Monday, I called the school, and I talked to the psychologist. And me and her kind of got in a little, hassle there.
She goes, well, I'll have the principal call you. So the next day, Tuesday, he calls me. Nice guy, a real nice guy.
And then Wednesday, he meets me at the Superintendent of schools. He introduced me to him. That was a Wednesday.
And the following Tuesday, we have a meeting to change the name. But they said, ‘ah, it's bigger than this. We've got to get a bigger meeting.’
So they got a bigger building, bigger meeting, about maybe 150 people. There was about maybe 20 or 30 of us. You know, all the rest of the people, they had their Indian uniform on and they're the Indians, right? But anyway, everybody talked. We got up there and made our testimony and they voted. And they voted 5-0 to change it. Man, Kelseyville got mad. I mean, they got mad at me.
I got threatened with phone calls. But they changed it. And then two years later, well, 2006, 2007, I didn't have anything to do. So I started trying to change the town's name. But, yeah, I was kind of like by myself.
And I didn't have no backup or anything like that. So I tried, and I didn't succeed. So I got back on the radio and started talking about, why do I have to change these names? Our people didn't name these names. We already had names. I said, why don't you white people out there that your ancestors did this, do something.
I said, ‘I need a good white woman, a strong white woman, and come up and just get out there and shout and write and all this stuff,, to help me. And I heard this woman from Kelseyville, Lorna [Sides]. She answered the call.
She started this group called the Citizens for Healing. And it's all Caucasian people. But they started it, and they submitted their application, and pretty soon it just started getting bigger and bigger. And now we've got all the tribes involved. We've got the conferences, as they call it, the Native American conferences.
They're backing us up now. And I've got our Council involved.
I mean, they didn't even think of things like this, right. But now they're talking about it. And they're young. They're the next generation. And so I see the little fire get big, bigger fire. And I feel it. I'm hoping that the National Congress of Native Americans being there and backing us up is going to change.
They won. I forget how many votes they had, but they beat it 70 percent to 30 percent [to ask the Board of Supervisors to advise the Bureau of Geographic names not to rename the town of Kelseyville to Konocti] . And, you know, Citizens for Healing was kind of upset about it. And I said, ‘man, just hold on now.’
It's the Congress of Native Americans. I think they're going to pull it through for us. And the Board of Supervisors, they're going to vote, I guess, the next meeting, and they're going to vote that we should change it [which they did by a vote of 3 to 2 in December].So hopefully that all comes to light and it gets changed and then we can work on the next project.
But, again, that burial ground, that bothers me. And it's under Highway 20. I have a friend, and she said that she would help me close down that highway and we can do a march and expose the Army Corps of Engineers for what they've done. I want them to get the same thing Floyd got, $28 million, 400 times $28 million. That will build a beautiful museum.
It will be a Holocaust museum. But after you see all of that, then you're going up, then you see the pictures of the sunrise ceremony of what we've done. This is what we've done with our Holocaust. And anybody in the world can do the same thing. You know, just take this. That's all it takes.
I'm not going to take money. I'm just going to take love, sharing, sharing, that kind of energy. Again, that energy to me is what we call harmony. It's what we call balance. But it takes people, people like you. You guys, I saw you guys. I don't really like to call these light-skinned people white people. I think that white was invented, what, 1676 [Bacon’s Rebellion] I think it says, that they invented this white race of people.
You know, there's white people in there. And the reason being is they had to fill, when they was taking the Indian land, well, they had to put white people on this land. And so they started naming everybody white. You know, they came from Italy, came from Spain. They were all white people there. And even some Cubans were white, I heard.
But, again, white, black, green, yellow, purple. I have grandkids that have light skin, but they're being raised in a native family. So they got a native heart, right? And they're going to hear a lot of this stuff out there.
The hateful people, when they think they're all together and nobody's around, well, they say things that hurt. And they're going to hear that stuff. So they need to be strong. I'm going to teach them to be strong. Words only hurt when you let them. And if people want to be ignorant like that, well, that's on them.
And so I believe in prayers. I believe in that energy of prayers. When we move the energy of prayers, when we give it to somebody, I believe it helps. And so that's what our people were all about, praying. I'm from the Chimacum tribe. And the women, they didn't have no springs for fresh water. So what they would do, they would go next to the lake, and they would dig a hole right next to the lake. And they would let that water flow from the lake into that hole. They would go through the sand and go through the rocks.
But while they were digging that hole, they would be singing, singing a prayer song, and singing to the water, you, singing to the dirt. And so the water would be good. And every time they cooked and every time they did anything, they prayed.
I mean, nobody would want to believe that people were like that. It sounds to me like the American people don't like that. You know, it's like, people ain't like that. We don't even, like I said, have no war songs, weapons, or anything like that. My great-grandmother would get up every morning, and I'd see her, and she'd get up, she'd pray.
And she would say, thank you. She would say,”make everything good around me, my father. Thank you.”
And thank you, you guys, for inviting me over here, to share with you. I think we're part of the family over there now. We're all one family now trying to do these things, so we should help each other out.