Birds, Belonging, and Becoming with Jamison Schulz-Franco

What does it mean to reconnect with your ancestry when the journey doesn't come with a roadmap? In this episode of *Our True Colors*, Dr. Shawna Gann sits down with storyteller, community organizer, and anti oppression facilitator Jamison Schulz-Franco for a thoughtful conversation about identity, belonging, and the courage to remain curious. Together, they explore what it means to hold multiple cultural identities, reconnect with family history, and embrace the complexities that shape who we are. Rather than searching for simple answers, Jamison shares how listening to family stories, returning to ancestral homelands, and building relationships with people and the natural world have transformed the way they understand themselves.

Jamison also shares the inspiring story behind Special Bird Service, a community centered on creating welcoming outdoor spaces for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and queer communities through bird watching and connection to the land. From conversations about migration, oral history, and ancestral memory to reflections on cricket, community, and healing, this episode is an invitation to embrace the richness of our own stories while making space for the stories of others. If you've ever wondered where you belong or how to honor every part of your identity, this conversation offers both encouragement and hope.

Jamison Schulz-Franco is a storyteller, community organizer, and anti oppression facilitator whose work centers on community connection and embodied approaches to social justice. Born and raised on the ancestral territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking Peoples in what is now known as Victoria, British Columbia, Jamison's perspective is shaped by their South Indian, German, and Scottish ancestry. They currently work with a local land trust supporting Indigenous led stewardship on Southern Vancouver Island and co founded Special Bird Service, a bird watching community that brings people together through nature, belonging, and care for one another.

In this episode, you'll hear about:

• Why curiosity can be more powerful than certainty in understanding identity
• Reconnecting with ancestry through family stories and lived experience
• Creating community through bird watching and relationships with the land
• Navigating multiracial identity without forcing it into either or categories
• The importance of oral history, belonging, and intergenerational learning

If this conversation resonated with you, we'd love to hear what stood out. Leave a review, share this episode with someone who would enjoy it, or connect with us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Our True Colors Podcast.

Dr. Shawna Gann's upcoming book, *Mixed Signals: The Multiracial Case for Civility and Belonging at Work*, will be released in early Fall. Visit the website to sign up for updates about the book release and other exciting news.

Check out some more stuff!

The Christian Cooper Chronicles

Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper

The Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow’s Hierarchy

If this is your first time with OTC, check out  EPISODE 1: START HERE for more background on the show. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram!

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Transcript

Intro  0:06  
Welcome to our True Colors, hosted by Shawna Gann. Join her as she explores the challenges of being a racial riddle, an ethnic enigma, and a cultural conundrum. Let's dive in.

Shawna  0:20  
Hi, friends. Welcome to another episode of Our True Colors. I am thrilled to bring today's guest to you. I had the best time talking with Jamison Schulz-Franco about what it means to reconnect with ancestry and define community through unexpected places. Jamison is a storyteller, a community organizer, and someone who believes that paying attention, whether that's to people, to places, and to the natural world, can change how we understand ourselves. Born and raised on the ancestral territories of the Hussein, it's First Nations and the Kuangan-speaking peoples in what is now known as Victoria, British Columbia, Jamison brings together experiences shaped by their South Indian, German, and Scottish ancestry

Shawna  1:07  
with a background in sports journalism that evolved into anti-oppression facilitation. Jamison's work centers on community connection and embodied approaches to social justice. They currently work with a local land trust supporting indigenous-led stewardship on Southern Vancouver Island, and co-founded Special Bird Service, a bird watching community that brings people together to connect with the land, birds, and each other. In today's episode, we talk about why sometimes the most meaningful answers come not from certainty, but from learning to stay curious. So, without further ado, let's get to the conversation. Hi, Jamison. Welcome.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  1:47  
Thank you for having me on the show today, Shawna.

Shawna  1:49  
Oh, I'm thrilled to have you on the show. I've been kind of a nerd all. Jamison's gonna be amazing, like, and I know that the listeners will think you're amazing too. Can you tell them a little bit about yourself?

Jamison S-F (he/they)  2:00  
Absolutely. Yeah, my name is Jamison. I use pronouns he and they, and I am currently sat on Kosinich homelands, which is what is colonially known as Victoria, British Columbia. I'm sitting here next to Mount Picoles, which is where I've spent most of my time on this island here. I am a bird watcher. I am a little brother to many people. Someone that I love in community recently called me a little brother, like kind of generally as like a personality trait, and I feel like that totally suits for how I feel. I'm pretty goofy, but I also feel like I, I like to be the one that people trust with, you know, all sorts of information, whether that be just something goofy or something that actually is a little more. I

Shawna  2:40  
look at, I don't know if I'm giving my little brother all the information, so what else? What else about you, little brother? Tell me more.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  2:52  
Oh, that's amazing. I don't know, I like to think that I exist in, in a wide range of spaces, you know. I'm, I could consider myself a bird watcher that's not somebody who knows a lot about birds, but enjoys watching birds. Oh yeah, I've been a sports media journalist because of my background in school. I have kind of moved into anti-oppression facilitation, which is how I've spent the last like three or four years of my life, and more recently I've switched lanes, moving from like a government human rights position into working for a land trust, so it's like a local land trust on the island here that is trying to move from environmental conservation work, moving into returning land back to First Nations on the island,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  3:37  
so that's what, like, the organization is kind of striving towards, and I'm somebody who is thinking about, you know, what modern solutions to, like, historical and ongoing problems. So that's kind of what my work looks like right now, is trying to be a part of these conversations in community to see how we can, you know, work together and build relationships together too.

Shawna  3:55  
Oh my god, can you come talk to our president? Because I don't think I don't think he gets like you talked about giving land back, he's trying to take it, this whole working together and communicate, I don't know, maybe let's see if we can get you an appointment, because we're in trouble, James,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  4:13  
we are cooked, I don't know, people talk about selective listening, and I don't even know if we would get to that place of listening, even being a part of conversation, so

Shawna  4:23  
there's no selective or any kind of listening, as anyway. Okay, different topic. Bring it back. We do need some help. There's two things you said, though, that I'm like, oh my god, I would just love to look out your window. Island and mountain, I miss the mountains. Oh my gosh, I miss the mountains. You get to have an island and mountains, like that's cool.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  4:45  
It's actually incredible, like this. The South Island that I live on, the ecosystems alone that it holds are incredible. Like, there are so many different, like, native plants that are like exist here and thrive. Here and what the ocean here, the Salish Sea creates the conditions for is just like a version of a coral reef, one of the most biodiverse, rich diving areas in Turtle Island in North America, and some of the most dense and rich old growth rainforests in the Pacific Northwest.

Shawna  5:18  
Please let us protect that. That's amazing, I You said that your bird watcher. So, tell me about it a little bit.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  5:35  
So, I got into bird watching in 2020 because my brother, my cousins, and I, we wanted to get outside and learn more about birds, and we had always been fascinated with birds, because my brother and I, we grew up on a bog, like on a marsh. Wow. Okay, you just

Shawna  5:51  
keep coming with, like, okay, bogs, y'all, bogs, islands, and mountains. I feel like I'm gonna write a song about that later. All right, go on.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  5:58  
Actually, I do. I'm starting to realize how ridiculous it sounds.

Shawna  6:02  
No, it's not ridiculous, it's cool. I grew up in a bog, now I live in an island next to a mountain. Okay, bog and birds go on.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  6:14  
So, what my cousins and my brother and I decided was that we wanted to help hold space for other bodies of culture, for other black and brown folks, and, and the queer communities that exist on the island here, to get outside and have, like, a safer place to bird watch in peace, to exist outside, and to have kind of community safety be a central point of it, so that when we're going outside, we are, you know, safer in numbers, and I guess have capacity to learn about the actual history of these lands, rather than just, you know, the scientific Latin names for birds that are often ridiculous and don't tell us a whole lot, you know. So it's a relational process for us, not only in how we relate to one another, but how we relate to the environment around us learning the traditional place names for the locations that we're at, you know, that's like a really key part of it, especially inviting in and being a part of the indigenous communities who live here, it's just like the names for these places hold such rich history, there's one place that's called Sneed Quiff, it's over in Hossein, it's territory, and it means place of the blue grouse, and so the history of this place is we get to go and bird watch on this place that has been an ancestral bird watching place for individual name of the

Shawna  7:33  
place, literally. Wow,

Speaker 1  7:36  
yeah, that's really

Shawna  7:37  
cool.

Speaker 1  7:38  
Yeah,

Shawna  7:39  
so my husband and I watch birds too, but that's because we're old.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  7:43  
Yeah, we definitely give Uncle energy when we're out there. I feel like my brother and I are kind of trying to like embrace the uncle within, you know, it's like we're not far off, I

Shawna  8:11  
I love that you are truly looking for connection with our earth, with our world, and with nature, and it feels so good. You know, I live in the DC area. I'm fortunate that I don't live in DC. Actually, there's a bird sanctuary. I'm pointing as if everybody can see it. You see that over there? Like, there's a bird sanctuary. So, we get like bald eagles sometimes, and lots of hawks and other sort of birds of prey and owls. I have a friend who's like, 'Girl, if you send me another picture of an owl, because she's afraid of them, so I kind of do it on purpose. But there's another thing that you said, I gotta bring us back for a minute, because we can't just let that moment pass. You said that this was about creating a space of safety. The minute you said that, when I put together black and brown people trying to have a safe space and bird watching, I think of Christian Cooper from 2020 those of you listening, if you don't remember, there was Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper. Christian Cooper was out there trying to watch him some birds in Central Park, and Amy Cooper was losing her mind with her dog, poor dog, and she was upset because he asked her to leash her dog, and so she basically weaponized her race and was like, I'm gonna call the police and tell them a black man is trying to hurt me. Thank God the camera was on and captured that, but that's the last time I ever heard about black and brown folks just trying to wash some birds in peace, and that's what happened. So, what's your story? What made it so that you felt like there had to be a safe space, you, your friends, your family, and why the birds?

Jamison S-F (he/they)  9:46  
That's such a good question. Yeah, we, when that happened in Central Park, we, a lot of our friends sent that, that video, and I need to.. it's now a documentary, I'm pretty sure that he's helped create.

Shawna  9:57  
Think it is. Yeah,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  9:59  
that's a.. that's kind of. Common experience for a lot of black and brown-bodied folks who exist outdoors, and who are in, like, especially in North America, at least. You know, the society that we exist in, like white folks in the outdoors, not everybody, but you know, there sometimes is this assumption that they know they want to know exactly what everyone's up to, and if they don't understand, then it's not often led with curiosity. It's led with this assumption that they know what people are up to, and or

Shawna  10:25  
that it's accusatory of, like, not just up to, but up to something that they wouldn't approve of, or whatever.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  10:31  
Totally, totally. Yeah. So, I think you know that's exactly why we, why we wanted to create this space, or you know, be a part of creating this space, because it's grown into more than we could have ever imagined already, but I think my brother and I, having grown up, and I mean, we went to, we went to private school here on the island, so we had a big level of privilege, I would say, in how we, you know, were raised, and we were also, we grew up in very close proximity to whiteness, being one of, like, in my grade, I was only one of four or five people of color, from grade one all the way till grade nine, when more international students came. So, this, this choice for us to get outside with our cousins and with our siblings was, it was a part of the unraveling, I would say, about the cultures that have always been a part of us. My dad immigrated here when he was 18, and so what he had to give up in that journey of immigration was a lot, you know, like he really has strives to be the model minority in so much of his life, and there have been a lot of brown spaces that he's been in in his lifetime, including bringing his most of his family here as well, from the south of India, where I'm from, so my brother and I had this kind of like tension that would exist not only between the different sides of our family, because on my mom's side they're German and Scottish, but it was also like in school and in public that we were often like feeling that tension, I would say, and so in 2020 we both realized how much of a priority it is for us to not only learn more about where we come from, which is, I say, I would say that that was a journey that I kind of started on as soon as I graduated high school, was like a more curiosity of where I come from, the cultures that make up who I am, but my brother and I really decided that it was an important time for us to kind of have solidarity between communities of color, because we were seeing of all the stuff that was happening in 2020 that was happening to black-bodied folks and to brown-bodied folks, and we were like, okay, we see the interconnectedness between us, and while we see the horrors we that we want to hold and witness one another in, we also need to get outside and be a part of healing too.

Shawna  12:35  
You know, I can really appreciate that, because some of the conversations I had with folks, especially in 2020 and I hate to say it, but we're not far from that right now. I guess when I was having conversations then, especially with people who do hold complex racial identities, mixed race, multi ethnic, or even people who are trans racial adoptees, some of the folks who were not identifying as monoracially black, we're like, what right do I have to speak or to say anything if I know that I hold some privilege because part of my identity includes this other privileged part of my identity, i.e. whiteness or some other aspect that one would consider privilege. You talked about unraveling, what is that process like, and how do you reconcile that tension when you're like, this is the stuff going on, but also this is part of who I am.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  13:30  
Honestly, I would say that I reconcile that tension by just trying to like consciously exist in it. It's never going to be something that is outside of me, like it'll always be something that is within me, you know. And, of course, it informs how I interact with the world, my like multiracial identity. And I definitely resonated with that. It looks like listening to more stories from my family, to be honest. It looks like a conscious choice and commitment, really, to learning about where my family, like the both of the many homelands, actually, that my family are from, I struggle to take up space talking about my identity. I don't really know where the place is that I should be talking about my identity, and I think that also says good things about the questions I asked myself. Like, in 2020 I wasn't really speaking out loud that much, or 2021 or 2022 I didn't speak that much about my own experience, because it wasn't the time for me to be doing that. It was my time to listen. I felt like, and to also, you know, continue this inquiry within, within myself and within my own community. So, I've learned most from my relatives, who I have met here, who immigrated from different parts of South Asia, like 2030 years ago, because there have been many people before me who exist with, as a multiracial person, many multiracial people who have been asking themselves, how do we, you know, try and fit into society here, and also hold the cultures that we come from, you know, and it's been like so important for me to learn about what. Are the south of India, especially like I'm in my very early in my stages of uncovering what my family's like names are, what my family's cooking practices are, but whether we know it or not.

Shawna  15:14  
Oh, did I get distracted? I'm sorry, you said food, go on,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  15:20  
it always comes back, but it's cool, because you know, the more, the more that I prioritize, like listening, the more that I realize this has always been a part of me.

Shawna  15:35  
Yeah,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  15:35  
I've always known what my grandmother's cooking activated within me, whether I knew it or not,

Shawna  15:40  
that makes so much sense.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  15:42  
Yeah, cricket and food are the two things that, like, helped me realize I've, I've always been brown.

Shawna  15:47  
Wow, I love how you said taking part in that part of your culture brought that out of you, but you're like, "But wait, it was always in me. I've always been brown, and so mine might be the opposite. I've always been Creole, I've always been multi-generationally mixed, but I think I had to accept that in myself. It also felt like if I were to claim that there would be some sort of betrayal to my family in the way that I grew up. But I recently talked to my mother about it. I was like, "Yo, so this is how I'm feeling about this, and she was so cool. She was like, yeah, we got new ways of thinking about things like that now, and that's it. That was it. I think I had worked myself up so much about what a label meant and what it would mean to my family. I didn't even consider that they might also be okay with

Jamison S-F (he/they)  16:35  
it. That's actually so beautiful. I love to hear of, like, your mom being that open to just receiving you and being there in the conversation, it's like I'm realizing how much more credit I have to give my, my dad specifically, but I think that generation of, of whether it was like immigrant folks or you know, black and brown body people of that generation, I'm realizing I have to actually give them a lot more credit than I was giving them, I mean, I'm 26 and I feel like maybe three, four years ago, or five years ago, I was thinking that I was the first person to have some of these conversations of exploring my racial identity, you know, and there have been so many people before us who question where they come from, who have felt this tension that we're talking about all along, but, like you said, don't necessarily have the words for it, I am definitely one of those people. I am still finding the language to describe who I am and how, where I come from, the many places that I come from inform how I show up, and when I'm thinking about my dad specifically, our conversations have been really charged around race and around what it means to be Canadian, what it means to be North American, I mean, just like he has told me to my face that he's, he's like, 'You're Canadian, you're not Indian, like you're Canadian. And

Shawna  17:49  
wow,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  17:50  
to me that conversation is very interesting. I first met him with, you know, frustration to be like, 'How can you just like try and erase who I am and like where I come from? Of course, I'm not the same as him, and though I carry parts of our lineage, our ancestors are from the south of India. We are the ready clan, that's where, like, one of the clans that we come from. And I feel like I'm learning to give my dad a lot more space in these conversations, because he doesn't have the same language that I am learning to use, but he actually has existed in some of these gray areas for so much of his life, and he's actually like wanting to have conversations. I was observing Ramadan with some friends in solidarity, and my dad grew up in a Muslim neighborhood in Bangalore, in the south. He's Christian, and so he knows Christian prayers, but in his neighborhood growing up, he learned the prayers from the Quran, and learned how to say prayer before breaking fast, and so we had some friends over for iftar, and my dad recited an Arabic prayer from 55 years ago.

Shawna  18:52  
Wow,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  18:53  
that he hadn't spoken since he was in the South, and so I'm just like, I gotta give my dad a whole lot more credit.

Shawna  18:58  
I bet your friends were like, "What, though? Wow,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  19:01  
my friends were like, your dad's amazing. Your dad is brilliant. He holds all this information up here, and he's like, you know, he's able to have these conversations. He brings so much to these conversations. Well,

Shawna  19:11  
able to, but also willing to. That's a difference, right? Like, you can know stuff just because you grew up around it, but you have to be willing to tap into that cross-cultural intelligence, so when you say your dad says you're Canadian, not Indian, I'm like, that doesn't even have to be an either-or thing, because you can be a Canadian citizen but have Indian ancestry. So, what comes to mind for you when I bring up that? I don't even want to call it a dichotomy, because it isn't really even dichotomous, it's together, so I don't understand why separate it.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  19:43  
Yeah, it's such an interesting thing. When my dad said that, I think about how easy it is to like subscribe to one or the other, just I guess more so subscribe to this like binary thinking that we exist in, or that we've been conditioned into. Actually, for me, you know, I. I sometimes identify as Canadian, like, as I was born here, I guess, in so-called Canada, and I also identify as South Indian, and I think holding those complexities is what I'm really trying to spend my time doing, or just existing in, because there are many folks who have gone through the journey of migration from India to here to North America, and it's just like the ways that people hold their cultures of where they come from and the ways they keep it alive. It's like a melding, it's an act of choice and melding, because that journey changes us so much. I feel like, depending on the circumstances of how folks have migrated, whether it was by choice or not. Yeah,

Shawna  20:38  
it

Jamison S-F (he/they)  20:39  
shapes who we are, of course. We know this, you know, and it shapes what we allow ourselves to exist in when we're here. Like, I only learned about what puja was because I was in indigenous-led ceremony here, and I was like, 'Oh, I wonder what kind of like prayer ceremonies are actually from where my dad comes from, and he's Catholic, so I think his prayer looks a lot different than, say, someone who's Hindu from the South, but his histories have been a lot more intertwined with religion, and so I see it as a loss of his traditional, like, prayer practices, and of course, he has a very strong faith now, so his prayer practices, in his mind, are they're intact, but that complexity exists at the most I've ever seen in the world, in my experience, is in India, there are so many different classes, castes, religions, and places that people come from, and people speak four or five different languages, just on the streets of Bangalore, and the streets of every, in every place in India, and so existing in that complexity to me feels like understanding where we come from. I will not know it all by the time I pass, but I'm on this journey of wanting to learn more, and I know, sure as hell, I'm not the only one.

Shawna  21:47  
Oh no, you're not. You're not. Now, what's interesting is, I don't call myself African American, I say I'm a black person, or I have black ancestry, because I don't have ties to Africa, whereas you have ties to India. Like, to me, that's why it was so interesting, because I'm like one is like nationality, the other is ancestry. I mean, technically it could be both, but in America, as I think it is in Canada, there is no one ethnicity or one race, so a lot of times folks default to saying American when they mean white.

Speaker 1  22:19  
Yep,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  22:20  
so I'm always like, well, do you mean white or do you mean American, because that's different, because I'm American, I white, so I don't know, oh my god, yeah, my mom, my mom's side of the family, she, they all identify as like very German, I mean, German, Scottish, because their last name is Schultz, and her dad comes from, like, Hans Schultz, you know. It gets real German up there. It gets a little scary for me, I

Shawna  23:08  
I love that you and your community are so intentional about talking about the lands that you're on and the people that you are with and helping that to live on, because, like, I need to be more intentional, as do a lot of other people, because it is so easy to slip into allowing that erasure to happen, right? Like, who actually lived here? What joy was here? What grief was experienced here? What was life like here? You know what I'm saying. I think it's so important, but we do have to be intentional, because we can forget and slip into our own sort of siloed way of thinking and forget all about the histories that are here.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  23:48  
Yeah, feels essential to me. I mean, the indigenous people here, and I mean many indigenous folks across the world have like these oral traditions that are so rich with living histories that you actually feel, you know, like indigenous scholars talk about worship of the written word. You know, how much we just worship these letters over what people's real life stories and experiences are, and it's just like it's so powerful to be hearing folk stories, because we're sure as hell not the first people to be bird watching or walking on these lands. Period. You know,

Shawna  24:15  
yeah. I know oral history is powerful. Have you ever heard of Dr. Anita Foeman?

Jamison S-F (he/they)  24:23  
Actually, no.

Shawna  24:24  
She's so interesting. She did studies on how people react to their DNA tests and whatever narratives they had in their head. So, like, let's say they had their oral history from their family, or families from here, and this is what we did, and here's our traditions, and then they get the results of their DNA test, and it tells a slightly different story. Some folks rejected it big time, because it was counter to the oral stories, the oral history they had grown up with. It's a fascinating thing, like it's like that means so much more to us sometimes than what's. On a piece of paper, digital or otherwise, you know,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  25:02  
I mean, so much more to us, you know. It's like I actually, you know, I think about some of the things that have helped me be like, okay, I'm actually going to go back to India, and like, I'm going to try and like learn more about where my family's from, and it is my grandma's stories, it is my family's like stories that, like, they stick with me. Our brains and our bodies hold on to so much more than we know, you know.

Speaker 1  25:23  
Yeah,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  25:24  
and it was actually an Alexis Pauline Gums black feminist ancestral listening practice that even made me think about there's so much I don't know about where my family comes from. I don't know any of my ancestors' names beyond my great grandparents, and like two, three years ago I didn't know beyond my grandparents' names what the practice is, is listening for what our ancestors have told us already, creating the space to just like meditate and listen, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, she's someone that I find so much joy in reading her work, I just really respect her, because there are so many of us who exist in these multiracial identities who have been told stuff, bits and pieces, and that somehow doesn't feel like we have enough to explore where we come from, and I have felt, and sometimes feel like I don't have enough to go back to where my family's from and make a choice to be there. I have almost none of the languages that are spoken in the south of India. I only know a little bit about how to cook the food, and that in itself is more than enough to be in that nutrient-rich soil that we can like water and nurture and move forward in a way that is reconnecting all these roots, because with that intention, I find with that intention, even making the choice to go back to India last year for the first time since I was like 16, just being there and the choice to be there. My family loves me so much more than I could have known by just going and being there. Like, my family knows these stories about me from when I was younger and when I visited that I don't even remember, you know. And now I know where my ancestors' grave sites are in the south of India, because I made the conscious choice to go back and listen to my atta, even though I, before going, I was like, I have no idea what this holds for me, I'm just gonna try. I

Shawna  27:09  
think that's beautiful. Most people are very familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, and a lot of people don't know that Maslow didn't come up with the hierarchy of needs, he was hanging out with this group of indigenous folks, who they have their hierarchy, they're like for him on the bottom is physiological needs, right, like we have to have shelter, and all that seems to make sense, but the very, very top of this pyramid is self-actualization, so the six seek of people, they said the base is self-actualization in their community. People come to this world with self-actualization. I freaking love that, because I am in my middle years, Jameson, and it's been my whole life of me striving to be good enough to be this enough to be that enough, and here's this community of folks that are like, you come here good enough, you come here ready.

Speaker 1  28:08  
The

Shawna  28:08  
next layer in this hierarchy of needs is community actualization. It's like we already know you are legitimate, you don't need us to confirm for you that you're enough of anything. You come here that way, but now let us show you what you mean to us in this community actualization. Oh my god, do you know how much I could save on therapy if I had come to this world knowing that I was enough? Somebody saying you don't have to prove or legitimize yourself, because you already are born who you're supposed to be, and that's enough. And then to say, like, okay, now I need my community with me, that's where that difference is. And you're talking about going back to your ancestral lands, not knowing all the languages or all the foods. Jamison, you don't have to, you're enough. Just because you were born is enough. That's your ticket, man. That was enough. I would love for us to just give ourselves a break and be like, I'm already enough. I'm just gonna go learn more.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  29:17  
Oh my god, that is so rich. That is so rich. What you just shared, it's I believe at the core of giving ourselves the permission and grace just to be as we are.

Shawna  29:56  
Tell me about cricket, man. You said cricket. It's part of your life too, and the sports journalism. How does all of this stuff play into who you are?

Jamison S-F (he/they)  30:05  
So, my brother, my dad, and I would, we would play cricket on our front driveway, which is like right on the bog that we grew up on. Like, our street was running parallel to the bog, but the bog was this huge marshland wetland that was just like full of willow, full of some, like, you know, invasive, like weeds and stuff, lots of cat tails, and lots of ponds as well, ducks, eagles, harriers, all these kinds of like unbelievable birds that would be in and about, and sometimes cougars too. There was lots of like wildlife that existed in that, in that bog. So, anyways, that's where I learned to play cricket, and I believe that street cricket - they call it gully cricket in India - is the purest form of cricket.

Shawna  30:47  
Is that because the rules are different? Oh yeah,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  30:50  
people bend the rules all the time. It's because the rules are flexible, and what you can use to play, you know, like all good sports don't require that much equipment, it's just a bat and a ball, or whatever, my friends in India, they use a window frame and a ball, whatever, hit it, run, whatever else comes next will come. So, cricket was what I grew up playing on, and with my brother, and it's also one of my dad's, like, biggest passions. He managed the Canadian national men's team for a couple years, and so it's been passed on to my brother and I to have a love and a passion for cricket, and it's been an.. it's been a ridiculous journey for me, playing representative cricket, and kind of not really vibing so hard with that. I just love the expression of cricket itself. It's a meditation practice for me. It's a community practice for me, and it's like baseball for people who don't know about cricket. It's like baseball, but use a flat bat, and you have to bat with a partner, so it adds the element of communication. You have to communicate with your partner, or else one of you is going to get out. And in cricket, once you get out, once you're out for the whole game. Oh no, and games are like seven hours, you can be sitting on the sidelines watching your homies, and you can get

Shawna  32:04  
that's awful.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  32:05  
It's unforgiving.

Shawna  32:06  
I can imagine that's a lot of shit talk opportunity, totally so much. Because one mistake will

Jamison S-F (he/they)  32:13  
cost you, you know, three hours of doing what you love. So, talk about grace, the grace needed with oneself and each other. Holy,

Shawna  32:21  
that's an essay ready to be written.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  32:26  
It is. You're right. You're right. Yeah, I'll get back to you on that. I'll let you know about where my essay journey takes me. I love that. Yeah,

Shawna  32:34  
speaking of essays and so on, journalism, is that why sports journalism? Just because you loved it so much. Like, what's that story?

Jamison S-F (he/they)  32:43  
Yeah, I went into sports media because when I was graduating high school, I was playing like competitive basketball at a high school level, trying to play post-secondary, and I was also playing like parental level cricket, and for me it was always so much more than just the sport itself, it was about what the sport teaches us, the stories that all of us as athletes have, yeah, in the background of why we, why we do what we do, and so I was like, I want to be a part of that storytelling, I want to be a sports journalist, at least try my hand at it. It's a four-year degree out of Toronto Metropolitan University, so I was there from when I was 17 to when I was 20-one, and it being a lively downtown place where the food, the music, the way people show up there is just like one of the most like diverse cities in the world. And that was such a cool place to learn more about myself and cricket and storytelling, like people are honing their craft, whatever their craft is, in cities like that. I mean, being born and raised on an island of less than about a million people, I was like, "Oh my god, you know, Toronto is unbelievable. And so I was going to school downtown in what I would call the butt crack of Toronto. I was like, "I work here, I go to school here, I'm just gonna be here. I wholeheartedly enjoyed my degree. It was, you know, it gave me the freedom to take other important electives, like I took a class that was called Social Movement and Politics, and the teacher for that class, Kik Roach, she's this queer black feminist lawyer from Toronto, and one of our assignments that we had, a school assignment, was to show up to a protest that she was co-hosting, and it was the Wat Suid in protest, so the shutdown Canada protests that were happening all across the country because of illegal resource extraction on what Sueton territory, and the assignment that she gave us was to just show up to the protest, to show up to the community hearing that she was co-hosting with Yellowhead Institute at our university, and just listen, and that was our mark for that for that week, and then it was, we talked about it, and we talked about what that meant, and what people's thoughts were, and she created the conditions for us to have meaningful conversation about things, and it was interesting, because I was in this degree for sport media, but so much of it was what I learned in and about all my classes that were, whether about sport or not, were about the stories that we hold as human beings. And as soon as I graduated, I was, it was in 20, it was 2020 that I was in the process of graduating, and I was like, I'm seeing all my favorite athletes come forward and talk about what's really important to them, and where they come from, and what they're seeing in their home cities, and what they've been seeing in their home cities, and I was like, okay, sports just one of the many things I care about, but it's the stories and the people that have always carried me through.

Shawna  35:23  
Yeah, you know, having a professor that gives you the real life, the real real. there's nothing like it. So that's fantastic, do Before I let you go, I would love to ask you to participate in something we've been doing this season called the Mixed Messages Archive. I have this, this box, my little homemade box, but inside of this box are all of these quotes from people that have been on the show or from folks that I've interviewed. So, I'm going to randomly pick one, and I would love to hear what comes up for you once you hear it. It doesn't have to be something you've personally experienced, I just want to know what it brings up for you.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  36:22  
That sounds amazing.

Shawna  36:23  
This one says belonging to multiple racial or cultural groups gives mixed people an advantage of navigating diverse spaces.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  36:31  
I think it definitely does. I think it's very particular to the context that you've grown up in. I can think of a few contexts where that would be different for folks who are, or they're adopted, or they don't have the same means of connection to where they come from. So, I wouldn't necessarily say that it's say that it's always an advantage. I didn't know what code switching was until like 2020 I would say that I learned to code switch and show up in spaces differently at a very young age, and it was totally an advantage, you know? Like, I can talk with my friends who are from rural places in Canada, and connect with their culture, like fishing culture and bird watching, makes me able to, you know, equips to speak with homies who are, you know, we're from very different places.

Shawna  37:13  
You're the first person I know to put fishing and bird watching the same sentence of homies. I'm just gonna point that out, but I mean, I'm here for it.

Speaker 1  37:23  
Damn, this is..

Shawna  37:25  
look, I think it's awesome that you could fish and bird watch with your homies. I agree that it does. It is context dependent, but I would say one of the biggest things that I see as an advantage of just being able to see different perspectives, I think, more easily because I'm forced to, because even if I didn't self-identify that way, people assumed I was mixed, and so they would act differently around me, or they would treat me differently. I don't have white privilege, but I have light privilege, and so I understand what it's like to be part of an oppressed community, but also have privilege. So, I think the fact that I do know what both of those things are at the same time, that has helped me incredibly when I'm doing work with culture and identity development, and what that looks like when you're becoming a leader of a place. So, I can see that,

Jamison S-F (he/they)  38:21  
yeah. Oh my god, yeah. There's, there's so much there, and what you've just said, it's such like understanding that power and positionality is so interesting. It's so interesting, yeah.

Shawna  38:44  
I want to thank you for putting up with me today. Thank you. I truly appreciate you. Thank you so much for this conversation, for sharing your stories, and every single time I walk away with something new, and I appreciate you for bringing it.

Jamison S-F (he/they)  39:04  
Absolutely, yeah. Thank you for welcoming me into it, into this space. I've listened to a few of the episodes from the past, and I feel like there's always such rich conversation, and for me to be a part of it is such an honor. And thank you.

Shawna  39:16  
It's truly a pleasure. I appreciate you. Thank What I appreciated most about this conversation is that Jamison never treated identity like it was something to solve, instead he described it as something to live into with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to keep listening. Whether we are talking about family stories, ancestral homelands, community, there's one underlying thought that just keeps resurfacing. Belonging isn't just about where we come from. It's also about the relationships we choose to nurture and the ways we remain open to learning about ourselves and one another. If this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear what stood out. Send me a message. You can send me a direct message right from the podcast. Look for the message me link, or you can find me on LinkedIn or on Instagram, Our Tru Colors Podcast. Before we go, I'm excited to share that my book, Mixed Signals: A Multiracial Window into Civility and Belonging at Work, is coming out this fall. Y'all, I am so excited. Stay tuned for more details. And what would be even better is if you sign up for updates, you can go to True Culture consulting.com to do just that. And speaking of True Culture Consulting, something new is coming, and I can't wait to share it with you. It has a little bit to do with mixed signals, but it's even a little bit broader than that. Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and keep embracing your true colors, spread the love, y'all. I'll talk to you soon.

Intro  41:16  
You've been listening to our true colors,

Unknown Speaker  41:18  
you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai