Airtable Native American Heritage Month Spotlight: Stephanie Sakoda, Enterprise Customer Service Advocate

During each Commemorative Observance Month, we spotlight two of our amazing employees, who are nominated and voted for by a focus group of employees who identify with the given month. We are excited to continue our celebration of Native American Heritage Month by spotlighting Stephanie Sakoda, one of our fantastic Enterprise Customer Service Advocates!

What is your role and how long have you been at Airtable?

My name is Stephanie, my pronouns are she/her, and I am an Enterprise Customer Service Advocate. I've been here for about eight months.?

What’s a weird or interesting fact about yourself?

I think an interesting fact about myself probably goes hand in hand with a particular tradition that I'd like to share, which is storytelling. That was passed down to me from my dad. He was a great storyteller and writer, and for the last several years I've been working on a creative project at Stanford, a memoir that's very close to my heart, and I'm coming to an end with that. I'm really excited to put that out into the wild and continue the tradition of storytelling in hopes that my children will also want to share their stories when the time comes.

What is your favorite thing about working at Airtable?

My favorite thing about working at Airtable is learning what the product can do, whether you are just one individual like myself, using it as a database for a website, or you are a small business, just trying to get organized and collaborate together, or you're an enterprise user. I walk away seeing some mind-bending bases, and every day I learn something new. It genuinely excites me to see what Airtable can do for you.

I think in my interview I said, “I'm just so excited to see behind the curtain so that I can apply that to my side hustle!” And I have, so it has worked out. I’ve been curating Amazon products that are buried under fake reviews to reveal higher quality items so you don’t buy random stuff that clutter your home and end up in a garage sale the following month. You can check out the site at https://www.lowcountryhighstyle.com/, but I’m working on something even better with other tastemakers for a new Amazon experience coming soon!

Which tribe are you a part of?

I am an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI). We are located in North Carolina, and I feel very honored and blessed to be part of that tribe. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the support I have received from the tribe so I really appreciate being able to show that gratitude now to a wider audience.

How have your Native American roots shaped your present-day identity?

This is definitely personal for me. My father was my connection to the tribe, and he passed away when I was 12 years old. Instantly, I felt like I lost that link and could only view the tribe through his past eyes. It was really important to him that I grew up the Indian way, and that really means appreciating my time here on earth, and understanding that it is a short time. To be grateful for my native blood and the lessons that I'm here to learn.?

As I’ve gotten older, I understand it is my duty and privilege to pass down what I know to my children and that has resulted in me taking ownership of reconnecting with the past. For a long time I accepted that with my father gone, I could no longer be curious, stay connected with my people, or try to reconcile why things happened. My roots have inspired me to get to know the history of my tribe even more, even the uncomfortable stuff, and to talk about things that previously maybe I didn't want to talk about with others because I didn't want them to feel uncomfortable or responsible for what their ancestors may have done. Now I kind of dig my heels in and I want to learn more, even though it doesn't necessarily feel good to talk about.?

Resiliency is just another one of those codes that just is instilled in us, and that has given me the courage to start seeking and speaking out as a Native. I have a deeper spiritual awareness of wanting to be connected. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point I realized it becomes a responsibility to stop being silent, to find my people, even if they're not registered.

I also think there are not enough people speaking up about the shame around not being registered. There’s definitely a divide of being perceived as native or not, based on whether you're on the roll or not. To be officially enrolled in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, you need at least 1/16 blood quantum, though other tribes have different requirements. For some of us, it's not as easy as just knowing for sure that you have a Native heritage. I did not become registered until after my father died, but it was one of his dying wishes that I would become registered. I knew that I was deeply connected, but there was still this sense that I didn't belong because I wasn't registered on the roll. After he died, to get that blood proof, I had to go through many hoops – the hardest being collecting his DNA from a coroner to having a stranger swab my mouth to get my DNA for comparison. Not everyone has to go through what I did, but I’m willing to bet there are more like me out there.?

At 16 I finally got registered, and that also meant I got the financial benefits from the tribe for a lifetime, and most importantly, they help pay for continuing your education. There were so many great things that came along with finally being recognized as a registered Indian, but there shouldn't be any about not being Indian enough until we got a piece of paper that said so.?

What is it like being a Native American woman in tech?

I would say isolating, until I found another person who identifies as Indigenous on my team. I have not found a group that I can say, “oh, I resonate with you a hundred percent.” I have kind of just been an ally to all the other groups I see, or tried to find a personality group I fit in with. For me, finding other natives in tech on Twitter has been the place that I can go to find others “like me”. But not being able to work with them on a project in real life, makes me still feel a little bit of disconnect there. So for me, until my teammate came along, I felt very lonely.

What does our theme this year (The past is not only the past) mean to you?

I think mainstream media has really shone a spotlight on how far we still have to go. This year was the first year that we elected six natives into Congress, and that's unacceptable. We're never going to make an impact in a room with numbers like that. I feel like we really need to fight to get into more rooms, into more tech companies, into more positions of power. And yes, we should celebrate the six that are in there right now – what a great thing! I think that the past is still very much the present, because the numbers prove we’re still pretty invisible. I'm grateful that companies like Airtable are putting a spotlight on natives, and that's huge. We need more people to follow this example.

I think that the past is just catching up with us right now, and we're in a time where we can't ignore it. Because of social media, we see conditions of the reservations, we see the faces of missing women and children, we now know of the struggles to preserve the language. There are about 13,000 registered Cherokee natives who do not know how to speak the language. I think there are 180 elders who know it. In the past they wanted us to forget how to speak to one another, and we're in a fight now to preserve that language. My main priority right now is trying to learn Cherokee so that I can pass it on to my children and anyone else that hopes to keep it alive.?

Do you have a particular tradition you’d like to share?

Like I said earlier, I love storytelling. I love to know. I'm just very curious about everyone's story: who you are, who your people are, where you come from, what has the Great Spirit taught you? What blessings have you been given? I want to know the whole thing. So, going on a walk with me means getting really deep and probably meeting a lot of strangers because I naturally draw them closer.

What is something you wish others knew about the Native American community?

How talented we are. There’s not a lot of visibility into how we can support Native communities. I wish that others knew how to find them on social media, so that they could support, whether it's their photography or their bead work or their hair pieces. I just wish that we could see more of what these individuals are doing because they are so talented, whether it's weaving a basket or making a dreamcatcher. Whatever it is, I just wish more people could support them.

Note: We’re including links of some shops that Stephanie would like to highlight below, so that other folks can check them out and support!