Diane Sands and Jennifer Euell

[00:02] JENNIFER EUELL: My name is Jen Euell I am 50 years old, and I am in Missoula, Montana. Today is Monday, June 6, of 2022. And I'm here with my interview partner, Diane Sands, who is a friend and mentor of mine.

[00:19] DIANE SANDS: And I am Diane Sands, age 75. Today is June 6, and we're in Missoula, Montana. And my interview partner, who initiated this, is Jen Euell whom I've known for a very long time as a friend and a coworker.

[00:37] JENNIFER EUELL: Okay, so thank you so much, Diane, for saying yes and being willing to join me in this Storycorps conversation. When I heard about the opportunity, I was really interested in asking you if you'd be willing, because you have done so much for Montana and have been a powerhouse not only sort of in the political world, having served in the legislature for many years, I was trying to count the years. I think it's more than 1516 years. Yes. In addition being a founder and just kind of the energy, I think, behind a lot of different positive change efforts throughout the years here in Missoula and across the state of Montana. So thank you for saying yes. I'm excited to just dive into this with you.

[01:23] DIANE SANDS: Happy to do it.

[01:24] JENNIFER EUELL: Yeah. So, first, I wondered if you could share a little bit about how you came to be an activist. Like, how did this happen in your life coming from rural Montana? I'd love to hear more about that.

[01:36] DIANE SANDS: Well, I was born in St. Ignatius, up on the Salish Kootenai reservation, because my parents were teachers at the time up in Ronan. But I primarily grew up in eastern Montana, which is related to this, you know, in a number of small towns. My dad's family. Family's homestead is in circle, although I never lived there. And my mother's family's from Bozeman. And I graduated from Fraser, F R A z E r, on the Fort Pick reservation. And it really was on the reservation that I first, I think, in many ways, became an activist as a kid. I mean, my parents were both college educated. My great grandmother had a college education. My grandmother worked for Mike Mansfield Center, Mansfield. So on my mother's side, there was quite a bit of political activity. But growing up on a reservation as one of the few non native people in that environment and seeing the discrimination really had a profound effect on me. I mean, the first instance I remember was in the fourth grade, and one of the guys had come back from relocation in California and started a small business. And it failed fairly quickly as a bakery. And all the white people, of course, said, well, you know, they're Indians. They don't know how to run businesses. And my dad, who wasn't really talkative about this stuff, but he just said to us, you know, Indians have a different sense of family and responsibility. Oh, that made sense to me. And then in high school, my sisters, particularly, I have identical twin sisters, and they would bring all their friends over all the time. Well, we were the only house in town where white people, quote, let Indians into their house. It was a very big deal. In fact, they fired my dad over that very issue because one of my sister's friends, two of the kids, got married to each other. The white girl, her father and his two brothers were the school board. She had been in his house across the street. He had never been allowed into her house, but they hung out at our house. So when they decided to get married, her family went nuts. This was all our fault because we were indian lovers and led Indians in our house. Otherwise, this would never have happened. Well, they're still married after 50 years, but, you know, so they fired my dad. I mean, they didn't renew his teaching thing, and dad just went to the union and the state superintendent and they said, they can't do that. But, I mean, that was fairly typical. I mean, it was really was. The only good Indian is a dead indian. And let's just. Teachers would just beat up indian kids and run them out of school. So, you know, I was very acutely aware of that by the time I was in high school and had a teacher who also said, you know, girls just aren't as smart as Boysenhenne. So he and I had quite the brouhah in class, and I never went back. But, you know, I was a white kid, the principal was my father. I got to do pretty much what I wanted to do. And so all of that really awakened me to many kinds of injustices and discrimination. And so when in 1965, when it was time to go to college, I came to the University of Montana because it was a politically active college. I mean, my dad's graduate degrees from here, but. So, yeah, among the first things that I did, of course, was to be very involved in the anti war movement and involved in the campus ministries, because at one point I considered going into the ministries. Race basically is a Lutheran, but they didn't really want women to be in the ministry. But it's what got me to Chicago in 67 with King and all them in the summer program for 1500 neighbor kids working on black history in summer school. And I thought, huh, we should be teaching indian history. But there wasn't such a thing. So I got very involved in the start of that and out of that program. I was kind of the key person who got Ulysses Doss to come back from Chicago, where he ran part of that program, to come to the U of M and then start the black studies program. We're the third black studies program in the United States. So campus ministries and that whole sense of justice. It was the height of the ecumenical movement and the social movements within the mainline christian denominations around everything from anti war to poverty to international capitalism, all of those. So I was very involved in all of that. So that's how I got into it in many different ways.

[05:53] JENNIFER EUELL: I had no idea about some of that. Yeah, I would think by this point I might have heard that story, but I never did. That's amazing. Yeah. I, in particular, never knew that you.

[06:03] DIANE SANDS: Were in Chicago and summer, 67 riots. You were in the shoes of the kid. Oh, yeah. The Panthers were very active. I was very attracted to the. Actually, I was really. I was a radical. I viewed myself as a radical. I was a radical. I was not a liberal. I was not. Let's change it through the institutions. Let's throw it all out and do something else. But as that era went on, you know, the assassinations of different kinds, political assassinations. And so it really called my attention to having to come to grips with. While you're committed to fundamental societal change in every aspect of it, how does one accomplish that? Do you do it with a gun? I mean, in the sixties, we were literally more than on the edge of a violent revolutionary movement in this country, and I was around the fringes of the more violent part of it. But in the end, I had to, after a great deal of study in some working groups with other people who are considering these different political theories, decide that you're not going to win at the end of a gun, and that the requirement in the Judeo christian tradition is to love one another. So I consider politics to be a spiritual practice in that regard. Just very challenging to do sometimes when you want to just grab other people by the neck or call them evil. I do not allow myself to do that, but it's tough. But so that change has to happen through nonviolent ways, through organizing, organizing and setting up organizations and voting and all of that. And the way I then convert over to actually, as we call it, the dark side. Elected politics was after the Montana Constitutional Convention, and I missed that because I was a little young. But when they did the abortion Control act in 74, I want to say I remember sitting up in the gallery of the house with a friend, and they were passing language that said, life begins at conception and that, you know, husbands and men all had to give approval and all this other stuff. And I remember turning and saying to her, I said, these guys decide if women are going to live or die, and I'm not going to let them do it. I'm not going to let them do it. So I started what became NARAL then, as well as my first experience in the Capitol, was as the lobbyist around abortion issues. And then in 83, when we started the Montana Women's lobby, which was a coalition of 50 some women's organizations, everything from nurses to childcare, AuW, BPW, League of Women Voters, all of those. And I was the executive director of that for a year. And we had two full time lobbyists and did legislation on all areas. So I moved into being a really broad based lobbyist and political organizer around all of those public policy issues. Never considered the course that I'd ever run for office or serve in office. That was just kind of a fluke.

[09:05] JENNIFER EUELL: So I don't know if you can even remember at this point, because it sounds like there's been a lot. But do you, can you list the different organizations and.

[09:14] DIANE SANDS: Oh, my God.

[09:15] JENNIFER EUELL: That you have helped start? I'm just curious whether you could.

[09:19] DIANE SANDS: We used to start one a week, at least. We'd go out to lunch and have some great ideas. I'm an external thinker. I was just discussing this with a friend this morning, and we were just having a great time thinking up this whole new activity. And both of us are really external thinkers. I mean, at some jobs I've been at, people just sort of blanch because I'll throw out ten new ideas in an hour. And they think we're supposed to do them. No, they're just things to think about. Could possibly work. I mean, I'm a historian, so I'm grounded in history. I always think, what is the history to this? But I also think, ten years out, what? What is it? We're going, what's that picture going to look like? And then what are the strategies to get to that? So I've started numerous nonprofits, some of which survived for many years and some didn't last the week, but that's just fine. You know, everything from. So in some ways, I have both a political resume and I have a historian's resume, and then there are other jobs that I did as well. You know, I mean, starting and running a community health center partly because of my attachment to the county, to retiring officially from the historical museum at Fort Missoula as both their development director, but also as the director of the japanese internment history project. I worked for the Forest Service, run Youth Conservation Corps programs, ran a bible camp at one point where I got paid less than the men because he finally told me, well, the guys just won't work for that wage. That pissed me off. Hence, I have nothing much to do with churches. But there you go. I've managed ballot measure campaigns in Idaho, two of them that had to do with defeating attempts for anti gay ballot measures. Oregon, on public financing of elections, run statewide campaigns like Linda McCulloughs for the Office of Public Instruction here, served in office myself. Started well, because I was on campus, and it was just the era we were in Washington, an activist era of the late sixties. And so we started the consciousness raising groups in the first women center on campus, probably about 68. And because, of course, a lot of us were becoming sexually active and there was no access to birth control information, we went out and collected it and tried to print it and distribute it around the dorms. And the university came and picked it up as quickly as they could. And we ordered the birth control handbook from McGill University in Canada, and the university confiscated it and locked it in a safe because it talked about abortion, talked about the Vietnam war, homosexuality, and it had naked people in it. So eventually they put a little strip in there that said it didn't represent the view of the university and then we could have it, but. And that, of course, then led to my work on illegal abortion at the time and finding places where women could go out of state to secure safe abortions. So I did all of that business. So I started the women's resource center. We were involved in the first rape crisis program on campus. That was when the football team, some of the football team, gang raped a young woman on campus. And of course, the president convinced her it was in her best interest to go home and not do anything. Well, we weren't going to let that go by. So got a can of spray paint. One of my favorite political activities, Spray painted a rapist all over their house, which is right over by campus. So these honking huge guys, about five of them, came into the women's center and said, and we'd had a statement, of course, from women against rape, acronym WAr. And they came in, are you the women against rape? Yeah. And we didn't stand down at all. They eventually just left, but they came in to intimidate us. So a lot of work in that area, and I've carried that through legislatively in a lot of bills having to do with sexual assault, including getting the requirement for consent put into the sexual assault statute. Yes. If there's another women's group. Yeah. Price was involved starting, well, a lot of women's employment stuff back then, too. One of the first projects I found money to do was gearing up women and higher wage occupations. So since I had learned how to lay stone and I worked for the Forest Service, and I'd done a lot of kind of manual labor, and economics was a primary interest of mine as a radical. So, yeah, the gearing up project was programming to interest women, involve women, deal with unions to get women into non traditional jobs of different forest service, railroad, all of that sort of stuff. So I've done a lot of work kind of in that area.

[14:03] JENNIFER EUELL: Yeah, absolutely. And you can see that in the legislature, your legislative bills as well.

[14:08] DIANE SANDS: Yeah. And then back to the. So. Well, about 74 or so. So Roe had become the law. A lot of us had graduated or kind of graduated or got out of there eventually after hanging around campus and doing all this stuff. So I decided it was time to go to graduate school. My dear friend Judy Smith had arrived in Missoula and took over some of these activities. And so I went to George Washington University, which is where I wanted to go, somewhere where I could think theoretically about what we've been doing, because I taught women's studies already on campus, one of the first classes we ever did. And that's where I got training in doing oral histories with Smithsonian. So when I came back, in addition to doing the women's employment projects and teaching, particularly with Judy Smith, some of all those early introduction to women's studies, I do women's history. We do an economic ones together. I teach the theory class. University not paying any of us, of course, but they're letting us use their resources, and then their faculty are giving students all the credit for all the work we did.

[15:20] JENNIFER EUELL: I didn't realize it was not paid.

[15:22] DIANE SANDS: Oh, no, no. We charge people $25 a piece. We all live pretty low to the ground, really. And I also taught the first women's studies class at Montana State University, too, because I was administering a grant for a friend of mine down there who was the dean, which was a project Ford had funded on western states project to integrate material on women, particularly women of color, into the core curricula of all four year colleges and universities in the west. So I was down there for a couple of years during the year, et cetera. So all the women's history, because I think of history as a political tool. So the first project we did was just interview, I think, 100 women across the state. And then the history of illegal abortion project was a big part of that in the late seventies, which was the biggest grant the Montana committee for the Humanities had ever given $10,000. They had a huge fight about giving all of this money on this radical topic. But they had a ton of courage because we organized at least one major conference a year. We did everything from one of my favorites, three perspectives on pornography, which was a great one. I gave tours of all the porno shops, and we'd have people look at tables of all kinds of material and decide, was this erotic, pornographic, or arthem, etcetera. We did one on childcare, we did another one on incest and violence, we did on a three. And we'd invite the big national, our friends that both Judy and I knew, Sheila, everyone from Gloria Steinem and Charlotte Bunch, and all the big musicians, Holly near would come in. So they were big statewide or regional ones. And I served on the national board for National Women's Studies association, its first six years. At that point, it wasn't a totally academic thing. It also involved people who were involved in community education. So I was doing part of that, which was fun. It got us really involved in what was going on around the rest of the country. I mean, we did not feel isolated here. We would jump in the car, six of us, and drive to San Francisco to go to a conference and all sleep in the same room in sleeping bags. I mean, yeah, it was fabulous fun. And think up 16 projects over lunch or driving down the road of what we're going to do next.

[17:41] JENNIFER EUELL: Yeah, there's so much. Oh, my gosh.

[17:44] DIANE SANDS: I feel like it's a very innovative time, you know? And so people say, oh, God, you're just so amazing. You did all this stuff. Well, yeah, but not really. You know, here I am, a middle class. I have nothing. But my family was fairly middle class. My parents were both highly educated. There wasn't alcoholism in my immediate family or physical abuse or any of that. So I had a safe and constructive environment in which to grow up. I had the money to be able to go to college. I was not a pregnant teenager. I could use all of those privileges and resources to be able to engage in all this work. My parents never once raised the issue of getting married. They never raised the issue of actually having a job.

[18:31] JENNIFER EUELL: Wow, that's amazing.

[18:33] DIANE SANDS: Yeah. So I could do all of this stuff, so. And in the right place at the right time. I mean, that was just such a creative period, because there was so little in existence of infrastructure relative to these social movements, and they were all overlapping that we just would go in and we created them. I mean, nobody taught us how to run these nonprofits. They didn't hardly exist at the time. Nobody taught us how to raise money. We figured it out. And how to do the organizing around legislation. We figured it out. It's always really fun.

[19:06] JENNIFER EUELL: Well, I could hear these stories all day, but I know we have a limited amount of time. So one of the things I wanted to ask you, and this might be hard, because this is obviously, there's a lot to choose from, but as you think about all of this great work that you've done, what are some of the things that you feel like? Here's a piece that I'm really proud of that we really accomplished something important.

[19:30] DIANE SANDS: Well, one whole area is around the native american issues. I mean, I feel like I owe such an incredible debt to the tribal people that I have lived with and have befriended me and that are a part of my life. I mean, I'm not native american. My sister married a tribal member. Two of my other sisters, the twins best friends, lived in my family. So we are sisters in their tradition. So the perspective from that is so significant to me in the work that I've done. Among the things that I've done, there is trying to be an ally and an advocate where I can. But also a couple things I would mention specifically. One is the getting rid of the word squaw on 86 sites in Montana. That was first my legislation, probably in, I don't know, 79, maybe, or 81 quite a ways back, it didn't pass. They sent it off to the fish, wildlife and Parks committee, and I had to say, no, we're not talking about squaw fish or squaw flowers. We are talking about human beings. This is racist, sexist, pornographic. They would have none of it, but that's fine. It takes time for these things. And then Carol Juneau, who was a legislator from Browning, native woman, carried it. The next time, and we got it passed, we set up a commission. It took us ten years of looking at every site in Montana that could be changed and working through the different tribes to get the culturally appropriate titles that they wanted to use, going to the National Board of Geographic Names, and that incredible process to change those sites so that every day in Missoula, when I look out my window at that peak, out there, it's cheap. Shining peak, treeless peak. It is no longer squaw peak. It never will be again. I feel very passionately about that one. And the other one is the indian education for all issue. I'm not a teacher, although I've certainly been an educator in various weird ways. My family are all teachers. But Montana's constitution has that provision in the education section that all Montanans will learn about native culture in there. And that that's a constitutional commitment. It doesn't exist in any other state. So there was a three year period I worked for the office of Public Instruction. I'd run Linda McCullough's campaign to be state superintendent. We'd served in the legislature together. So she hired me to run all of her federal programs and raise money and do this and that. But one of the things I worked on, Denise Juneau, who then later became superintendent of public instruction, native woman Blackfoot Mandan Hidatsa, was working for Linda in her indian ed division. And so we worked together on the implementation of indian education for all and getting resource material and getting $10 million in the legislature. But I'm the one who added for all to indian education, because there is a title program called Indian Education, which is for indian kids. But indian education for all is the implementation of that constitutional provision for all Montanans to learn about indian people and their cultures. So I'm really pleased with that. I mean, that's really, I think, is the gift of native people to the white people of the state, who are mostly pretty much living in a totally white environment. Unless you make an effort. You don't live in a very diverse world here in that regard. But kids like my brother, you know, they go off and work for a major IBM or they join the military, and they're all over the world, and they've got to deal in an international context. So I think indian education for all is really a gift to all the people of the state to understand not only what it means to be on this land and the cultures that have been here, but to get a tiny bit of those sort of multicultural perspectives that you need to live in this world.

[23:23] JENNIFER EUELL: Yeah.

[23:24] DIANE SANDS: Anyway, yeah, those two.

[23:25] JENNIFER EUELL: And it strikes me that those pieces of work, too, are really good examples of what it looks like to do cultural change. Do you know what I mean? Whereas it's something that is going to be forever, and it's institutionalized and it's widespread, and it's not just one generation, but multi generation. And. Yeah. So that's pretty amazing.

[23:44] DIANE SANDS: Appreciate that, because I think that is. I mean, the key to part of this. It isn't just showing up at a rally, which is great or something, but it's how do you institutionalize changes? Because a culture is, in anthropology based on those structures, and they embody the values of the society. And so I think you need to focus not just on kind of something flying by that sounds good out of context, but what is the entire context? What's the structure around it? What are the values around that infrastructure that supports our society, whether it's around healthcare issues or equity issues or how we deal with native people? I mean, it's complex and it's hard, and it takes a long time. There is no easy fix for any of these. All of these have taken decades of work, and I'm good at decades of work.

[24:37] JENNIFER EUELL: Yes, you are. Yeah. It's one of the things that I've taken from our conversations and I've actually quoted you on, is that change takes a long time. Nothing changes unless we make it change.

[24:49] DIANE SANDS: That's exactly right. Yeah. All that saying, oh, the pendulum just shifts. Bullshit. You know, history, the arc of history is long, but it moves toward justice, but only if you bend it that way. You know, it takes effort to do it. And right now they're trying to bend it back. So that area. And certainly then a lot of things having to do with women's issues legislatively, some of which, you know, around sexual assault, you know, and because I am kind of the vice chair and have been the chair over in judiciary on criminal justice reform issues very broadly. And those include everything from women in the correctional system to Native Americans in the system, to the fact that our ability to deal with violence against women is still pathetic. And so a number of things there. But convincing the legislature, men, mostly men, to pass legislation that would make it somewhat easier, still not easy, to prosecute sexual assault. So the inclusion of the consent language, which on the record, the funnest part of that, I really think, because I was chairing the interim committee where we were studying at first, which is the best way to convince the boys and the legislature that this is going to be okay. It's not going to be too threatening. You know, this is a good idea because you got to have their votes. You can't do it by yourself. So in the hearings on this bill to include a requirement around consent, showing of consent. Well, a bunch of the young women came in from the women's resource center in Missoula, and they were all ready to get up and testify and give the usual feminist rant about control and blah, blah, blah and men and all this sort of stuff. And I talked to him in advance and I just asked him not to do that. I said, you know, that will kill it off the bat. Appreciate it. Get up there, say you're for it. Leave it at that. And then the person I had organized to come in and testify for it was the adjutant general who runs the national guard, whom I work with as a legislator on other things. He said, sure, I'll come in. Got up there and said, in his uniform, of course. Yeah. This is the language that's in the military code of justice. We've been doing it for ten years, works fine. Blah, blah, blah. All the guys on the committee. Oh, yeah, they were good with that. Seems shaking their head, didn't want to discuss the content of it, what that means. Nope. Good enough for the military, good enough for us. Passed it. People said, how in God's name did you manage to get that to happen? Well, kind of read the room and figure what it's going to take to what language can they hear? It's not what you want to say. It's what language can they heard? And they could hear it from the military. They couldn't hear it from a. Now, not that they shouldn't hear it from young feminist students, but the reality is my job there is not as much as an activist. It's to actually get something done right. So I'm very proud of that.

[27:45] JENNIFER EUELL: Yeah, that's amazing and very helpful for those of us in my work.

[27:50] DIANE SANDS: They hadn't prosecuted a single sexual assault in Yellowstone county in three years because they said, what's the point? We're not going to get. We're not going to get any conviction. So that has made a huge amount of difference.

[28:01] JENNIFER EUELL: It has.

[28:02] DIANE SANDS: I think, unfortunately, I don't think the incidence of violence against women has decreased at all. And that is the true measure here.

[28:11] JENNIFER EUELL: Yeah, I was just having that conversation before this, actually. Of course, because it's my job. Yeah. Just the prevalence, I think we don't know, of course, because you never know if it's increased or not based on the data, but it looks like it's increased. Either more people are reporting or it is actually increasing. But having those definitions and that understanding is the first step, at least. I feel like if we can have a good definition of what it is we're talking about, then.

[28:42] DIANE SANDS: Yeah. And I think for that reason, it's so important to have women in the legislature. I mean, when I first was involved in the legislature, there were like, there was one woman in the Senate and one woman in the House, and now we are the majority of the Democrats, strongly in both the House and Senate, but the Republicans still have a smaller percentage, so were still at about a third. But having people whose life experience it is get up there and they have to deal with them as peers makes an enormous difference. I was the first out gay elected official in the state, and at first, they were just beside themselves about what they were going to do with me, the Democratic Party, as well as the Republicans. The Democrats were sure it meant no one would ever vote for Democrats again. They even had meetings in Missoula with some of the democratic electeds and were all flopping around and having a fit over this. And as you know, my partner, Ann Mary Dusso, was county commissioner, and she was county commissioner at the time when she came out, partnered up with me. And we have an official letter from the county attorney, Dusty Dayshaw, at the time. I've still got it saying, dear commissioner, do so we have had a meeting in regard to the situation, and we have come to certain conclusions, and here they are. Number one, we will not prosecute you as a felon because it was still a felony under Montana's deviate sexual Conduct act. Five years in prison, $10,000. So that's number one. Number two, we will not remove you from office based on this. We will not support anyone else calling for you to be removed from office from this. And finally, congratulations. We think it's wonderful, but, wow.

[30:19] JENNIFER EUELL: I mean, an amazing message. But why even have to have a meeting, right? I mean. Oh, what year was that, Diane?

[30:28] DIANE SANDS: We've been together 30 years. 91 or 92. Wow.

[30:32] JENNIFER EUELL: Okay.

[30:33] DIANE SANDS: Yeah. Ballpark.

[30:34] JENNIFER EUELL: Wow.

[30:35] DIANE SANDS: Well, and they were, you know, the rumor was going around then that we were getting married at Washington Grizzly Stadium with a deranged jesuit priest, Father Dumas, and Max Baucus. Senator Baucus was going to give us away. Old friend of ours. It went everywhere. It came back. I even got a candy dish from the Senate staff, has a wedding present. A wedding that never happened, was never intended to happen. And when I even took on the job of managing this campaign in Idaho around the anti gay initiatives, and I was being interviewed, and the congressman, democratic congressman from Idaho, you know how long ago that was? 93, said, I have one last question for you. Are there any pictures of the wedding? And I looked at him and said, no. And he said, good, you're hired. So that whole rumor story went everywhere, and the Republicans went nuts as well. And so the first day of the session, Bruce Simon, who was a representative from Billings that I'd worked with, who was a pro choice Republican, purposefully on the floor when all the ceremonial junk's going on and people are talking, walks over to our side and puts his arm around me and stands there talking to me and saying, they are just freaked out, but I've told them they're going to like you fine. And all this stuff, that was one of the great acts of political courage I ever saw in the legislation. It was remarkable that he was willing to spend his political capital giving me that protection.

[31:59] JENNIFER EUELL: Absolutely. So we are running short on time. And one of the things that you said kind of leads into a question I was hoping to ask, which is this. You have been known for your ability to work across the aisle and with people from all different backgrounds and different beliefs, and I wonder if you could share how you do it. Do you have any words of wisdom? I feel like this is a challenge at this point in history.

[32:26] DIANE SANDS: I do. Again, I consider politics to be a spiritual practice, and that takes work. It is not easy. I refuse. I choose hope, even though rationally I am not hopeful about the situation we are in or have been in for a long time. I believe that we must love one another. We must. It doesn't mean you have to agree with people. It doesn't mean that some people aren't dangerous. I refuse to call someone evil because it in all of history justifies genocide. It justifies the murder of people that you don't agree with. It justifies making them criminals, it justifies putting them in prison. It justifies families breaking and it justifies kids committing suicide. That's what it does when you consider other people that you disagree with to be evil. And however you phrase that, and the political dialogue in campaigns is very hot around that, of course. And I think it's incredibly destructive to the democratic process. And I think democracy is on the line at this point. So you have to practice to do that. I think the biggest thing to do is go and make friends with people, genuine friends that you like each other who, who do not agree with you. We live in these damn bubbles around people like us, people who look like us, think like us. I mean, it's a tendency of humans as primates probably to do that. But the challenge of a multicultural democracy is that you have to force yourself not to do that. And it's wonderful. It's just freeing beyond belief to see the world from somebody else's perspective. And that's, I think one of the good things about the legislature. You are forced in a structured, safe with lots of rules environment to work with people who don't agree with you and you have to build those alliances and those relationships. And I have worked hard at it. You know, people say, my God, how can you be friends with him? He's as right wing as they come. Yeah, he is as right wing as he comes. And I absolutely love him and he loves me and he would do anything for me and I would do anything for him. Doesn't mean I change my vote, but we respect each other and we intentionally do that. So I really try to tone down for other people this too hot language around it. It's got to be about working through the issues and finding a way to be in community together in small communities that I've lived in Montana. You know, if it's a blizzard out there, the guy who owns the store, who's a member of the Montana militia is going to go shovel me out and I'm going to go shovel him out. And if we can't do that, we are doomed to a level that we fought a civil war in this country once. We could easily do one again. That's people's choice. And if you don't want to move in that direction of violence, you must make a conscious decision to behave, to act in a different way. And it's a challenge.

[35:19] JENNIFER EUELL: Yeah, I mean, I absolutely agree with you. And that's funny because that's an example that I often give about because I grew up in Montana as well and live still in a rural community in Montana. And that is true that we know each other, the neighbors know each other, and we know that we have different political beliefs and we still choose to take care of each other's animals when the other people are gone or dig each other out in the snow and whatever. I call my neighbor all the time to do that kind of stuff. But I still feel like when it comes to political decisions. So, for instance, in Florence, we had a bunch of stuff going on in the school board. It becomes really contentious and hard to maintain those relationships, even among friends sometimes now. So I don't know if you have any other thoughts on how in this age, with sort of the social media and just the entrenched nature of politics, I wonder how we get back to that place. I don't know if you have any other thoughts.

[36:15] DIANE SANDS: I can't get back. We have to go forward because the issue of social media has been so disturbing, destructive to that, you know, the fact that we don't even share the common facts that we used to share by watching the same news. And social media allows us to fragment off with people who only think of the world as we do. And I think that's what makes it harder. And we have to make an extra effort, even within our own families. It can't be totally. We just never talk about these things. It can't be that. But it's got to be at a more deeper, more emotional level. Like, for example, I mean, I've done all this work on abortion, but I do understand at the deepest spiritual level, what someone who believes that is murder. I get it. I understand that. I emotionally understand that. That's not where I'm at, but you have to work at that and practice it with people. I mean, the nice thing about the legislature, it is very rules oriented. We never call each other by our first name, is always senator this or representative that. And there are rules around behavior. You just don't yell, scream, roll your eyes. You don't. And if you want to, well, you're going to be out of there in two minutes flat because you'll be. You just don't. So it forces you to be able to have these disagreements in a safer environment. So, you know, facilitated group in your organization trying to talk about racism. We did that within the National Women's Studies association in its first couple years around race. It was a whole year of structured conversation with people in different groups about their own history, with issues of race and how they evolve and move through it. It was really productive.

[37:55] JENNIFER EUELL: It's work.

[37:56] DIANE SANDS: It's very. And it's emotionally difficult and intellectually challenging, and we've got to do it. Democracy depends on it, and my very soul depends on it. Otherwise, I think in politics, you will lose your soul if you believe you have one or any ethical grounding, whatever you want to believe it to be.

[38:15] JENNIFER EUELL: Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you, Diane, for spending time sharing a little bit of your experience and wisdom, and thank you for all the work that you have done.

[38:28] DIANE SANDS: Yeah, well. Which go on the record that you and I work together on a number of things, but one of them being the women's foundation in Montana, which I was on the board of an executive director, but before you took on and did such a fabulous job trying to steer money into projects for economic self sufficiency for women and girls, it's been a great institution to really make a difference in the lives of women in Montana. It's what it takes.

[38:54] JENNIFER EUELL: Absolutely. Yeah.

[38:55] DIANE SANDS: Good leadership.

[38:57] JENNIFER EUELL: Thanks, Diane.

[38:58] DIANE SANDS: Yeah, it.