The

The

The Welcome to Spirits, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore.

Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world.

I'm Amanda.

And I'm Julia.

And we are delighted to be joined today by Isaac Sanders. You are a scholar. You're a poet.

You are a two-spirit, non-binary, Afro-Indigenous person. And you posted something so powerful

that I threw my phone across the room and then picked it back up to call Julia and said, we have to have Isaac on the show all about tricksters as anti-fascist practice. But first of all, Isaac, welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time. Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be here. It's also so nice to meet y'all. As things go, I was like, we were emailing back and forth, but it's always great to see, like, a name and a face and actually talk to y'all and not, like, see, like, different video recordings from your Instagram, but actually talk to y'all. So it's very nice to see y'all. Well, we're very excited to have you here today. I was like, I have to ask, how did you find your way to the trickster?

Because that is very much what we want to focus on in our recording today, though I'm curious about all the kinds of ways that folklore has intersected with your life. But let's start with the trickster figure. Yeah, that is so good. So one of the things that my mom did for me, and I'm going to talk about my mom a lot, I'm going to talk about my grandmother a lot because they are pivotal figures in my life. But when I was younger, she really liked Aesop's fables. Like it was like one of the first books that I had received. And from there, my whole, my journey through like mythology are just like these kind of tales that bring in these characters became a core part of my life.

And Beer Rabbit was the one for me.

I loved that story and just hearing about like, and I'm going to call it what it is,

the manipulation tactics of this rabbit were fascinating to me.

I was obsessed with, like, yeah, I can work smarter, not harder,

and this is always going to be the way my brain operates.

And so I kind of, like, took on this identity of the trickster at a young age

where I would make my cousins do things, knowing good and well we weren't supposed to be doing them, but I wanted to see what would happen.

There's nothing more chaotic than a child who said, I'm going to be the trickster now, because children already immediately chaotic.

And so to make a conscious decision as a young child to be like, this

is the energy I want to bring into this world. Incredible. Yeah, it's been a character trait,

and it still is very much a character trait that I lean into on a regular basis. But yeah,

being a little kid and having cousins who were willing to do whatever I said, I really just wanted to see what would happen. And so I'd be like, I'll give you $5 if you go and like swing that golf club and make this thing happen. And then we break a window. And I'm like, I didn't do it because I didn't. Technically. Did your cousins rat you out? Or? No, well, I would be like, what are we going to do? And so we would try and strategically get ourselves out of it. But if we cut it and it was like, what's going on, I would sit in a corner, I'd have my little Game Boy advance in my hand, and I'd be like, I didn't see anything. I didn't do nothing. Learning from a young age, not writing anyone out. No one is writing each other out.

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