Good Mind Grappling w/ The Barreiro Brothers (Uncut + Transcript) (Patreon)

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Sam speaks with Thomas Rahontsiiostha and Phillip Raweri:io Barreiro of Good Mind Grappling, a project that aims to guide young people in Indigenous communities to use wrestling as a positive physical outlet for overcoming intergenerational trauma and developing good character. The Barreiro brothers are national wrestling champions from Akwesasne, a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) community that straddles the Quebec, Ontario, and New York state borders. Thomas is a six-time Canadian national champion, and Phillip is a three-time Canadian national champion. They represented Canada at the 2019 World Championships and Pan American Games.

Transcript

[Note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.]

This is Southpaw. I'm your host, Sam. Today, I have two very special guests with a very cool project. Thomas and Phillip, can you introduce yourselves?

Hi, my name is Thomas Rahontsiiostha Barreiro. I've been wrestling probably about 20 years now. No, 21 years now. Started when I was 14. I'm 35 now. In that time, I've wrestled at the Division I level, been six-time Canadian national champion and Greco-Roman.

I spent nine years working at a boys and girls club in my local community of Akwesasne. We're both Wolf Clan Mohawk from the community of Akwesasne. And in the last two years, I've been... working on this project with my brother, Good Mind Grappling, to use trauma-informed approaches to mentoring to help the youth in our and other

indigenous communities. I'm Philip Raweri:io Barreiro. I'm also Wolf Clan Mohawk. We're twin brothers. I've been wrestling 21 years as well. I also started at 14. I wrestled Division I. I've coached at the Division I level. I'm a three-time Canadian national champion. And I've also been working on this project with my brother aimed at helping injured

youth regain their own power. Tell us more about the program and what the impetus was for even starting it.

Yeah, so my brother and I went to University Division I at American University in Washington, D.C. And we graduated 2013. And then we came home to the community and our home community, our home reservation of Akwesasne. And we were going to be done with wrestling. You know, I was very burnt out.

Division one programs are kind of a grindhouse. You know what I mean? And so we were just both very done. And then I had a family friend tell us that his son, who was at the time in ninth grade, that they were starting to wrestle. This young man, he was like a football player.

He was a very big kid, heavyweight, you know, a little bit. He was like a lineman. And so we're like, okay, you know what? We'll come work with this kid. We'll work with this kid. We'll coach him. So we tell him we're going to show up on Sunday at your dad's house and we'll train you,

which we'll work with you. We'll see how you are. We'll assess you and we'll work with you. And so we show up at 8 a.m. on the Sunday. It's a long driveway with a yard. And this boy, he's outside in the yard. He's running wind sprints. you know, sprinting back and forth in the yard.

And Phillip and I, you know, are kind of like, oh, this kid's going to be a pleasure to work with. Clearly he's very disciplined and he's on time. And look, he's even doing wind sprints beforehand. So we walk into the house and he says, hey guys, I'm real sorry. I've been up since yesterday.

I was drinking all night. And I've been doing these sprints here to keep me awake so that I can be here. And so this boy, you know, he's about 15, 16. He's already got functional alcoholism. You know, granted, he didn't cancel on us, but he showed up in that state.

And so we took a number of years working with this boy, driving him to Montreal, the practices, working with him ourselves. And he became... the first New York state champion out of our community. He was a Canadian national champion, Pan American champion in Greco. But the most important thing is that he went to school.

He got a degree and, And now he has a wife and a child. He's actually living in California now up in NorCal working as an electrician. And this is a boy who his parents were split up. His dad was not really involved in his life. And so he had it hard.

And so on top of that, he was the first person in his family to graduate university. And then his mom, he inspired her to go back to university. And now she has her master's degree. So what that did for Phillip and I was we saw the way that sport and physical

activity and embodiment really can shape the life of a young person and And take their life from where it could have been to where it can be. And that's been the biggest thing driving us. That was the start. And we thought for a while, you know, we want to do this thing.

And then I was working at the Boys and Girls Club, you know. So I started as a diabetes educator. Uh, in my, my first job at high school, I was a diabetes educator at the boys and girls club. And I worked my way up to managing three different clubhouses, like three different sites on the reservations,

total about a 90 kids, 30 at each site, uh, and staff under me and all that. And I found myself, um, in that role, doing a lot of trauma informed care, working with kids, uh, interfacing with the intergenerational trauma that appears in our community.

A quick trigger warning, I'm going to talk a little bit about some dark stuff here, sexual assault. But one of my formative experiences as a young professional was I was working with a group of eight-year-old kids, third graders, because that was who my grant, my diabetes education grant was focused on.

And I had this little boy and he was like just a great kid, real smart as a whip, courteous. And then I would transition him from room to room. And when I tried to transition him from one room to the next, he would fight me. He would fight me like a son of a gun.

And he threw a chair at me one time and I didn't understand what was going on. I just didn't know. I didn't know any better, you know? Uh, so I talked to my supervisor, I talked to the family, you know, investigate what's going on here, what's happening. And, you know,

come to find out the boy had been assaulted by a uncle and the mom didn't believe him, uh, for a number of months. And so he had a lot of trauma related to adult males. And that's me, adult male, uh, controlling his autonomy. And so because he became triggered like that, he would fight me.

And so I had to learn how to, to deescalate that and to, and to work with him in ways that did not trigger him. And that allowed him, uh, support for his autonomy, you know? Um, so that happened. I kept working through there and I found myself, uh, disillusioned because, you know, boys and girls club, it's well-meaning,

but it's a national chain. It's a, it's a franchise. So they had us being like the doing like national curriculum and it was just not, it was just not well suited. You know how many doing diabetes education for six, seven, eight year olds.

And I was supposed to sit here and explain to them how blood glucose flows through the body and And it's like, yeah, this is neat, but even my eyes are glossing over talking about this. And that's how behavior change works.

So you yourself didn't have autonomy over the curriculum.

Exactly, exactly. And so I quit my position in, I think it's 2023, January 2023, to start this nonprofit program. And so what Good Mind Grappling is, is it's loosely based on the model of Beat the Streets. And so what Beat the Streets is a national organization that does wrestling clubs throughout the country.

But they're kind of just like essentially a boys and girls club with a wrestling club. And I don't know what their model is or how trauma-informed they are or what their curriculum is. But I wanted to use a sport for social development in the indigenous community to

empower our young people and to take a lot of these kids. When I was growing up, I was a fluffy 14 year old who, you know, I played lacrosse, but I hated it. Um, no, I didn't have the build for, you know, I'm five foot six, 225 pounds, 232 on a heavy day.

And, uh, I'm not built to be a runner. And so the sport is just very inclusive, uh, in terms of being able to participate with, with anybody, you know, maybe you don't like You know, maybe you're not like a world champion, but you can participate with any body.

You know, you even got Anthony Robles winning NCAA Division I. He was born with one leg. So that was the crux of it. And then, you know, Phil can talk a little bit about the cultural underpinnings of our name, Good Mind Grappling, and why that's important.

Yeah, so in our traditional teachings, we have what's called a great law of peace. The great law of peace, there's a lot of traditional teachings. But one of them is the gutnigomio, which is the good mind. And what that really more means is it's like it invokes a picture of like you're

looking into a stream of water and the water's nice and clear and you can see through it. It's not cloudy and muddy. So it's about keeping one's mind clear so that you can make good decisions. And when we're talking about intergenerational trauma and things of that nature, that really gets in the way of making good decisions.

And all those trauma cycles, they're vicious, man. A lot of the times, you don't know why you're making a decision. And it's because something happened to you in your life when you were fired.

Like that story from Boys and Girls Club earlier.

Yeah, like the story that my brother just gave of that kid. That story specifically is a little bit more intense than a lot of other kids, but there's a lot of stories like that. So what we're trying to do is to use sport to do that. So the traditional way in which sports are taught, especially martial arts,

which I'm sure you're aware of, is that we're going to drill it until we're dead, rote memorization, the banking model of education where your student is just a cup to fill and the teacher is the font of knowledge and they're filling a cup. And that's really, really dehumanizing to both

the students and the teacher because it makes the student some worthless being and it makes the educator seen as some God figure who can't be wrong and both of those are not human. So what we're trying to do is use like a more traditional style from what we, our people,

a lot of our teachings and the way that we teach our kids is through alive methods. So we have them do things. Like an example would be instead of like, okay, we're going to drill, let's say a front headlock. And then we're going to drill goal behinds from front headlock, do it 30 times.

And you got to put your hands in a specific way in that specific pattern. And we don't do that. What we do is we go get in a front headlock. Your goal is to get behind the other kid. And then the other kid's goal is to not let you behind. And then they play a game.

And then we'll modify the conditions of the games based upon what that kid is doing, what that kid's seeing in a relationship. So we're teaching them all about relationships with themselves, with their partner, with the ground, and then with the air around them, the space. And in that way, they can kind of become more cognizant of

the environment around them and how the environment around them is affecting their behavior and that they have an ability to participate in that environment to change it. So that's kind of what we're doing that way.

And it's also easier on the body, right? Because if you drill something like that over and over, your head is getting snapped down over and over. Well, yeah, it's easier on the body because the way that I look at it is

Everyone has a different body. So everyone is going to do things differently. Like even my brother and I, we're twins, but we do things slightly differently because I'm a little bit smaller. So it's just like, hey, maybe this one specific way of doing it is really good for somebody with a certain body type.

but maybe another body type is going to be better at it another way. And if you, if you figure that out on your own, instead of forcing your body to do something, it's not like good at doing, you can figure out what it is good at doing and then expand from there. Yeah. It's really a strengths,

a strengths led approach, you know, like, so like when Phillip and I were little, You know, the sport in our community is lacrosse because that's our traditional sport. You know, that comes from our people. So everybody in the community plays lacrosse, you know, and our elder brother, he put us in lacrosse like real hardcore, you know,

because that's what the young men do is they play lacrosse. And, you know, you get like a lot of, you know, like in any youth sport, you get parents and caregivers who are, they don't know how to put their kids in for their kids experience and not for their own experience.

And so they end up, the kids get, end up getting burnt out real hardcore. And that's what happened to us a bit with the lacrosse, you know, and it also, my body just wasn't, I couldn't find a way for my body to be suited for the sport, you know, partially because of the way it's taught.

And so that's why wrestling's always felt better. You know, that I started wrestling the first day I started wrestling is like, First day I started actually enjoying my body, you know?

So like that. How did both of you get into wrestling in the first place?

We were living in Ithaca, New York because our father was at the time a professor at Cornell University teaching Indian studies. And so we had longer hair and we'd get picked on by a lot of the country kids. They'd make fun of us. Pull our hair. We get into fights a lot.

So we got in fights a lot. All the time. And then in eighth grade, one of those country kids came up to us and was like, hey, you guys are good at fighting. You should join the wrestling team. And so we joined the wrestling team and That was that. It was, it was just fun. Like,

it was like, I think we had a lot of good luck because our first coach, the middle school coach in eighth grade was really, he was really soft and kind. He was a, him and then also our high school coach, our first high school coach was a special education teacher.

So they were kind of more, like, less intense. Like, they still did the, like, drilling thing because that's what you just do. They're not, you know, you don't know another way. But at least they were like, hey, I'm not feeling good. I'm in a cradle and I feel, like, claustrophobic and I'm freaking out.

They're like, okay, like, we can relax and move on, you know? So that was good, but my brother and I were just two rambunctious kids who would fight a lot and I didn't know how to use my body in a way that's a more in a healthy way.

That aggression, that fighting is you got to do it to survive. But the second we started wrestling, I didn't get in a single fight in high school. I haven't been in a non-sanctioned fight, non-sanctioned match since the beginning of eighth grade. You know, it's like,

it's like we fought enough to get some respect from the people who were trying to bully us. And then they saw, okay, you can, you're another, you make it, you become community. And, you know, a lot of those guys, I still know them tangentially.

And a lot of them are not as, you know, racist as their parents were, which is a big part because of, interacting with other people. It's an environment thing. Everybody's a product of the environment around them.

And so these country kids got you two to wrestle. Did it feel like there was a bit of catching up though? No, no.

Our first year we went 12 and two. You took to it naturally. Well, because the thing is, is Philip and I have always been aggressive. And we're twins. We've been aggressive with each other. And our dad always used to have us do little sumo matches. And then we played a lot of lacrosse.

And so because of the lacrosse, there's a real thing of donor sports. So I wasn't good at the stick handling or the passing. But I had a damn good cardio. So like I had matches where like I'd be getting my butt kicked and then just like third period, they'd be gassed out and I wasn't.

So like early on that background really helped as well as the aggressiveness that we just like naturally had. So like for me, I'm a little bit more like of the two of us. just as a matter of like natural disposition, I'm a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more assertive, a little bit more like just naturally.

And so I went 12 and two, right? I won my first 12 matches and then lost the last two at the end of the year. For me, I was actually really scared when we started wrestling. They were talking about doing a tournament and I was super scared to compete. So I,

We were drilling like a half Nelson and Tom put a half Nelson on me. I pretended that my shoulder was hurt. I know that my coach knew I wasn't actually hurt, but I pretended it was hurt because I was too scared to compete. Then the competition happened. I saw Thomas just beat people up.

And so then we went to the next competition and I was like, oh, I'm ready to go. And because the kids that Thomas beat at that time were like, they had been wrestling like something like five, six years. And Thomas had been wrestling like three weeks.

So they figured like, oh, like Phil's going to be like just into it. And so they put me with like really strong kids the first two matches. And I just got my ass kicked like bad. My first two matches. And after that, they put me with like, you know, not so great kids.

And then by the end of the season, I was the district champion for middle school at my weight class. And actually the kid that crushed me in that first match, that's who Thomas beat for the district champion in the little higher weight class, 20 actually. But yeah, so, and even with the joining wrestling, it was more like,

they asked us to join wrestling and I was like, I don't like these kids. I'm not going to do it. And then Thomas was just like, we're going to do wrestling film. Like, okay. Yeah. It was like also the first thing I ever did where I didn't like ask my parents if I was going to do it.

I was just like, Hey, we're doing this. Pick us up after. And so it was just like a very serendipitous spur of the moment decision because, you know, at that time we were both aggressive, gotten to fights all the time. And so the only thing at that time that was keeping me having positive self-esteem

was my identity as somebody who fights. Right. Cause we'd like, you know, started out being picked on by all these country kids who were, you know, their families are like very conservative and all that and beating some of them up. And then, you know, you become friends to a certain extent. And then, you know,

having a little bit, a small bit of a social circle and being like, okay, so this is my identity is the guy who like, if you mess with them, but that's, I will fight you. Yeah. But it's a weird kind of friend because like, I beat you up.

And that's why I'm like, then, then you, you get a little respect. It's not really a healthy thing. It's more like they're afraid of you. Yeah. And it's like, it's like, and so when you're, when your whole self-esteem is based on that, you, you become really, really deeply insecure. Like I'm just, you're a little kid fighting.

You don't actually know what you're doing. Right. Right. So at any point, that status, that little status you have in the playground in a middle school, any time you can go back to being the kid who's being bullied.

So it was an insecure position anyway. It was very unstable.

Yeah, and it was bad because for a little bit, we started becoming bullies as well. Because it's like I said, it's all about your environment and When you're insecure and you get around, those kids were also insecure. That's the whole reason they're bowlingless in the first place. So then you join a group of insecure kids.

And then we were just lucky that we got into wrestling. And that we had the specific coaches. We had the specific coaches that we did. And then I remember... In ninth grade, because my grades were not good, like very good. I got like C's and D's. And then going from eighth and ninth grade, our brother,

our eldest brother took us to a wrestling camp, a Cornell wrestling camp, like in an outside, in an area called Newark Valley. And my eldest brother, he's a little bit like, he doesn't really understand how stuff works. So like I'm literally having wrestled for like less than a year.

He's talking Thomas and I up to like the Cornell coach, Rob Cole. And I distinctly remember Rob Cole came up to me to talk to me while I'm working there. And he asked me, how are your grades? He didn't ask me. What's your record? Who'd you beat? Who beat who? He asked me, how are your grades?

And I just remember sitting there thinking like, I didn't answer him, but I remember sitting there thinking like, shit, I've got D's. And so that's when I came to realize that like, oh, if wrestling's a thing that I love and I want to wrestle, I have to have good grades. And then

I started getting good grades and then by getting good grades, I became someone who cared about being a good student. There's pros and cons. I mean, there's pros and cons that came with that, but you know, at least, at least I wasn't getting in trouble for my grades, you know?

And obviously there were a lot of other stuff before wrestling where I get in trouble a lot.

Sounds like wrestling occupied your time in a way where then you didn't have those opportunities to do those other things because it filled up so much of your time and then it became an alternative life after school. Well, yeah.

Well, for us though, is we grew up very isolated socially, right? Because we grew up on like a little farmstead outside of Ithaca, 30 minutes outside of Ithaca, like just like like state forest nearby and all this stuff. Cause our mom, she's an Aboriginal midwife and she was doing a corn project.

So there's lots of traditional varieties of corn and our dad is a professor at Cornell. And so they're doing these projects on the land. You know what I mean? Like, like these are two people who met in the seventies at Wounded Knee, you know, the American Indian movement and the American Indian movement.

So they're both, both of our parents are very like big activist types. So we grew up around that and we were not really like, we didn't like have a traditional like neighborhood experience. So in a certain way, both of us were very like socially inept.

which led to being bullied a bit, which led to all of this other stuff. And so, yeah, it ended up, it ended up being such a thing that like, you know, like I never actually like, uh, and so then because the wrestling occupied the time after that,

because once I got to my teenage years and I would have been able to go wherever, you know, if I hadn't had wrestling, I would have like, I would have like, uh, maybe gotten into drinking and drugs and all that, but I didn't because wrestling was the only thing we did.

And so you two already touched upon this, but I wanted to delve deeper because you two mentioned about these traditional knowledge systems from your community. But then there's also the way you were taught even lacrosse, probably within your community and wrestling, which is very rote, drilling a lot, very mechanical,

which is really the normative way things are taught, at least here in North America. So how did you two connect the dots? Because a lot of people might've come from that. And then when they start their own wrestling program, just do what they know. Right. And then maybe like, you know,

people tend to like categorize things into compartments and like, that's that, this is this, these are two different things. So how did you two come to realize, Hey, let's start merging these things. And take some of that pedagogical approach and then apply it to this.

And then let's do some research and see what we can find to kind of fill in the blanks.

Okay, it's very difficult, okay? Because wrestling and grappling, it has a heavy conservative lean, like highly conservative lean. And so being around that without realizing it conservatism and reactionary thoughts, they start to like creep in, you know? So it's this weird dissonance where growing up Till about the age of 13, you know,

like my father is putting us to sleep at night, telling us about the Antonio Maceo and Jose Marti and the Cuban revolutionaries, not Fidel Castro, like back in the day, like the old school Cuban independence movement. you know antonio maceo he got shot 26 times and and jose marty and he read us jose

marty's poems and you know what i mean like this this was our parents and how they were and and the type of activism they're in you know and they're very they're very when we were in like we're in like first grade they make a they make a joke that our our eldest brother's first word was booyah

Because our father and his friend would talk about the bourgeois all the time. When we were little, right, we had our friends who were, like, heavily conservative. We had, like, one specific friend that we hung out with. And we were in, like, second grade.

And we had to, like, make a fairy garden and have a system of governance for it. And so we convinced this kid to, like, create a commune for our, like, fairy garden. And he called back and was like, hey, I can't be a communist anymore, guys. My dad says we can't. My dad says we can't do communism.

Yeah. And we're like, oh, okay. So this is like, not that we're like communists specifically, you know, because there's also issues with that specific philosophy. But like growing up around that, that's what we grew up around. Around traditional old time people.

But then the thing is, is then you join wrestling and like, we didn't just do wrestling like We did wrestling. Wrestling was and still is my life. We got a mat and we'd wrestle each other every day for about two hours. Just wrestle each other. I didn't do any other sports. Didn't really do any other activities.

Just wrestling. And a lot of the people that are in wrestling are very conservative. And so, again, people are a product of their environment. And so you're around conservatives a lot. You kind of start becoming more conservative, especially in college. We were at a pretty liberal college, which we went to American University. Yeah, that Sarah McBride.

I think she was the first transgender congresswoman. She was in a, I think it was a professional. But anyway, she was in a lot of my classes, you know? So like things like that. But then when you get out of college, like I had the mindset of like,

you just work hard and things are going to work out for you. Right. That's what I had the mindset of, which is true to an extent. And because you're in a sports setting, it like sort of becomes true. But it's it's not like it's an incomplete truth. Right.

It's an incomplete truth that's sold to you so that you think everything's your fault. Everything is your fault. You know, and so like after we got a university, it's like this weird disparity of like, OK, we're doing this thing where we're like teaching this kid.

And then we went to the Olympic trials in 2015 and we both lost in the final. It's best two out of three. And I was like super close to winning it. And then we both just got massively depressed. And then I'm like watching YouTube videos and all this Jordan Peterson guys making a lot of friends.

No, I should like clean my room. And, and I fell down this rabbit hole for like four or five months. You know what I mean? We're like, we're like, literally I was like, us just, let's just, embedded with conservative talking points and we were like so fortunate that like

if I didn't have the community around me if I hadn't met my now wife you know like dude, that could, like, you know, assume I'm, like, a, you know, like, I'm a native man. I have, like, a little bit of privilege from being male, you know? So, like, just that, like, really effed me up.

But during that time, my dad was, like, why are you, like, listening to this guy talking about the Bible? You know, like, Why don't you go and listen to the, you know, creation story, go to your own people. Why are you going to these white people for knowledge? You know, that's not, that's not our thing.

And, you know, it's like, he's not wrong. And even, you know, like even my understanding, cause I don't really understand the Bible that well, is that like the traditional Bible is not what's Like the conservative, you know, supply side Jesus isn't the actual Jesus.

So coming out of that and trying to decouple that and a lot of the various traumas we experienced in our lives. So on an athletic front, we had the idea that we go into practice and we're going to practice and you drill and you drill forever and you get better.

And if that was true, I'd be like a three-time Olympic champion. We've drilled so much. We had some good friends in college. One of them is a guy named David Tirao. David, he was fourth Division I NCAA. He's IBJJF, brown belt, no-gi world champion. And he's the current U.S. Judo representative. He's really good at grappling.

Probably the best overall grappler I've ever met. He was our college roommate. Good friend. He started coaching wrestling at Ryan Hall's gym at 50-50. We had been training with our coach at TriStar. We met Ryan and he introduced us to a conceptual framework of It's pretty common nowadays, the idea, you know, like alignment principle, things like that.

Stuff you hear on BJJ Mental Model, you know? All of that stuff. It just made me think, okay, well, if I can take ownership of my own wrestling. So we started doing that and COVID hit. I got really depressed and then I started actually seeing a therapist. Um, and then eventually I did a, uh,

if there's one event that really opened it up for me, uh, I did a, uh, uh, medicinal ceremony with psilocybin and it kind of just like, you know, I've got my own trauma and it's like, uh, it blocks me a lot, but at that time I could just

it made me feel the difference between being blocked and not being blocked. And once you see that difference, it's kind of like, it's possible to be that way. And so dealing with that and reintegrating and relooking at our own peoples, I started looking at, we have what's called like a, what's it called? The, the,

The coming of age ceremony. Ohalogo. It's called Ohalogo. In that ceremony, they teach the young girls and boys to become young women and men. And the way they do that is by having them go out in a forest by themselves, taking care of a fire and fasting.

One year they do one day, and then up to the fourth year they do four days. And in there, they either have an aunt or an uncle for if you're a boy, you've got an aunt, or if you're a boy, you've an aunt and uncle.

If you're a girl, you've got an aunt and uncle who are helping you. And one thing that's really important to them is making a fire. And the whole point of that making a fire is it's teaching you how to live, how to maintain a fire, maintain a family, maintain your own life, your own energy.

I was talking about the great law of peace and another thing they talk about is called which generally translates like righteousness or power. But really what it's more like is the ability to attract other people to you. And what that's talking about is it really more means like a fire.

A fire can either be really bright and hot and hurt you or it can be it can warm you. It can be just embers. So it's like realizing that things aren't in stone and that there's an entire environment around you. It kind of helped me reconnect.

And so that's kind of how I started looking at making games and playing more alive. Yeah, and so the other thing, too, that's important about our Great Law of Peace is the story, you know? Because there's three major narratives for the Haudenosaunee people, right? So there's the creation story.

Then there's the story of the Peacemaker, the Great Law of Peace. Then there's the Code of Handsome Lake, which people don't necessarily agree on. And around all that, there's the Hondo Galiwadequa, which is a Thanksgiving address. But the Great Law of Peace, the Peacemaker story, that's the story of the formation of the Confederacy.

And people can look this up if they want. It's not like it's secret knowledge. But at that time... The oral history, the oral tradition tells us that the people were at war with each other and that they weren't healthy. You know, there was like cannibalism and people hurting each other in their own families and blood feuds.

You know, this kind of stuff where the people were traumatized and unwell. People were unwell. And so from the Huron Nation, which is not even part of the Confederacy, they're a sister people, they share our language and some of our stories, you know. He came, this peacemaker came, and along with Ayawanta and Jagonzase and some others,

he created a great law of peace. And essential to that, there's three principles. which are skana, which is peace, like peace, like Phil was talking about, the clear-mindedness. Then there's ghasastasala, which is that fire or that power, that ability to bring the people together, right? And then there's ghasningonlio, which is like

As we were stating, that's a good mind. And it's all of those things. But it's like the things that you do, the actions you take that create the other two things, right? Like the action, the doing. And so in that, as part of that story, there's this man named Iowata, commonly Hiawatha, you know? And there's a traditional,

there's a bad guy named Tadaho who had snakes in his hair and he was a dark sorcerer. And he had killed all of Aionwanta's daughters. And so he was like ill and sad and stricken with grief. And so the story is that he went out and he was collecting these wreaths and

putting them together and talking about the ways that he's feeling. And then he met with the peacemaker. And they put together these wampum rows, which form the condolence ceremony. And there are 14 beads of wampum that describe the things that happen when people are grieving or dealing with trauma. And so the formation of our people,

of our confederacy, whenever a chief is, sorry, I'm jumping around, but whenever a chief is put up into office, there's a condolence ceremony to make sure that their mind is right. You know, so our people, we have a deep, deep understanding of trauma because that's where the formation of our confederacy comes from.

It's from understanding a group of people that were unwell and coming together as a confederacy to heal the people and make sure everyone is healthy and cared for. and to have strong community kinship bonds. And so we experience in ourselves a very similar time because this thing happens, you know, people get traumatized. Right now,

we're living in a time where the people are unwell as a result of government and other policies that have disrupted our communities, right? Settler colonialism has disrupted communities and made the people unwell. And so as people, we have to come together to heal that, you know? We have to come together to heal that.

And so I'm not like a psychologist or a counselor or like any, you know, I don't got like letters after my name, you know, I just got a bachelor's. But I've worked with kids and have the understanding of trauma that I do have and I

know how to wrestle and I know how to teach wrestling and to do it in a way that supports the autonomy of the kids I'm working with. So for me, what Good Mind Grappling is, It's our part to play the way that Philip and I can interface in the community to help our community heal.

I'm not the only one to make that peacemaker connection. There's people in our community and other Indigenous communities who are working at this process of building... strength in our communities of community building and making sure that the children and the elders and the people around them that they're well so that we can be there

for each other you know because that's that's part of the thing is one of those things says that It's like the logs are scattered. When you're ill and traumatized, spirit will come and hit the logs and scatter the fire. And that fire, that's the center of the community so that everyone's scattered.

So people get alienated and they're all in their individual bubbles. And it's real easy for a colonial power to come in and step on a single person. So part of that is building community and building community in a way that uplifts everyone. So that's really the philosophical, the underpinnings of what we're doing.

It expresses itself in coaching, but that's what we do. During that process, I've done some research. There's that... the ecological dynamics thing that exists nowadays. I've read all of that. I've read a lot of motor skill stuff. And what I just found interesting is like the more like, look, the science is good. Science is cool.

No, no issue with that, but it's deeper than that. And science, science itself is limited by the environment of science itself, you know? So, What I found is like when I look more into a traditional culture, the way in which we taught or that people still teach is just science relearning what indigenous peoples already knew,

what human beings already knew. Like that.

So if I can kind of summarize it or even differentiate good mind grappling from some of the things that are happening, maybe kind of adjacent stuff, fellow traveler stuff in grappling is that a lot of people are using constraints and games and task oriented activities, but they're using it philosophically different, right?

They're using it to try to create some kind of Ubermensch, like this ultimate competitor. They're not doing it because they think it's more trauma-informed. They're doing it because it will produce better competitors, better athletes. Whereas you two are doing this because everything that you just said, talking about all this trauma, by doing it this way,

It's a form of trauma care. And maybe the byproduct of that is that people and these kids learn faster, but that's not like the primary underpinning. In mainline jujitsu or other grappling forums, their thing is about creating the best competitor, whereas you two are working on a project to make better, healthier people.

And the byproduct of that process sometimes makes them also very good at wrestling. Would that be a fair summary? It's somewhat fair.

I want to make a couple of addendums to that, though. The first thing that I want to make is it's all about intention. And all of the ecological dynamics, people will tell you, it's intention and attention. So like you said, with intention, hey, look, we live in capitalism. The intention is to make as much money as possible.

And by chance that raises the living standard of people. Whereas we could have the intention of raising the living standard of people, which is kind of what you're saying. But the thing that I'll say is that like, when you're introduced to this kind of concepts and being clear, I was not,

I looked into a lot of this stuff in this way, starting with science too. You know, because to me, science is extremely insecure by design. And I'm trying to figure out how to word what I'm saying in a coherent way. So give me a second here.

The issue with science, I think, is that, look, as a Native peoples, we look at the world... as alive. The world is alive. And what that means is that this phone that I'm talking to you on right now has its own spirit. The ground you're sitting on, the chair you're probably sitting in, or maybe not,

I'm assuming you're sitting in a chair, that has a spirit. And you're going to interact with those things around you and they're going to have effects on you. And so the world, and even a lot of ecological psychology people will talk about Cartesian dualism of I think, therefore I am. It's like, no, you just are.

There's no separation. And there's actually not even really a separation between me and that chair. We're all part of the same energy. So the issue that I'm trying to get to is That intention matters, but people don't necessarily have full control over their intentions. It's all a product of your environment,

so if you grew up in an environment, like we were just talking about, that's very conservative, you're not gonna know. So I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like I'm some grand arbiter of knowledge, I just have my lived experience, and my lived experience tells me that this is the way to do it with kids. The goal,

whether we're trying to win a wrestling competition or whether we're trying to have kids deal with trauma, is to create power, empower them. It's just, what's the more important power? And what is that power for? It's very similar. I know that when we're talking, I'm sorry to make this a little bit like Democrats or Republicans thing,

but it's like, the Republicans are much more successful, you know, probably by design because the only thing they actually care about is power. Right. And, you know, like, there's, you know, you can argue like, you know, Democrats are like, they're also not really a left wing party. You know, there's all that issue, but really the Republican party,

they, they care about power and they get their things done and they make change in the world. mostly for real, but they make change in the world because that's what they care about. And so the question isn't like, is power good or is power bad? No, no, no, no, no. Power is power.

It's what you do with it and what your intention is and how you distribute it. Right. So it's not that power is bad. It's that one person having all of the power is bad. You know, so it's it's like that is we want to build power, build strength in our communities so that we can empower each other.

And so that when someone is having a hard time, they have community to lean on. Because the way that our system is set up right now, as many people feel and I felt in the past, it can get lonely. It can be real lonely. You know,

I've got children and I'm so fortunate to have uncles and aunties and my parents, you know, their grandparents and family around that can come and support me. You know, if I was a father, me and my wife alone in some place where we didn't have community support, man, it'd be real hard.

And although there are people who are living in that real experience right now. And so that's the thing we want to do is to come in and not be these kids coach, not be the, you know, like I am coaching them, but it's more of like, uncle, you know, there's a distance where I'm respecting the real boundaries,

you know, cause they're children. You gotta be, you know, you gotta have, uh, you gotta have a lot of professionalism when working with kids. But, uh, that's the goal is to come in and, and inspire them and make them feel like they can be more than they, they think they are and,

and give them some of that fire.

Going back to something you two said about serendipity, I recently had somebody come to the LMA Learning Lab from Atlanta, a forest defender who was working with Stop Cop City and all that. That's like what the media and people were calling it, but they were just people trying to do good and defend this forest. Unfortunately, unsuccessful.

One of their comrades, Tortugita, was martyred. But one of the things they were talking about is like, especially what a lot of young people were very idealistic in the movement. They were like so idealistic. They wanted to just like do things so horizontally where they're like, I'm not interested in building power at all.

And the person who was here that I was working with was like, man, if we're not building power, then what are we doing here, right? Because how do we resist this, right? I get your fear of like power being concentrated, but the project has to be about building power.

And I think that's kind of like a different venue, right? We're talking about activism, but it's like kind of talking about power in that same way that you two are talking about power in a wrestling program, where it's like you said, it's not that power is good or bad, but it's just going to exist, right?

And it's like how it's going to be distributed, how is it being used, but... Oftentimes, the project is about building power, whether it's political power or on an individual level, like empowering these kids. Oftentimes, we think negatively about power when it often is a force that's just going to exist and that's probably very necessary.

It's fire. Perfect. It's fire. It's a fire. Power is fire. And fire, it's not good or bad. In our language, when we say, I love you, we say, and what that really means is I see you for what you are and accept you. And so what that is, it's really hard because trauma,

like we're talking about that water, it muddies the water so you don't see what's in front of you. And it's funny because when you think about that clear water, even at the bottom of the clear waters, there's mud. You're never going to get rid of the muddiness. You're never going to be perfect.

But you have to learn anyway. You've got to understand what things are and the attributes that they have. And so the reason that I find the tradition and there's issues, you know, with like SBG people and because they just care about being good at grappling.

But the thing that makes that conceptual model of understanding grappling beautiful to me is it's understanding the attributes of the structures that we make and that they're not good or bad. It's just understanding the attributes. And so power isn't good or bad. Hell, that dichotomy of good or bad is like a heaven or hell thing.

That's the colonized thing.

Dualism.

Yeah. So it's not that things are good or bad. They just are. And it's not that we can't not want quote-unquote bad things. I don't want anyone around me harmed. But these things happen. They just are part of the world. And we have to exist in the world that we actually live in.

And so, like Phyllis, it's about learning to tend that fire. Learning how to keep it from going ablaze and hurting people. Learning how when it's about to die out, you save that last little ember. And so it's like, if we're not building power, someone else, they're doing it.

Just sitting on your hands isn't activism, isn't acting in the community. It's not an action. It's going out and doing something. And there's strategy and what actions are worth taking. But, you know, from the perspective of an indigenous person living in North America, you know, we live in an entrenched settler colonialist state.

And so there are some limits on the things we can actually do, but we got to build power over time. You know, like people poo-poo land acknowledgements, you know, like, and I get it because land acknowledgements are just like, a thing. They don't actually do anything for you.

We acknowledge that we're on the land of the traditional this, that, or that. But what it is is don't poo-poo that. What that means is that we've won to an extent. They have to acknowledge us. They could just not acknowledge us. They could just pretend we don't exist. Like they did for a long time.

There's some kind of change that's happened.

Yes. And even if it's only a platitude, you know, but at least it shows we're going in the right direction. Yeah. And the only thing is, is you go, yeah, we got land acknowledgements. Then what? Kind of like voting for Harris, you know, like I don't, I'm not,

I don't pretend that Kamala Harris was like good or she was like gonna save the world or nothing. You know, I just know that I'm very scared of what this Trump administration is going to do. And so you vote in your best interest and then you picket them anyway. You know? Yeah.

Like, I was talking to my dad the other day and he's, you know, he's an old school activist. And the way he put it to me is it's like, you know, in our way, we've got the principle of seven generations. We got to do what's best seven generations from now. And if that's what we're doing,

we need to do labor that maybe, you know, maybe we're not going to see the fruits of it. You know, you get a lot of young people who are like, oh, we got to have revolution today. And it's like, well, we don't have the power to do revolution today,

but maybe we can do the work to lead to that. Set the table. The table's got to be set. It's not like England, Spain, the colonial powers didn't come here in 1492. And then by 1493, it's as it is today. It also took them time. You're not going to undo 300, 400 years of actions in one lifetime.

It's just not going to happen. So it's not to be like, oh, we can't do anything. It's to go, what is within our power? Like when we're working with those little kids, look, Maybe a little kid's too traumatized to actively deal with the fact that their parents are doing whatever abusive action.

But I can put them in a pinned position and then they can learn to deal with the pinned position. And we can make the pinned position easier or harder So you can modulate where that kid is at. And that's why I think it's really a lot about relationships and understanding one's relationship to themselves, their own internal fire,

other people and dealing with other people's fires, and then the world itself, the ground, the air, the trees, all of those have power too.

And some of the stories you told, it's like better than direct, like, this is what this means, right? These kind of stories are powerful because of the way you could reach people. But from my own positionality, being Korean, I don't know how much you know about Korea, but also within Korea, there's like this island.

So I'm from Jeju and ancestry. From that positionality, where I draw things from is Confucianism, Taoism. And something you two mentioned at the beginning is like how people were like a long time ago, right? And it's like a lot of those stories are very similar.

All of us, everyone is indigenous. Everyone. Somewhere back in your line, your people, I don't care who's listening, somewhere back in your line, your people, Believed in the sun, believed in the moon, believed in the water, and believed in the earth. It's only... People think that history is progress, but it's not. You know?

The weirdness of belief is recent. You know? Look at the indigenous Irish. Look at the indigenous Germanic peoples. Look at the indigenous peoples of Asia. There's indigenous peoples of Africa. There's indigenous peoples of Australia. There's indigenous peoples everywhere. All this whiteness that's constructed recently, it's not a real thing. You know?

So it's like the issue is that these traumas, they... They invade, they're in your mind and they're sneaky. They're sneaky. You have to, it's hard to confront them. Like if you're sitting there looking at that water and it's clouded and you can't see behind the cloud, what's causing the cloud? You don't know.

And so it's not a special thing. Like us being like, we have our own indigenous ways of our own indigenous knowledge pathways to our own tribe. But there's a lot of other tribes that have very, very similar things. We're not unique.

This might be a little bit inside baseball, but I was curious, since you two are doing an approach to wrestling and even learning sports, motor learning, that's different from the way you two even came up. Do you two ever get friction from some of the parents or some coaches who are like, what is this?

What are you two doing?

Thomas and I are lucky. We're lucky that in a mainstream sports world, we're highly successful. That's true. Here's a good example. You're aware of turtle position?

Yes.

In wrestling, they call it referee's position. We're playing a game where kids got to stand up. Other kids behind them, kids got to stand up. And so there's a parent that was watching on the sidelines because the kid is not... Instead of doing a normal stand-up, quote-unquote normal, like doing the blast stand-up that everybody's aware of,

the kid was doing a three-point stand-up. He was going onto his hands, putting his hands down and walking up his hands to his feet. Quad pod stand-up. We didn't teach him. He just did it. His parent went, no, no, no, don't do it like, don't do it like that. And then Thomas went up to, Thomas stopped him.

They kept playing the game and Thomas explained to him like, if you look at the NCAA Division I, that's the majority of the way the top level people are getting out. Your kid's doing something elite that I didn't learn until I was in college. Don't hurt his autonomy, let him learn. So it's like that.

And really, a lot of the times, I'm learning from the students. Really, that friction you're talking about, most of that friction comes from myself or Tom. Because I grew up in a way of learning. Even knowing what I know now, those blocks are real, man.

It's hard not to look at a kid doing something and thinking, why are they doing it like that? I've learned so much from watching the kids because they don't have a preconceived notion about what's supposed to happen. I didn't understand how backframes work and I'm watching a kid dealing with a kid's backframes

And I'm sitting there like, how is he doing that? And then I sat there, thought about it, played around with my brother. And I'm like, oh, now I understand how backframes work.

And for listeners who don't know what that is, can you explain?

Okay, so like in Turtle, you're giving somebody their back. And so most people think, so like, where do I hook in? If their back's bent, it pushes you away. So you kind of like slide off of them. But there's like underneath your lats, there's like a good place to put hooks, create really strong drive.

And so I've used those lat hooking spots, but I did them on accident because I drilled. And then I watched a kid doing it Like, because normally I'm thinking, oh, we're supposed to do a thigh pry. You got to get as low as possible. I'm seeing a kid do a thigh pry that's super high.

Like their hands are like really high on the thigh. And I'm like, that's wrong. But the kid's pushing the other kid so hard. Come to realize, like, I tried doing it like that. And the thigh pry is way stronger because you're more easily able to reach those lats to make a hook, to make a pushing hook there.

And it's like, okay, well, there's a kid who's literally been wrestling for two weeks and he knows this better than I do. You know what I mean?

They didn't know they weren't supposed to know it.

Yeah, they didn't know they're supposed to know it. And true expertise is something that can't be explained. You know? So it's like You can only, it's like having a map. You've got the map, but then there's the actual territory. The map's not the territory. And so sometimes if you're looking at the map,

like so a lot of the times when we're dealing with technique, I have a preconceived notion. So I'm looking at the map. This is what the map's telling me. But in reality, it's different. And the kids not knowing, not having 15 years of drilling and this and that.

You get a lot of coaches tell you, oh, don't do collar tie because you're going to get stuck there. Or don't throw headlocks. Or don't do this specific move I don't like. And it makes you think like, oh, I'm never supposed to do that. We have kids throw each other on the first day generally.

We just do it when they're on their knees so it's like a little less of a fall. We got kids throwing headlocks on the first day. You know, we never showed them a headlock. And so it's like not only are we empowering the kids, the kids are empowering us.

You know, because then it makes me go, oh, there's more to it. I can recalibrate and now I can be a better, I can be a better mentor. So yeah, most of the friction comes from my own beliefs about how the body works.

Your own conditioning, right?

Yes, exactly. So like I'm saying, I'm sitting here talking about traumas and stuff and it's like, I'm not perfect. I'm still dealing with it. Everybody's still dealing with it. You're never not dealing with it. It's just a thing that happens, period. And as soon as people can accept that and accept that they're going to keep working

on themselves, it's going to be a lot better.

There's no magic pill, right? It's just continuously unlearning and learning. Yes. Continuously unlearning and learning.

And even learning what learning is. I love that.

It gets noodley. You two mentioned how sometimes after practice, you have time for something you call reflection. So what is that time for reflection? And what are some of your favorite reflections from the kids?

So there's two different kinds of reflections that we do. The first kind is we'll play a game and then we won't... We'll literally just have them play a game. We won't describe like, here's what's happening. Here's Frank. We'll just have them play a game.

We'll have them come together and we'll go, what are some strategies that you did that worked? Or what are some strategies that your partner did that worked? Or like, what did you run into that was hard? So we have them think about what's going on first. And so...

One of my favorite ones from that is we're playing knee tag and you get kids who come to understand, okay, if I get low, I get down to my knees, I can just dart from my knees. People tell you don't wrestle from your knees, but it's like, yeah, you get low enough, you can dart.

So you have kids doing really cool stuff. The other kind of reflection that we have is at the end, We always ask the kids to share what their favorite thing was and what made them feel good about the, what did they like, what made them feel good.

My favorite one from that is we were doing an intro session at a school and there was a little girl, maybe about seven years old. You know, she was a bit on the chubbier side. you know, there's kids who are out of shape. And so we're going through the reflection and all the kids are explaining what

their favorite thing was and we get to her. And she said, at the start of the day, I was really, really scared. And then I decided to be brave. I had a lot of fun and now I really like wrestling. And it just made me think like, This is what it's about.

It's about a kid who's maybe not your stereotypical athlete learning that their body is something they can enjoy.

You two mentioned that's part of why you don't even push competition too early, right? Because you want them to just fall in love with moving, fall in love with the sport, the activity, and get to even know their bodies.

Yeah, I think competition is important. However, it's very easy to get toxic with competition. You gotta, they have to love the sport and have fun. It's gotta be fun. Otherwise, you're wasting your time. Because at the end of the day, who's Olympic champion from 1976? You know, like, who's the Grock Roman Olympic champion?

I've got a coach named Anatoly Bykov, who was 1976 Olympic champion for the USSR. And nowadays he lives in Montreal and he has a really rough life because he's still clinging to the fact that he was a champion back then and that's all his life ever was. And so it's just like, if it's not fun,

Why are we doing this? Because success, success is just, is something you had on a day. It's not who you are, but what your body can do, how you can move, the way you see the world, the way you understand the world, what your relationship is to your body, right? Because again, it's, it's all about relationships, right?

Competition has the ability to make your relationship with your body unhealthy by doing unhealthy things for the sake of winning. And now if that's what you're doing and you're an adult, sure, that's fine. I've done that. But when we're dealing with a six-year-old kid, when we're dealing with a 10-year-old kid, why? Why? Why are we doing that?

So if we're going to competition because they want to and it's fun, sure. But if we're doing it because I'm a parent and I didn't win when I was little and I want my kid to win, we're wasting our time. That parent's putting their trauma on their own kid.

How can listeners find out more about good mind grappling?

We have a website, goodmindgrappling.com. We're also on Facebook, Good Mind Grappling. We're working on building up an Instagram, but currently those are the two ways that they can find us.

Thank you to both of you for your time. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, it was a fun conversation. Hopefully we can talk again.