We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

Author:Kliph Nesteroff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Jackie Keliiaa Thinks, “Holy Shit, This Is Amazing.”

Jackie Keliiaa was born in Hayward, California, twenty miles from San Francisco, the youngest of four girls. The Paiute-Washoe stand-up did her earliest gigs at the Brainwash Café and Laundromat in San Francisco, an amateur venue that birthed contemporary comedians like Ali Wong and Al Madrigal. Conscious of her lineage growing up, Keliiaa listened intently to her grandparents as they spoke in Paiute and Washo. “They attended Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada,” she says. “My grandpa got a job at the naval air station after World War II and moved his family out to California. All of their friends and family were Native. There was a huge Native population out here because of urban relocation.” Under that program, Native Americans were bused from rural reservations to urban areas, provided with dilapidated apartments for a maximum of six months, and told to find a job. As with termination, it was the brainchild of Dillon S. Myer, the man behind the Japanese American concentration camps during World War II.

“A lot of Native people were sent to the Bay Area, where they had no family,” says Keliiaa. “My grandpa Marvin would drive up and down the coast, encouraging these men to join in Indian baseball tournaments. That’s how the Indian leagues got started in the East Bay. And it’s the area where I was born.…

“I attended Cal State, where I was part of the Inter-Tribal Student Council. We put on massive events with over two thousand attendees. I got involved with powwows and tutored students at the American Indian Child Resource Center. The university held a comedy night, and Charlie Hill was the headliner. I thought, ‘Holy shit, this is amazing.’ It was transformative. I always loved comedy, but here I understood a second meaning to all of his jokes and I fell in love with his performance. I knew then that it was something I wanted to do.”

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