[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome to We Are Chaffey Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of humanness, community and well being.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Based in Chaffey County, Colorado.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: I'm Adam Williams, and today I'm talking with Kimmy Uno. Kimmy and I both happen to be kids of the 80s and 90s, but we grew up in different parts of the country and with notably different family stories. So I was really interested in hearing about her experiences.
One of the things that I really enjoy about getting to talk with people like Kimmy on this podcast is that although I'm usually talking with guests who live locally, here in Chaffee county, they bring stories and experiences from all over. It's a local is universal kind of thing. So I think that locally we can take pride in the fact that we are a community of so many amazing people with so many enlightening stories. And it's a reminder that we never know what stories someone is walking around with, what they're carrying. When we start to learn about those, we find common ground and connection. The community gets closer, and I think that's pretty cool. So it's the case with Kimmy. She grew up within reach of the rise of grunge music. I'm thinking about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, which I still like to listen to from time to time. I think even more importantly to Kimmy, though, was or is her connection to the riot Grrl movement that came up in Washington State in that same time period.
More seriously, though, she also grew up knowing that members of her family had been taken from their homes by the United States government and placed in internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. As you can imagine, that kind of experience ripples, lasting effects through the generations of a family and a community. Kimmy and I talk about that history. We talk about multiculturalism, anti racism and activism. We talk about feminism and female empowerment, and we talk about entrepreneurship and the meaning behind Howell, the name of her curated retail shop in Salata, Colorado. We talk about a lot of good things. So here we go right now with Kimmy.
Hi, Kimmy.
[00:02:21] Speaker C: Hi, Adam.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Super simple. Start today.
[00:02:24] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: You know, I have a little secret here that I've not divulged yet. I have been aware of you and your work from afar for quite a while, and you're someone who, I think I've gotten glimpses here and there that has made me really interested in talking with you. And I've kind of been holding on to that. I'm not the sort of person who tends to go introduce myself and then try to have one of these Conversations just on the street corner. So the podcast is the perfect vehicle for me. Thank you for coming in and sharing this time and taking on this conversation and story journey with me.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: I want to ask you to start off, I guess, about growing up in the Pacific Northwest. You and I are pretty much the same age. Within a few months, I believe, because I saw you post something about your birthday. Oh yeah, recently.
I grew up in a very different place. So we have kind of same time, very different place. What was it like growing up in Washington State? Can you paint that picture for me of the vibe that whether that was social, cultural, family, just what was going on around you in your youth?
[00:03:34] Speaker C: Well, I grew up in, I'd say, two parts of Spokane. My parents lived in what's called Spokane Valley and we lived in an urban neighborhood.
And then when I was in high school, my mom pulled me out of our school district and transferred me to East Valley High School, which is more of a rural environment. So that high school, it was bigger than Salida, but I think it was pretty similar. The demographic of the kids was very similar. It was mostly working middle class. So you didn't really there. I feel like class wasn't as much of an issue there. Everybody was. We kind of saw each other as the same. However, I was one of maybe four non white kids that went there. And growing up, it was pretty similar. There weren't a ton of kids of color all through school. And then the other part where I grew up was on my family's farm. And so after Japanese internment, they moved to Spokane.
And this was my great grandparents moved to Spokane and got established as Japanese truck farmers.
And the chuck farms were agricultural. They grew vegetables for the most part on just these like very intricate, beautiful rows of plants. And so when you saw them from afar, they looked beautiful. They were like a work of art almost with the color. And they were very intentional about how they moved the crops around. And they were pretty small, but they would supply grocery stores and restaurants with their vegetables. And that was a. There were three families. So there was my father's mother, his, her brother in law, and then her sister in law. So my grandfather passed away when my dad was 18 and so my grandma and he was the oldest. So my grandmother raised her kids as a single mom, but she had the support of the other two families. So that was, I guess a dichotomy in how I grew up. So I grew up with a very strong Japanese foundation of my family. But then where I went to school and Where I actually had friends and spent the majority of school life was in this very white community. So I was sort of like, I think a lot of biracial kids have this feeling of like your feet are in two different places and you learn to kind of navigate those two scenarios at the same time. So, yeah, okay.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: And you did say Japanese internment. That is, that's a big area to go into and I want to do that soon enough. But before we get there, let's sit in the fact that we're Talking about the 90s, early 90s as teenagers going through high school.
And. Well, I had to look up where Spokane is. I think I have actually thought that it was closer to the area of Seattle and where I think of the different cities within Washington state that I know the names of. I didn't realize it's all the way out east, nearly to the border with Idaho. Okay.
[00:07:09] Speaker C: It's the panhandle of Idaho.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Okay. So, yeah, that, that experience of early 90s, you're within reach and have family roots and connections of some kind back to the Seattle area. Right.
When I think of the early 90s in one of the keystone sorts of cultural music, fashion type things, I'm thinking grunge. I'm thinking Nirvana, Kurt Cobain. Was that of any significance to you? Was that something that resonated with you at that age and time?
[00:07:42] Speaker C: Well, I think that in high school I started getting into music and it was grunge music like Mud Honey, Nirvana, Pixies, things like that.
But it wasn't really until I went away to college on the western side of the state that I started getting really active in punk music and particularly female driven punk music, which at that time it was coming from Olympia, Washington, the music scene, and it was called Riot Grrl. It was a female based feminist movement and it was about music, but it was a lot about a lot more.
You know, we did campus protests like Take Back the Night, where we were fighting for campus safety and sexual assault. I worked for a domestic violence shelter, so that my music history was sort of founded. And I grew up in my 20s in that scene. And feminism became a big part of my life. And it, I mean, it still is a big part of my life, especially as a parent of a daughter. So.
But I was introduced to music through a group of friends. And when I was in high school, I had mostly male friends and I had transferred into my high school and I didn't really know anybody. And I think this group of guys, like, took me in and introduced me to music. And we would hang out. Actually, it was right on the border of Idaho. My boyfriend at the time, he lived.
It's called Newman Lake. And it was probably 15 minutes to the border of Idaho. So that area is very rural. And it reminds me a lot of Salida, actually. There's, like, you know, farming and fields, and a lot of kids come from areas where there's just a lot of property to roam around on. There's forests there. It's easy to get lost and go up in the woods and party and that kind of thing.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: So I was just thinking, did you grow up partying on those farms and out in those spaces, away from all the adults and authority?
[00:09:59] Speaker C: Yep, it was. We partied up in the woods right outside of Newman Lake. You just would cross the street and then you'd be in wilderness. So we had like big party spots that we would go to, similar to kids here in Slida.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Well, and where I grew up in the Midwest, in northern Missouri, it was farms. It was kid farm kids who had access to whatever, you know, number of acres. And I, you know, maybe it was even a pond or a shelter or a barn or whatever. Right. But we had places that we could go. So I think it's funny how universal that is and maybe was for that time period too.
[00:10:36] Speaker C: Yeah. And I think it's like a little bit of a safety net that you've got this place that's fairly safe. I mean, there were kids definitely drunk driving and doing irresponsible things, but at the same time, you didn't have to. You could just be there. And it was.
It wasn't like we were going to be driving around in the city and the fear of, you know, taking someone's life by drunk driving and that kind of thing. So I think it was. It seemed a little bit safer, I.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Guess maybe you could camp and things like that, too.
[00:11:11] Speaker C: Yeah, camping.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Stay the night and have that.
So Riot Girl. I'm not as familiar with that. The word movement, you said. That's something that I had read. Is that not a band? Are we actually talking about a movement? This encompassed a number of female forward punk, the whole thing that you just described.
[00:11:35] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that there was a female aspect of grunge music that was big at the time, like bands like L7.
But Riot Grrl was more based on bands like Bikini Kill, Kathleen Hanna, Heavens to Betsy, which became Sleeter Kinney, Carrie, that's in Portlandia, she was in those bands. And that's sort of where Riot Grrl was coming from. And it was based in Olympia, Washington and Washington, D.C. kind of at the time. And it was, I think, just more about female empowerment. I mean, men weren't allowed to be toward the front of the stage. They had to be toward the back. And there were just these specific roles that were there to empower women and girls. And that was another thing, like educating girls on your rights as a woman. And how can you, you know, how can you combat sexual assault? How can you combat discrimination and the 90s. It was an interesting time because I think there were a lot of men that were coming to the same conclusion. Like, Kurt Cobain was very much influenced by Riot Grrl and, you know, he lived in Olympia for a while, and he was active in that scene, and he was coming to some of these conclusions that women are equal. And he was a feminist, and there were a lot of men that were feminists at that time. And so I think it was a great time for collaboration and the queer community, too. I think that there was a music festival called Yo Yo A Go Go. And it was heavily.
It was heavily based in queer culture. And so it was really cool. It was a really great time.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: I would like to sit in this conversation for a bit, but I'm going to take us on to that Japanese internment piece of your family history, because I really want to make sure we have time to allow for plenty of that story, because I'm.
I'm shocked. I'm fascinated, to be honest. Where I grew up, I knew no one who had any sort of touch to that being in their family, to that being their experience. So I only learned about it in history classes as a kid.
What is that story that touched your family so directly? What is it, you know, of it and maybe how did you learn it? Was it actively taught through your family or. I mean, I could keep going, but just what you can share of that?
[00:14:35] Speaker C: Well, it was always talked about in reference to things like in camp we did this, or in camp we did that. So it was always something that I knew about, but I was curious. I was really curious about it. And Japanese people, Japanese American people, they don't tend to dwell on bad things.
They would.
They used. They had this experience and they would move past it. And I think that that's what gave them strength to move and keep going.
So my grandmother didn't talk a ton about it. It was really this one aunt that I had, Auntie. Cause. And she was.
She was a feminist for sure, and she was the matriarch of our family for a long time.
She was my grandfather's sister. And she was in medical school at the time that the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
And she was getting ready to graduate from the University of Washington.
And then her professors came to her and said, look, we need to get you graduated because this is. Something bad has really happened, and we don't know what your future is going to be. So they helped get her to finish school so that she was able to graduate before going to camp.
And when they went to camp, they first took my grandfather.
They took a lot of the Japanese male elders away first. And he was involved in a community organization for business.
He was a. But he was pretty well regarded in his community. And they took a lot of those men first. The FBI came to their house in the middle of the night and took him and didn't tell the family where they were taking him. And he was missing for quite a while. I think it was a few months that he was gone. And they had no information on him. And they were worried that he wasn't alive. And then eventually they came and took everybody. They loaded them up. They said, you can take a suitcase and some personal belongings. And they put them on trains and they sent them to these holding centers first. And the first one that they went to was in Puyallup, Washington.
And it was just barracks. It was like a stockyard where they would house horses and cows and things like that while they were building these, like, massive camps. And the irony to me is that a lot of these camp are on Native land, on reservation land.
And that's like one of those intersectional histories that's really fascinating to me. You know, they've taken this land away from the first people, and then they've housed.
Then they've like, put these barracks and these camps on these. A lot of them were Native American reservation land.
So then they sent them by train to camps. And my grandmother, the Inouye side, they were in Heart Mountain in Wyoming. And then my grandfather, the unos, they were in Minidoka in Idaho.
I mean, we could go on and on about that, but that's kind of what happened. So my auntie. Cause it was. I mean, she was very honest about what it was like, but I think that what fascinated me is that she always saw the positive in things. So one of her things that she always talked about was the fact that she was able to practice medicine when she went to the camps. And she said that she got a lot more experience in camp as a woman and as a Japanese woman than she would have gotten just functioning in the white world. And I thought that that was such a sign of her resilience and her strength to see the positive in that. And then she ended up moving to Michigan and going to actual medical school there to do her residency. And that's where she met my Uncle Ajar. And he's Turkish. And they were not allowed to get married in Michigan because Turkish people at the time were considered white. And she was Japanese. And so they had to like, I think they ended up going a little bit further west to get, actually get married. But just a little side history on her.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: It sounds, you know, the casual use throughout the family, throughout time, referring to in camp or the camp. It's. It almost makes it sound like it's something we would have done as children. Oh, we went off to summer camp. We went to something that is not evil, mean, cruel.
So that being the phrasing of it throughout the family history and the passing of that story is standing out to me.
Help me with some clarity on maybe timing for who in your family was involved. Like, are your parents old enough that were they children at the time, were they babies, were they born yet? Who all was affected in terms of the generations going through this?
[00:20:17] Speaker C: So Japanese Americans in the US are named by their generation. So the first generation is the Issei. And that was the generation that came from Japan. And that would be my great grandparents.
And then it's the Nisei, those are American born Japanese. And then Sansei is my dad's generation. I'm Yonsei and my kids are Gosei. So it was the Issei and the Nisei that were sent away to camp.
One of my friends, her dad was born in camp.
She's my age, but he's a little older. My dad was born in 1950, so he wasn't born in camp. And I'm not really, I don't really think very many of my dad's cousins, I don't think any of them were born in camp. But you know, one of my uncle, great uncles, he went away to the war. He was, he's a veteran and he went and served in Europe. And there were, there was a special group of Japanese soldiers that went away and fought in Europe. And they're very decorated. They were. I can't remember the name of the group at the right now, but I.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: Know who you're talking about and I can't either.
[00:21:36] Speaker B: But that's so wild to me that we have sort of such extremes under this circumstance. Okay, It's World War II.
We're going to imprison our own citizens, our own people who are. Who are here, and we're going to allow some people and send them off to fight for us and for, you know, the whole line of this is our freedom and democracy and all the thing.
[00:22:02] Speaker C: And I think that there is a perception that the Japanese went willingly. And I think that this is used as a incendiary way of describing the model minority myth of Asian Americans, that they went away and they weren't fighting it and they didn't care and they weren't passionate about it. And that. That's completely untrue. I think that in a lot of ways, there were things that just were not within their control. But there were many, many people that were angry in camp about it. And there were uprisings, and there was a group called the Nono Boys, and there were people that were trying to fight it as well as white people that were trying to fight it. And in fact, Governor Carr of Colorado was one. He was the only politician that was standing up and saying, this isn't right. And they put a camp in Colorado, and he wanted it to be a place where people were treated like humans. And so he would let people. He would let a lot of the Japanese go and work in the communities and in the fields and do agriculture out in the fields. But he lost his reelection bid because he was standing up to this and saying, this isn't right. So there were. There were people that were fighting it. And.
And I think that when we look back at Japanese internment, mainstream society might say, oh, well, they just went. And it was not a big deal, but it really, like my family's land, where that was taken away from them is where Boeing Field sits today in Seattle. And you can imagine how much that land is worth.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: I wanted to ask what happened to properties, to whatever was left behind and what that might have looked like, because I don't know if they owned their homes at the time or not owned farms, owned land, but then also just their simple daily possessions of. I mean, were just kitchens still set up, clothes still in closets or what have you.
[00:24:12] Speaker C: They were. They were still there, and then they were taken and they were vandalized. Some people that, you know, maybe if you lived in, like, Chinatown in Seattle and your neighbors were Chinese, maybe they would look after your property for you, or maybe some white people felt compassion and would look after your things for you. But most, most of their things, their homes, their possessions, were just taken, were stolen and taken.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Did your family ever return to those places, to those things? Did they Ever see them again?
[00:24:51] Speaker C: No. No. My family, they moved to Spokane. The Japanese in Spokane were not interned. The people that lived there, they didn't live close enough to the coast. So there were Japanese people in Spokane during the whole war.
And so my family, I think. I'm not sure if they immediately went back to Spokane, but they knew people there, and so they went there, and that's where they started the farm.
[00:25:22] Speaker B: Do you know why your family came over to the U.S. i think you have told me. It was around 1915. So this would have been just prior to the First World War. And in less than 30 years, they're going through this internment experience.
But do you know what led them to say, we're leaving Japan, we're going to the US and set up a new life?
[00:25:45] Speaker C: I think it was an economic decision. I'm not exactly sure why my great grandfather came, but he was very young. He was probably less than 18, I would guess, and he came to be a laborer. I think there were at the time a lot of Japanese people coming over. They were coming to mainland US And Hawaii to have a better life for themselves. Maybe they had a really big family and they wanted to. As a male, he definitely wasn't the oldest son, and the oldest son inherited everything and was the kind of carried on the family name and that kind of thing. So I imagine he just came over to start his own life. And then he brought my great grandmother over.
I'm not sure how many years later, but they had an arranged marriage, so she came over much later.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Okay.
Something else about the internment camps and this idea of. Because you've mentioned. Well, I'm not sure if my father, if his cousins might have been born there. So now I'm thinking it's not even just in your family. You referred to. You've got grandparents, great grandparents.
Okay. It spills over to cousins. So we have sort of what I think of as maybe the lateral reaches on the family tree. You also mentioned a friend whose dad was older.
This affects. It's not like one person goes off to prison because they've committed a crime. It's, we're going to take your whole family. We're going to take them in generations. We're going to take your whole community, and no one did anything wrong to be put there.
[00:27:33] Speaker C: Well, I personally, and this is my opinion, see it as the decimation of our culture. They were not allowed to speak Japanese in camp. They were not allowed to bring any books. So it created this separation between the Issei and the time you Know, this is in the 40s where assimilation was really important. If you were going to immigrate to the United States, then you better assimilate and you better become an American. Right? So that was their mindset, what they felt was really important, what they valued. And I think that a lot of the Issei valued that as well. Maybe I can't do it for myself, but I'm sure as heck going to make my children assimilate into American culture. And my grandmother, the Inoues, they, her, her and her siblings all have names that Japanese people can't pronounce. Her name is Dorothy, which is like Dorothy. Her uncle is Harold, which is like Harold.
Her brothers Carl. All of these names their parents couldn't even pronounce. And so that in their minds, that was what was really important. I need to make sure that my kids are American. So that was already happening. Then they got sent to camp. And then it just created this rift between the Issei and Nisei, where Japanese culture was.
It was pretty much destroyed. There was no motivation to keep the Japanese language going.
And then it even magnified further with my father's generation because he was born in the 50s. And so that idea of being American was so important that by the time my generation rolls around, we're like, what do we do? How can we get our culture back? And what does it mean to be Japanese American?
And I think that there was a lot happening in the 90s in terms of Asian Americans coming to terms, you know, there was a lot of violence towards Asian Americans starting in the 80s and 90s because of the automotive industry. And Toyota was becoming a big deal. And so there were murders that were happening of Asian American people. So there's a lot of activism happening in the Asian American community at that time. And I think that's the generation that I grew up in. And so that's what motivated me to really learn about my culture. And it's different than Japanese culture. We're Asian American. Japanese American. I went to school with a ton of Japanese kids from Japan. We would always talk about like, oh, that's so interesting that you do that, because that is very old fashioned. Like my friends would say, you still do that. That's so weird because, like, for me, my Japanese culture is kind of solidified in 1915. Right. Like, so a lot of the traditions and the things that we do are from that era of when my great grandparents came over. And you know, at the same time, like, Japan's been moving forward and advancing as a culture and we're sort of like frozen in time over here. So I find that really interesting.
[00:31:06] Speaker B: It sounds like those in your family who went through that experience that they chose to stay eyes forward, stay resilient, accept the experience because they had no choice, and keep moving forward. I wonder how you have felt about that, how that has influenced. Influenced maybe your interest in being part of riot grrrl and punk and feminism and all these things, you know, anti racism, multiculturalism, things that I know that you've been engaged in. I think that you studied. Is that right when you went to college?
[00:31:41] Speaker C: I went to Fairhaven College, which is a part of Western Washington University in Bellingham. And essentially it's create your own major. Everything is driven by you as the students. So you take your interests and what you want to do, and then you form your curriculum around all of that, and then you have a group of professors that are there to consult you and help you do that. But I decided I wanted to major in Asian American women's studies, and I was able to get a lot of my women's studies taken care of when I lived in Bellingham and went to the university or Western Washington University. But I moved to Boston in my junior year to take care of all of my Asian American studies. And that was really interesting because the Asian American community in Boston is pretty new. There's a lot of Southeast Asian immigrants.
There's a older Chinese American community there. But where I went to school, my professors were from Cambodia and Southeast Asia. So I was around all these people my age that were pretty new to America and had these, like, super fresh immigrant experiences.
And when you live on the west coast and you're Asian American, we've. A lot of us have just been there so long that even Chinese American people share many of the same experiences of kind of like generation after generation. We're driven to be American, and we're sort of losing pieces of our culture. But when you're in a fresh community of new immigrants, that experience is so powerful because you get a glimpse of what it might have been like for your ancestors to come over and the motivations that they had to leave their country. And a lot of them, it was war. You know, a lot of Southeast Asians came over because of the war, but, you know, Filipino Americans came over for economic reasons too. And I think that those that really motivated me to get involved in Asian American studies, and then I worked for a hate violence prevention project in Chinatown when I lived in Boston, and all of my mentors were Asian Americans. So to be immersed in that community was.
It was definitely what shaped my mindset, what shaped my life and helped me get to where I am now.
[00:34:24] Speaker B: Do you know how your parents felt about what you were studying, the activities you were involved in, the way you were cultivating and using your voice to speak against things like oppression and racism and so on?
[00:34:39] Speaker C: Well, my parents are. They're super mellow. I think that they just wanted me to be happy and to support what I wanted. They were never the parents that were like, you need to go to medical school, you need to have this type of job when you grow up. They just were supportive of what I wanted to do, but I think they were sad that I moved so far away and definitely spent a lot of time independent from them.
But it's interesting, they were. I grew up pretty Christian because they were.
They were involved in the church, in the Nazarene Church, actually.
And I think that that's been an evolution that I've seen in my parents over the years. And recently, within the last three years, we've started talking more about their experiences with racism as a biracial couple. My mom is white, my dad's Japanese American.
And I think that my education in schooling has influenced their thinking and their mindset from being pretty conservative to now. They're, I would say they're very progressive in their mindset and think about things pretty intentionally.
[00:36:04] Speaker B: Were they concerned that, you know, with that question of how are you going to get a job, make a living, have a life, when this is what you're studying, this is what you're participating in, instead of getting, whether it was that medical degree or a business degree or whatever, that they might think more marketable.
[00:36:20] Speaker C: No, I was the first generation to go to college. I don't think they had any expectations.
I don't think there was pressure necessarily on what I was doing for schooling. And they were supportive of me pursuing this sort of very out there college experience. I mean, Fairhaven College and Evergreen State College, there's maybe like two other universities that have this format. And that's not typical. But I don't think that they ever thought of me as like a typical person. Like I was somebody that kind of marched to my own beat and was very. They raised me to be extremely independent. So I don't think, I don't think there was pressure on the schooling aspect. Maybe like the people I was hanging out with and, you know.
[00:37:13] Speaker B: Yeah, okay, we're going to jump ahead here a bit to speaking of marketability and those things. This, I feel like the humanities and just Focusing on any of the what are sometimes called the softer skills, the softer awareness of the fact that we are humans with feelings instead of simply economical viability of a degree or a career path. And what you did go on and have a career. You had nearly 20 years with urban Outfitters and corporate leadership. But I want to jump ahead to where you are now as. And have been for several years as an entrepreneur, as a business owner with Howell being, I'm going to call it, a flagship store. You have a second location. I don't know how you describe it. You can go ahead and correct me if you don't like how I did that. But I'm curious to know about what all of this and the Urban Outfitters experience, how that wraps into what it is you do now as a community, I'll say leader, as a business owner and voice here in Chaffee County.
[00:38:19] Speaker C: Right. So Howell is a reference to Ginsburg's poem Howl.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: I was going to ask. Okay, great.
[00:38:26] Speaker C: And if you've read the poem, you know that this is a cry against oppression, against subjugation. It's a cry for, I think, like, equality and speaking out against injustices and saying, I am a free person. I can live my life the way that I want to live it. That, to me, is sort of the essence of the poem. And if you go a little deeper, it was the first.
What is the word? What is that word?
[00:39:07] Speaker B: Well, now I know what you're getting at, and I'm. I'm blank on it as well. But it was when his, his poem was in the Supreme Court because they.
[00:39:14] Speaker C: Thought it was inappropriate. But there's a. There's a word for it.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: I feel like we're playing a game show now. We're trying to give each other hints. And I know what you're saying, though. Yeah, they thought it was salacious. They thought it was something completely inappropriate for, I assume also especially the younger, the youth of the nation, to get inspired by the wrong values.
[00:39:35] Speaker C: Yes. So. And then it won the Supreme Court case for that.
And my husband was very influenced by the Beat poets. And when we moved to Denver, he took me to Larimer Square and he showed me where Jack Kerouac and Ginsburg would hang out and that kind of thing. And then I had ACL surgery in 07, and I actually read three Kerouac books and Caroline Cassidy's book Off the Road. And I was, I loved those books. I saw a Jack Kerouac play where this man was acting as if he were Jack Kerouac. When I was in college, and it didn't really jive with me. I was like, this is. I don't know, not. Maybe not my thing. But then when I read the books, I really got into their lifestyle and how they were just living free and being who they wanted to be.
So that's what Howl is named after, is the poem.
But to me, it's also a place where I think a lot of the brands and the people that we bring into the store have a similar background to me in that we have lived and worked in a corporate environment. And then the daily grind got to us, and we really felt like not living my true self. I'm not living what I'm passionate about. How can I make a living doing what I'm passionate about? And you interviewed Brink recently, and he's a good friend of mine. And I think that he's, as a Salida example, like somebody that is doing that. He's living his art, he's making his art, and he's trying to make a living off of it. And that's what a lot of the brands that we carry. They are makers, they're artists. And I seek out those people, and then we create a marketplace for them. And for me, too, growing up in a corporate company, Urban Outfitters, which, if you do a little digging on the company, you'll realize that, yes, it's a corporation, but entrepreneurship is a huge piece of that company. And when I worked there, it's not like this any, but when I worked there, every store was run by a store manager that was given a lot of skills and a lot of empowerment to run their business, including understanding the sales reports, like really deep. Digging deep into numbers and understanding what's selling. How do you use merchandising to drive sales?
And that, for me, is what Howell is too. I'm extremely passionate about merchandising, curating this environment, and also with Urban Outfitters, when I left the company, we were starting to get into multidisciplinary environments because it was. Everyone was talking about, like, the death of retail, how the Internet is killing brick and mortar businesses. And so for me, I knew that it needed to be something multidisciplinary. So we have coffee, and coffee is addictive, and it brings people back into the store. And while you're waiting for your drink, hopefully you'll take the time to look around the store and be inspired by what you see and drive sales from there. And then we also have a apartment behind Howell that's an Airbnb, and so people can Come and stay and drink their coffee and kind of make a whole experience.
[00:43:28] Speaker B: Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur?
[00:43:30] Speaker C: Mm.
[00:43:31] Speaker B: That's a word that fits.
[00:43:32] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: Does the word activist or does activism apply to you?
[00:43:37] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: Do you see those going together and what you're doing by, again, the representation of how the meaning of, you know, what that.
What that refers to, but then also the way you are trying to or have established a business model that takes care of people like Brinkley Messick, who you referred to, and others who are artists and artisans and people who are maybe their own small businesses that you're looking to curate in, I guess, cultivate a community and connection that is different than Big Box. It's different than that.
You know, that notion, I guess, of what retail has been of a sort of lifeless.
[00:44:21] Speaker C: Well, I think that retail needs to have an emotional connection. And for Howell activism and having this store, this community place, they go together, I think that it draws a type of person that feels intentional about how they live their lives and how they think about things, that maybe critical thinking is really important. We think about things.
We're not going to just move on with our lives and have no intention.
So I think that intention comes in a lot of aspects of the store. It comes in the people that we hire that I feel very strongly about taking care of people, taking care of my employees, how it's merchandise, the products that we bring in, the drinks that we make for people, the service that we provide. Those emotional connections that you have with the employees that work there. Every employee that has a day shift there will have regulars. And it's interesting how they change and they shift through different people. Like, Greg is the store manager, and he has this full set of regulars that I never had. When I worked there, I had a whole different set of regulars. And so I think it's that emotional connection that draws people in, keeps people coming back, and hopefully they can feel that I care about the place. I care about people being able to live their lives the way that they want to live their lives and to follow their passions.
[00:46:06] Speaker B: In a lot of what's being said right here, I hear the word community.
Does that word have a particular resonance with you? Is that something that you think a lot about your place with how downtown in this town that draws people from. I mean, globally, I don't know, certainly nationally.
And what that means for your role and how you are sharing yourself, sharing your voice, the business and these emotional connections. Community, in whatever sense that means.
[00:46:41] Speaker C: Absolutely. Salida is a special place, and it's a Small community. And I think within our community we find community, the like emotional community.
And there will be people that are drawn to that place of howl but find their community, find their people there.
And that's different for each person that works there. It's different for me, it's different for Greg. But I have an employee, she just started, she is a transplant from Seattle. And so we already had that connection.
And she works for a marketing firm and she remote works here in Salida. And she said to me, I just want to work here because I need community. I need to find my people. It's very isolating working at home by myself. And if I had a couple. Couple shifts here, then I think that I could find my people. And I think that that is the experience of every employee that works there. And a lot of them are transplants from other places and they find their community in working there.
[00:47:59] Speaker B: A few years ago you came to work and there was a note on your door. I hope this was, as far as I know is an anomaly in your experience when we're talking about community and what those connections are and the relationships.
There were local articles about this, so it's public. People probably already know about it if they're local.
But the message was essentially, it seemed, in response to you having put forward a Black Lives Matter what poster showing your allyship with that expression, that movement.
It was asking you if you were part of Antifa, which to me is a strange concept because I would like to think that we all are opposed to fascism and pro freedom and rights.
It was espousing All Lives Matter as the truth and claiming that you're a racist and suggesting you should go back to Seattle.
I'm curious in the midst of this community and these connections and what you're talking about, the impact of that one, by the way, it was anonymous. I don't think I mentioned that. And I think that says a lot about who was behind it and what their intentions. And they knew that they weren't in the right, but they meant to cause hurt and I assume did.
[00:49:26] Speaker C: I think what really struck a chord with me in that message was go back to where you came from, which is something that every immigrant has heard that has come to this country. And I mean touching on racism, we don't have to go very deep into that. But racism is from.
Is a perspective of dominant culture and marginalized communities. So it's kind of not possible to be racist when you're fighting for the rights of marginalized people. So that's just. That's Just kind of the semantics of it. Like all of the ism, sexism, racism, ageism. We need to look at what is the dominant. Who holds power, right? Like, who is the dominant culture, and how is that power being projected on and marginalizing other people? So, yeah, that's not really a thing to be racist when you're fighting for marginalized people's rights. So I just wanted to put that out there.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: I think that the nuance of all of that is lost on someone who will anonymously, and I would attribute cowardice to that post, such a message.
I don't think they're getting into the nuance of human experience and understanding and where they are themselves coming from and what the impact of that might be on yourself. I'm curious. As our time wanes here, the reason I bring this experience up is because of that history in your family and because of that experience that I think so many, certainly not myself, I've not experienced that. I've not experienced the stories in my family history like you've shared with us here today with the internment camps. And I've not experienced a note like you did on your door. So I think it's important to keep connecting these dots, that this stuff in various forms continues to happen. And I'm curious, surely in your mind you've. You're connected to the fact.
Yes, I'm going through it too. My great grandparents, my grandparents, my parents, me. And as a parent, where's this gonna go? What's the experience of my children going to be?
[00:52:01] Speaker C: Mm.
Yeah. I think that there. I recognize in myself that I hold on to generational trauma. I know what my ancestors have gone through, and I can. I do continue to see it happening to my son, going to school here.
Microaggressions, we can call them microaggressions or just, you know, making references to being Asian or eating dogs or all of these things. It's extremely hurtful. And I think that people in our community need to be aware that these things are still continuing to happen.
And yes, Salida is getting more progressive. It's getting. There are more people moving here that are open to empowering people to live the lives that they want to live.
But all of these little things that they do. Great on you. And that sign was not, obviously, it was somebody that was incredibly ignorant. It was. They felt very triggered by the Black Lives Matter and all of the propaganda that's been going out about that antifa and the movement and all of that, but taking the time to recognize where we are as a society and it feels like we're moving backwards in some ways. But I can't say that I'm only of this generation. I don't really know firsthand.
But those kinds of things are still happening. They're happening to people that I love, that I know in this community and as a community, I think it's really important that we collectively stand up and do something about it, say something, be active and be awake to all of the messages that are coming out and say that's not right. And I think that we were there a couple years ago. People were pretty awake to what was happening, but we've kind of like crawled in our holes, myself included a little. A little bit.
But it is important to stand up and to say something and to fight for what's right.
[00:54:35] Speaker B: I think it's important to have said the things that you just did so that we do connect these dots and let people know this is not an abstract, distant oh, it's happening somewhere, but never where I am. Like, we are all, no matter where we are in this country and in the world, we're part of these issues. And without us recognizing them and using our voices and hearts to stand in the right place, I don't think we're going to continue in the progress that we want to have as humans. So thank you very much, Kimmy, for everything that you've shared here. And like I said at the very beginning of this, I've been wanting to talk with you for a long time in this podcast. Just gave me the excuse to invite you in to share all of these deeper things for an hour. Thank you very much.
[00:55:23] Speaker C: Thank you, Adam. It's great to be here. This was fun.
[00:55:33] Speaker A: All right, that was Kimmy Uno. If our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you, you can learn more in this episode's show
[email protected] if you have comments or know someone in Chaffey County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email
[email protected] we invite you to rate and review the We Are Chaffey Looking Upstream podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever platform you use with that functionality. We also invite you to tell others about the Looking Upstream podcast, help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation. Once again, I'm Adam Williams, host, producer and photographer. John Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to CAHIN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado to Heather Gorby for graphic and web design to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment and to Lisa Martin, Community Advocacy Coordinator for the We Are Chaffey Storytelling Initiative. Again, the We Are Chaffey Looking Upstream Podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffey County Department of Public Health and the Chaffey Housing Authority, and it's supported by the Colorado Public Health and Environment Office of Health Disparities. You can learn more about the Looking Upstream Podcast and related storytelling initiatives at we are chafee.org and on Instagram and Facebook Earchafey. Lastly, thank you for listening. And remember, as we say here at We Are Chaffey share stories, make change.
