Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host for today. It's May 7th. I'm John D'Alene.

We are here in the midst of what I think is a really interesting and important interview.

We're here with Sane Ciali. Hey Sane. Hello. We just spent two and a half first-so hours hearing about Sane's amazing story.

Growing up as the daughter of Tongan immigrants, growing up Mormon in the Oakland area, in a white ward, predominantly white ward, almost exclusively white ward, doing so many things, but excelling it or high school, being sort of a mother figure to her three younger siblings in a blended family.

And if that weren't enough, becoming an advocate for social justice and particularly for the Black Lives Matter movement in the Oakland area as a believing Orthodox Mormon teen.

That's where we left off, where you were graduating high school, about to serve a mission, about to go to BYU.

And what I think would be kind of like a dream for the modern Mormon Church, because you are educated woman of color, who was also fighting for the rights of marginalized people, but as someone who identified as a Christian and as a Mormon and saw no conflict between advocating for social justice, but also being a woman of color in Mormonism.

Like that seems like a PR dream. I'm looking at you, Beau, but that seems like a PR dream for the Mormon Church, given all the things the Mormon Church is struggling with today.

Like I would have thought they'd be wanting you to become their face in so many ways to try and move forward in a way, given all the historical problems with the Church.

But I'm getting ahead of getting ahead of your story. So anyway, welcome back. Thanks for joining us. If you haven't watched part one, please go back and watch it because it'll build a really important foundation for this part too.

But thanks for joining us, Sonny. Thank you for having me.

And also joining us today is Nate Bird. You'll recognize him from my previous episode with Nate on Mormon stories. Nate was also one of the founding members of the Black Manaces at BYU.

He's got an amazing story as well. We'll make sure to include that in the show notes. But please check out Nate's interview. And thanks for joining us Nate. You're here at Sonny's request.

Thank you. We've just kind of been around each other for years and then that turned into a close friendship.

And then Bishop O, or Beau Euler, who's become a dear friend of mine, he was also Carolyn Pearson's Bishop in this Oakland ward.

Sonny, you wanted Beau to be here as well. And he's provided really important context to this whole story.

Thank you for joining us. Absolutely. Good to be here. Yeah.

All right, Sonny. So we left off last episode with you graduating from high school. And you said that if we had interviewed you as a graduating senior, you were going to go on a mission.

You were going to go to BYU. You were going to go to graduate school. Continue your work in social justice.

And that you had hopes that someday you'd get married and have that temple marriage and do the Mormon thing and maybe even have kids.

But because of your skin color and your cultural cultural heritage, I think that dating marriage. Child thing was a question mark.

And so will that that's going to be an important theme of how that progresses. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely.

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