The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples & the Unmaking of US History

it's hard to even emphasize how kind of synonymous in many ways Colonial New England remains with early America or the origins of America and we still have you know metaphors and common day life that were expressed you know the city on the hill the kind of first thing so Thanksgiving it's just you know most Americans have a hard time like putting things in a historical perspective um it's hard to hear and kind of make sense of the fact that you know the first British colony to endure was founded 13 years before the Puritans came we just don't know much about that early history of Jamestown in ways that we should but so it was really kind of an attempt to provincialize in a sense that kind of proprietary hold [Music] uh thank you all of you for coming in person and on Zoom uh this is a real honor and privilege for me Ned and I have been friends for about over 10 years more our teenage kids were in school together downstairs avoiding this talk right now so that's how we first met even though we were also colleagues so this is not only a great intellectual pleasure for me uh but also a kind of you know something I'm very very happy about personally to be here with Ned tonight Ted's a tremendous scholar uh one of if not the most influential historians of the Native American Experience writing Now in America and I think we're all going to have a really really scintillating and eye-opening discussion over the next hour uh so first I would like to just invite you to talk a little bit about the origins of the book your first book violence of the land was a very very specific study of a certain uh history and place uh in the Western United States can you talk a little bit about how the idea for this book came about the origins of it the inspiration it's a it's a book of extraordinary scope and ambition it is a uh it is a a effort to sort of redefine the field stake ownership over for the entire field of Native American history so can you talk a little bit about uh about where the book came about um well thank you for that uh generous invitation to offer some Reflections and thank you all for coming both in person and virtually and thanks uh to Olivia and to the whole team here at the Historical Society for also organizing tonight's uh hopefully productive evening um this book uh as I often reflect upon reflects a lot of both personal as well as kind of intellectual experiences and ambitions I'm not quite exactly sure where to begin but generally speaking I've modeled it aft on a series of what I consider to be kind of foundational synthesis of certain types of American history that I read earlier in my career and found incredibly useful and I spent much of my teaching and to a lesser extent administrative career kind of helping to build certain approaches to Native Americans history and I've always kind of seen the need for a um what kind of interpretive overview of the field for both pedagogical and scholarly purposes it may be hard to really comprehend because the Native American history is obviously the oldest field of American historical inquiry but it lacks in many ways much of the requisite academic infrastructure and so it may be hard to realize that there's not actually a kind of commonly used kind of single volume synthesis or at least there hasn't been until very very recently in the field and so um that kind of need has always been kind of present in my teaching and kind of intellectual life as well as in kind of personal encounters with colleagues or friends neighbors who say you know I'm really interested in Native American history what should I look at and I usually used to recommend fiction right because I used to say uh you know read Louis erdrich or Leslie Marvin silk or and Scott mamaday some of the great Native American Writers to really if you really want to understand native American like the experiential nature of Native American experiences uh try that um thank you um but then over time and that's the where the title of this book comes from uh there's been an incredible outpouring of scholarship in this field I've witnessed and lived through and in some small way participated in an outpouring they're kind of prodigious kind of scholarly both conversation but also a reorientation that has happened with kind of some social scientists might call a paradigm shift has kind of occurred in the study of particularly early American history in which a field that used to be criticized for knowing more and more about less and less kind of literally exploded in the last 25 years to create what Taylor and others might call a vast early America that is not bound by the Atlantic it's not only anglophone it's not only British North America it's a continent I mean imperialists and Indigenous peoples newcomers African-American slaves people coming together upon the American continent in which a kind of Continental perspective is necessary so that kind of profusion of scholarship that has kind of occurred in the last 25 years or so I call the rediscovery of America that we have kind of lived through or kind of come to this point in our nation's history where we can attempt to think about the history of North America from at least this Fields kind of perspective and vantage point I have a quick very very quick follow-up on something that you said in passing you said that Native American history was the oldest field of historical inquiry in America now that I want to make sure I understand that because that actually comes as a surprise to me are you saying that academic historians in America first devoted their attention Okay well I would say it's the oldest field of American History okay so it predates the Rival Europeans obviously oh I see okay and it's also in certain ways one could say it is the oldest subject of American historical inquiry if we think about uh the exploration narratives of the 1500s the kind of narratives of settlement which are are often obviously about subtler communities but the interior Worlds the indigenous Traders allies hosts figure prominently throughout the kind of study of American history and part of the introduction to this book makes a strong kind of casting or kind of strong critique of the field for not really understanding this sufficiently well and so I'm trying to get to a point academically and intellectually if not kind of socially where we can have a kind of broader conversation about the history of the United stays District of North America that is not siled into kind of segmented fields of inquiry but kind of more of a kind of unified whole of some kind so you describe the book as a synthesis which points to the indebtedness that you have to this 25 years at least of inquiry and of course going back further would you say that the book at the same time has an overarching thesis or argument or narrative thread so beyond just sort of synthesizing the work you know the ranges you know from the beginning of of contact to the present uh all around North America but in addition to this narration of events would you say that there is an interpretive framework or thesis that guides the introduction of material that people here today in readers should be aware of um I think there are a series of hopefully identifiable themes that kind of unify the whole and that's particularly evident in the book structure and so the book is divided into two parts part one in part two and each part is six chapters total and part one ends essentially with the ratification of the US Constitution or ends in 1787 with the Drafting and ratification of the Constitution the place of Native Americans within that process and then part two so that's the end of part one which is entitled Indians and Empires um and surveys the Spanish French British North American and kind of particularly the Imperial crisis of the 18th century from the vantage point of this field uh part two is called struggles for sovereignty and it's basically a history of Federal Indian Affairs and relations since the founding of the United States so each of those parts then have a kind of thematic emphasis one on Indians and Empires about the centrality of indigenous peoples to all of the colonial settlements and Imperial worlds that are established across the North American continent um I can't obviously Chronicle and survey or interpret or synthesize all of those subjects but do so in these kind of discrete chapters Each of which I hope offers some intervention or kind of overview um and there's a chapter in British North America at least in New England on on the history of Puritan settlement essentially um so that those those haves essentially have their own kind of thematic orientations so the first half would be a kind of familiar emphasis as the kind of field now recognizes upon the dialectics essentially of indigenous and Imperial relations the second half is more political and legal in a sense that it highlights the kind of changing forms of American law and dominion and kind of subordination of Native Americans throughout largely the 19th century and then focuses on how Native Americans across the 20th century have largely responded to and or at times reshaped those doctrines and practices into our current ERA it's a kind of you know remarkable history that hasn't been I think sufficiently recognized in which Native American communities over the last 100 years in particularly over the last 50 to 60 years have really um found forms of autonomous self-governance that really are kind of unprecedented in the history of the United States more broadly so those are the kind of themes somewhat kind of specialized interpretive conclusions we might say but if the book had a central thesis it's that it's impossible to understand the history United States outside of its indigenous past and each chapter each section is essentially intending to prove that and so even a commonplace subject like The History of the United States in the second world war The History of the United States during the Cold War the history of the New Deal era the history of the Progressive Era all of these kind of paradigms or fields of analysis that have conventionally or continued to conventionally organize American historical inquiry are themselves inadequate or incomplete without a reckoning or kind of a recognition of this field and I'm happy to give kind of particular details about that if you'd like or if needed so that's actually what it's going to turn to next so I have two sort of parallel companion questions and the first is we're all going to read the book so we're all going to learn this but in advance as a bit of a teaser what would you say are the biggest falsehoods or misconceptions things that we think we know about Native American history that are not true and that we will be disabused of by reading the book um well since next Tuesday is the Fourth of July um and we are sitting not too far from Boston Harbor I think it's it's really one of the kind of central imperatives of the early half early parts of this book was to lay to rest a kind of hagiographic celebration of the founding fathers kind of ideological Origins as the exclusive understandings for the origins of the American Revolution um in certain audiences that I might get a little bit of Applause for saying that Western scholarly communities but there has been a kind of deeply entrenched um overly celebratory kind of um recognition of the ideological origins of the American Revolution is the famous book by Bernard Balon has termed it um and the kind of the theories of republicanism that have kind of guided us generations of Scholars for understanding the kind of political culture and ideology of the origins of the United States they failed on a fundamental level to understand the concomitant kind of anti-indigenous currents that are also who are also at play in the revolutionary era and I was sharing some documents with your daughter or before we came in about this period um and uh was telling her that I was showing her that the declaration has in it as its last concluding grievance against the crown a concern that the English crown has incited merciless Indian Savages to attack our Frontier communities and if one studies this declaration and its history once what would kind of come to see that the final grievance is in fact the most important and like there's 27 grievances in declaration and the last one is essentially the climax or Crescendo of the entire document and the last grievances were the only ones that the Continental Congress actually um re-edited from Jefferson's original 29 and and so Scholars like Jojo Lepore most recently or most perhaps in certain ways in the field of early American history have written about these subjects in her famous book these truths The History of the United States without mentioning that the Declaration is simultaneously inciting violence against Indians and where does that history come from and I could kind of lay that out if we wanted to and that's what chapter five does so one thing to kind of kind of emphasize That central theme of the first half of the book is that indigenous peoples were so Central to obviously the not just the formation of these Imperial Colonial worlds but to their ultimate evolution and we really can't or shouldn't think of them outside of these outside think of these worlds that is outside of these contexts because you can't understand how it's July 1776 the founders or the content of Congress Lodge these concerns into their chartering document that authorized independence without understanding where those sentiments came from and those sentiments came from interior communities that were heavily aggrieved because of the British Crown's policies of relative appeasement or diplomatic negotiations or economics subsidy subsidies towards indigenous tribes and there's a whole dark history of an anti-indigenous thought and practice and violence throughout the 1760s and 1770s that hasn't been sufficiently incorporated into kind of narratives of our nation's founding that's a real important kind of intervention I feel that was needed and it's related to the need to then think of the history of the Constitution and the centrality of indigenous Affairs to the formation of the early Republicans similar ways and those are a little slightly more technical understanding like where Indians appear in the Constitution and how those Clauses and phrases and ultimately form larger doctrines of Law and policy but they're related because native nations were such an important and at times determinative historical communities within the correct Imperial crisis between England initially in France and then England and its colonists that we've just really been unable to see this world sufficiently well in my mind so related to that um did you write this book in any way with the wider history of settler colonialism and other settler colonial projects Canada Australia Israel in mind where so it was the rewriting of American History informed by the idea the United States is less an exceptional nation that founded democracy in a particular way but is part of a certain kind of phenomenon of settler Colonial uh uh displacement and founding of new relationships to land in place through the displacement of of native populations a topic that's transformed my field of political philosophy as well as as well as history were you informed by the broader increasing understanding of settler colonialism as perhaps one of the defining features of modernity from the 1600s um yes and no they're having critiques of American exceptionalism that predate the kind of settler Colonial turn that were kind of foundational to my own academic or scholarly development um and those critiques were coming largely out of the field of American studies which is not just history but also literature and kind of cultural studies of various kinds we're very present throughout the late 90s and early 2000s but they failed to really grapple with the indigenous History of the United States in this um and so Southern colonialism gave many of us a kind of vernacular for continuing those critiques and incorporating some of their their key themes and it's not in coincidental that the revolution chapter that I just mentioned or chapter five is entitled settler uprising and it looks at these settler communities particularly Western Pennsylvania who are totally at odds with the British crown over their Indian policies in the aftermath of the Seven Years War um so and the idea of a settler Uprising kind of is referencing the kind of growing capacity of essentially settler colonialists if we were to use this academic term um they're growing presence and then chapter seven is called the Deluge of settler colonialism which is essentially a history of The Early Republic and the kind of just demographic economic and profound kind of social turbulence that much of eastern North America experienced because of the prodigious kind of growth of British or formerly British North America into the interior portions of eastern North America so clearly I'm engaged in this and there's some great books that are kind of are in studies and articles that are kind of part of this Paradigm that you referenced and many Native American studies Scholars are deeply participating in the kind of directions that this theoretical field is going I'm a little hesitant to embrace some of these paradigms fully um and because they sometimes flatten the historical distinctions and uniquenesses between and across wide-ranging subjects and so one of the important books that I drew upon pretty heavily was called replenishing the Earth which is a global history of settler anglophone settlement which I think mentions in 1790 uh they're roughly um I think 20 million English-speaking people in the world but then by 1930 there'll be 200 million and so that kind of history of demographic with the scholar named Jamie belich calls settler booms we need to understand and so he periodizes the history of seven major anglophone settler booms and begins ironically or not um with a heavy critique of a book about Chicago that has been incredibly influential in my field called Nature's Metropolis by actually my former colleague William Cronin and Nature's Metropolis is this kind of beautiful history of Chicago's just um extraordinary growth in the aftermath in particular of the Civil War a city that I think had 20 000 pigs in 1850 has four million by 1880. and these are animals not uh you know so he is a nation Metropolis explores this kind of Hit the hinterland the infrastructure The Agrarian kind of western territories of Timber and Grain and Hogs and other resources and steer steer and cattle that make their way to Chicago making it Nature's metropolis and so that book which um you know just profoundly influenced the history of Western American history or historiography um belich takes issue with and says look you know Chicago grew like that but so did Melbourne and so were other kind of anglophone settler communities around the world um so we need to think of them less than a kind of exceptionalistic or nationalist way but in a comparative way so I'm very kind of appreciative of this kind of paradigm but also a little concerned that we lose particularly not just the historical variations across these historical and kind of various Continental experiences we're also losing at times the kind of centrality of indigenous agency to the making of these worlds and the settler Colonial turn as you know emphasizes the process of indigenous elimination as a central feature of the kind of anglophone Commonwealth nation state formation across the mainly the 18th and 18th century worlds um which is you know in certain perspectives helpful and true but it's also in a certain ways also less helpful because we lose sight of the fact for example that North America had more people in 1492 than it does in 1776. and that's not because of Southern colonialism that's some other historical history of colonialism more broadly diseases and warfare and enslavement and so if if we can't think of those things as connected with Southern colonialism which we should then we're going to just fall back on a somewhat truncated field of analysis that reinscribes the importance of nation states rather than seeing the kind of long durray influence of peoples and places and in particularly the unanticipated outcomes things like minor skirmishes that become Wars or certain political strategies that become movements you know we kind of lose the kind of historical contingency as well so I'm very appreciative of this other Colonial Paradigm but also kind of aware of some of its limits well having said that to stick a little bit with the settler Colonial question um so there's a certain kind of story let's say that's popular in political Theory or political philosophy that says that there are differences between the settler Colonial ideology of protestant North America from Catholic Spanish South America and that one of the dominant justificatory ideologies for settlement in North America is kind of you know derived from Lockheed and conceptions of property right by what right do we have to settle here they're not making arguments about natural law or or or or uh you know are the natives human or not it's well we have colonized the land we've taken land that was in common we've mixed our labor with it we have now an entitlement to property so that's a kind of a broad story would you say that there was a single dominant ideology of settler colonialism throughout U.S history or various different ideological projects and justifications at various stages in various places for various purposes I think I'd say more of the latter than the former and so I do agree that there is a kind of particularly distinctive anglophone Protestant um kind of ideology that ultimately by particularly by the Jacksonian era has established the kind of well-recognized discourses of what we would call or what has been called manifest destiny that is the kind of providential uh the predetermined necessity if not outcome of the United States to become a continental Empire and to subdue and or civilize the indigenous populations there um there is however a 50-year period of undetermined pluralisms of various kinds and mutualities that is really at the heart of the early Republican or of The Early Republic in ways that haven't been sufficiently recognized um and chapter seven which is kind of a survey of this period attempts to kind of highlight this kind of Growing Power of particularly a Jeffersonian vision of agrarianism that will be at the heart of the American expansionary project it doesn't Jefferson say at one point that is as long as Native Americans are settled as long as they're turned into Farmers or something like that in our sense of the term they can be incorporated into Virginia is that wrong or I think um in notes on the state of Virginia uh he has a kind of long meditation on on the presence of native peoples within the colonial world um and and one of the interesting things that that chapter kind of revealed to me and as did some of the work of Scholars like Abraham Kennedy um uh that his ideas about race were still in formation and the Haitian revolution in 1791 um the Jays Treaty of 1794 um the Naturalization Act of 1790 which is the first time the term white is codified into U.S statutory law the militia Act of 1792 these are events that kind of form this decade of kind of growing racial consciousness that he may not have intended to essentially adopt or reckon with but was forced to um and so the reason I mentioned the J Street for example is that he didn't really believe that the Senate should have that kind of exclusive power when he was before he was president but as he becomes president he starts realizing it's a great thing to have that kind of power if if you want to acquire access to say the mouth of the Mississippi and the French are offering to sell you the whole region and you don't actually need a constitutional amendment um and so they passed Louisiana Purchase treaty um without having to kind of amend the Constitution and so there's the kind of formations of kind of policy that bring sometimes coherence to incoherent spaces and so over time I actually see the Declaration of the Constitution as ideologically kind of disparate um approaches to a similar problem the Declaration incites are kind of condemns native peoples as merciless Savages and Savages you know is not just a kind of form of racialized distinction but also kind of form of uncivilized kind of classification that will eventually kind of compel many state leaders to feel that their kind of moral obligation to impose institutions of civilization upon them um and so there are uh there's there is an incredible period of indeterminacy that is starting to take formation by the time Jackson comes into office and begins the removal policies of the 1830s it's a you know somewhat technical history that um may not be super familiar outside of historians of the early American republic or the Antebellum or Southern or Native American historical experience but it's not influence you'll see these kind of divides kind of consistently in recurring recurring throughout this era in ways that um seem episodic but are kind of part of a larger kind of history and phenomenon and Jackson as you know is at odds with Supreme Court Justice in the Cherokee Nation cases in the 1830s and so even in their even in their disputes various kind of philosophies or ideologies of Indian policy are still kind of information and often in conflict I have a few more things I'd like to invite you to talk about before opening it up to the audience one of the things I'd wanted to ask about since we're here are some of the New England Massachusetts uh particularities anything that you'd like to comment on one thing that occurred to me is that you know um you know maybe this is what you sort of meant by the settler Colonial Paradigm not taking into account indigenous agency so if you think about things like the king Phillips war or the Seven Years War you know that there were Natives and settlers on both sides of the conflict it wasn't always just settler versus indigenous um and so you can say whatever you like about that but I was wondering is there is there any sense from your research that things could have been different that there were some settlers that came without the desire of complete sovereignty and conquest of the land which necessitated either the removal or the subjugation of indigenous populations was there a sense in which there were some moments in American history or some uh sort of visions of settlement that would have allowed for a different mode of relationship to the land relationship to Native populations relationship to sovereignty and governance or am I just being a little you know that's a really interesting question because it highlights the kind of multi-imperial emphasis that the field now has taken and so um there are academic historians like myself who specialize in certain regions or imperial settings or what we might even call Borderlands histories and we come to understand those particular uniquenesses pretty as carefully as we can um and in that kind of variation you can start seeing then alternative practices contrasting experiences and philosophies and in certain ways the kind of history of the French Empire North America has become seen as in many ways the most kind of mutually determined of the three or four or five major kind of European Imperial undertakings and so much of this book's early half reflects that emphasis in the literature within the British Empire one thing I was really struck by was the relative fragility of the Puritan Colonial experiment or settlement pattern until the early 1630s um and so even though it's maybe maybe only a 12 or 13 year period um chapter two which is on the British Northeast or the native Northeast in the rise of British North America uh really attempts to provincialize the kind of Puritan um Colonial history in part because it has been so heavily kind of institutionalized as the kind of antecedent of American History more broadly and this is like still the in kind of historical perspective the North New England Still Remains the most heavily studied region in the United States because of the Puritan and because of the antiquarians of the 19th century the rise of colonial history uh the you know the kind of deeply often celebratory history of the Revolution and the founding leaders from the region um it was only in like the 70s that southern history kind of broke away from the kind of prevent the whole that uh New England held on what was then called like the American mind you know so uh anyone in the field would know these kind of historiographical um Moorings essentially so it's hard to even emphasize how kind of um synonymous in many ways Colonial New England remains with early America or the origins of America and we still have you know metaphors and common day life that were expressed you know the city on the hill the kind of first things so Thanksgiving it's just you know most Americans have a hard time like putting things in historical perspective um it's hard to hear and kind of make sense of the fact that you know the first British colony to endure was founded 13 years before the Puritans came we just don't know much about that early history of Jamestown in ways that we should but so it was really kind of an attempt to provincialize in a sense that kind of proprietary hold and so I spent a lot of time mainly reading the works of other Scholars to kind of see how they exposed a whole range of developments that you know that heavily shaped the eventual outcome of the Puritan settlement of New England and so those emphases are things like the the the enslavement of indigenous peoples from the region that transport to England the enlistment of them and kind of creating cartographic and kind of ethnographic understandings of the region the return of those people including to squantum or Squanto who is at Plymouth you know if having returned to North America having been already transported there aren't that many identifiable indigenous peoples from the region who are in England before Puritan settlement but there are dozens and so it's hard to kind of realize that there are in fact indigenous people from the region already in England before Puritan settlement so um it's just and it's probably because the first British you know Mariners are here in the 1500s they're here in the early 1600s and then that history of right we tend to think 1620 or 16 or seven right the coast of Maine right over there has forts from 1520s right I mean maybe not forts but uh trading trading posts you know Cartier is under Saint Lawrence in 16 uh 34. uh Verrazano is in New England in the 1520s and his journals are published and translated and it's not like this information isn't available so I actually began chapter two with Verrazano um and his in his Chronicles of Block Island which comes to have a central feature in this chapter is evolution because what happens in Block Island in the 1630s kind of eventually leads to the Puritan conquest of New England through the um after during and after the Pequot War and so the peacock war is really in many ways the kind of culminating day new mall of the chapter two and that kind of represents the eventual solidification of a vision of Puritan settlement that was not actually in existence initially and that the British were not in the 1620s and even early 1630s envisioning the same levels of a kind of regional Imperium that they eventually established and it's partly because of the influence of diseases both before Puritan settlement and before the Pequot War these two major pandemics in 1616 and then 1632-33 that just so radically destabilized indigenous worlds that the British are able to then Envision and initiate a kind of conquering of their kind of primary indigenous Rivals and the subordinating nation of them that leads to the kind of forms of land ownership the lockian kind of in property owning kind of political reality only becomes possible in certain kind of contextual ways I'm going to ask one more questions I'd like to get people to start thinking of their of their questions and it goes something like this so for a lot of us who are not professional historians advances in historiography are very often presented in the public as ways of understanding the present so the 1619 project for example you know you know the big thing that came out in New York you know you can explain the public transportation system in Atlanta on the because of 1690. so anyway I'm not disparaging that I mean you know um do you in the book or either on your own want to leave us with any kind of suggestion that there are certain aspects of our politics today our political culture our political um fault lines uh certain aspects of uh kind of preoccupations with issues in the part of certain Americans that can be still today traced to our settler Colonial origin whether it's the obsession with guns whether it's hatred of History right you know why are we so uniquely opposed to teaching our own history not just a scientists but many many people um obsession with land and property um I want you to answer I'm just saying is this something you want to leave us as well that you know you bring a Native American history up to the present but is there also something about the political culture of America that you think means that colonization settlement is still going on and is still a feature of as you derisively said earlier the American mind well I was maybe being derisive of the historiography and this is funny because you're basically asking me whether there this is a uh whether the work has within it a kind of potential continued indictment of for explanation explanation or of the American um historical experience of writ large um in a way that might limit what I still see are some of its potentially if not optimistic but hopeful sentiments and so I'm actually more kind of you know just in a kind of personal perspective um uh hopeful that we can transcend some of our ideological or partisan or Regional or certain types of differences by seeing commonalities and shared unit unifying themes more broadly and I think Native American history allows us to see certain things in ways that are unfamiliar and in strange ways also kind of reassuring and Indian policy in particular over the last 70 years or so has in many ways not been heavily dominated by one or two of the dominant National parties the United States and it is something that Native Americans themselves have been so kind of consistently advocating and trying to shape and impact and modify that it's not really intelligible in a kind of red or blue or kind of conventional kind of political Paradigm I think that's healthy in a way because I think it shows that this concern has been one of the unifying themes of these communities for so long that they've enlisted often numerous allies national leaders supporters other constituents into a kind of struggle for we might say sovereignty we might say some might say indigenous Liberation it's a way in which these communities have tried to use certain constitutional principles legal doctrines international law public Consciousness certain types of militancy to change a kind of national current I think those stories are more perhaps inviting or who have spaces for entry then maybe some of the more potentially leveled criticisms that this subject could could also still deliver if needed all right I'd like to open it up now at this time gentleman right here uh thank you my question really has two parts one uh you spoke at the beginning in a very broad sense about looking at the whole two continents North and South America and I remember reading a book a number of years ago about champlaining and I got the impression again a fairly different approach to dealing with the indigenous people than some of the English settlers at the time so my first part of the question is do you have a broad distinction let's say between English French Spanish and Portuguese and my second question is I know in Latin America you had like very large indigenous Empires that covered large territories to what extent did the indigenous people of say communicate amongst themselves let's say coordinate um amongst the opposing uh you know the incoming settlers um there is a kind of hemispheric perspective that opens the project with the chapter on [Music] it's it's I I hope it's not too presumptive um but chapter one is called American Genesis um Indians in the Spanish Borderlands which is an attempt to kind of highlight the kind of centrality of Spanish um and Iberian influences upon particularly the Caribbean and Mexican worlds prior to francophone and anglophone exploration and this is um somewhat conventional historical emphasis in the field but still isn't like very heavily sometimes recognized so there's a lot of synthetic surveys of these types of histories that kind of highlight how Spanish kind of partial Island colonization up to like 1517 kind of is radically um expanded by the cortesian conquest of Mexico in the 15 by 15 19 15 21. so that kind of History then leads to the settlement of central Mexico amongst the great Nawa or Aztec empire and the sets of negotiations that kind of form the kind of you know the nucleus of the Spanish Empire that nucleus expands North throughout the 1500s eventually arriving into the southwest and the 15 and by full in full force by the 1590s laying the seeds for the first American colony New Mexico North American colony so there's the kind of emphasis on these kind of Continental or hemispheric developments that distinguishes this world from others other Colonial worlds it also puts in I think into I don't say sharp relief but it puts into conversation the enduring presence of Pueblo Indian communities in this Region's history these are the oldest oldest continuously inhabited spots on the North American land the Pueblo nations of New Mexico and Arizona they're roughly 81 by an archaeological estimates by the time the Spanish arrived um 36 I think by the time the purple revolta 1680 and I think 22 today so they've gone undergone just tremendous changes but nonetheless have endured and adapted and responded essentially to the challenges that you're here um suggesting the level of communication between these indigenous worlds is really hard to ascertain outside of the presence of European Chronicles and documents there is a kind of concern with this project that it's in certain ways dependent very heavily on euro-american textual Productions and archives and much less on Native American origin stories or cultural teachings some of which are heavily influenced in certain areas more than others so there is a this is not um by any means a kind of comprehensive overview but a kind of hopefully uh a useful and if not needed uh undertaking towards these concerns um so contingency seems to be like a very important idea in your book and something that I found it kind of disappointing or frustrating with other narratives about the spirit of history is that like everything was a foregone conclusion you know if there's a lot of disease 99 of people died and you know it was all just a matter of time from that one so I'm just wondering if you could elaborate on that sort of idea um the history of disease is an essential feature of Native American history and in many ways has become the primary or a primary mechanism for telling the early American historical experience writ large some Scholars have been able to piece together like the epidemiological history of communities that highlight that the demographic diseases were not yeah exclusively the cause or sole origins of these communities challenges but they were as we referenced perhaps of the Puritans they were one of many ordeals that Native American communities had to endure in the presence of these other kind of Imperial or Colonial challenges and so I'm kind of I think pretty um assured that at no point does the disease kind of argumentation overpower these other contingent experience explanations it's one of many kind of colonial disruptions that um unmake essentially Native American communities and shouldn't be seen outside of the context of these other disruptions that may be kind of a broad answer to your question but it uh it's a pretty big subject um the diseases of the smallpox epidemics of the 1780s you know are affect indigenous peoples from Mexico of the Mississippi and Missourian World up into the northwest coast up into Hudson's Bay like with relatively the whole continent has a history of disease that is a necessary um factor in understanding that subsequent development [Music] among the founding fathers what you hope to see in conversations interventions and public events for the upcoming um [Music] um well I I would hope that uh many of our readers and listeners might um kind of take it upon themselves or feel somewhat motivated to try to answer these questions themselves where do these terms come from where does the term Restless Indian Savages originate in chapter five has some kind of partial suggestions um but there are others who are working on these subjects um and I would hope by the time we reach 2026 that we as a nation are able to have a more kind of full-throated but nonetheless still civil conversation about the intricacies of all of the kind of original sins of the United States that there's more than one and it didn't occur in isolation and um we shouldn't be uh competing to prove one versus the other as more kind of foundational but and this is not just about some Scholars but these are like big fields of inquiry there's a whole field called the history of American racial capitalism now that has emerged that has kind of seen um has been unable essentially to see Native American history and land dispossession as a central factor of the history of American racial capitalism I think we're going to get to the point where this is not the case but my book has some small role to play in that conversation but I'm constantly in conversations with Scholars where I I'm saying things like I just can't see how you can and it's usually like a modifier It's usually the kind of and I try to tell my students not to let their modifiers carry their analysis um but you know if we're fighting over modification we're losing the battle right um if you want the most foundational uh the most original you know the first or the oldest whatever kind of modification you're trying to prove is going to not have as much kind of analytical persuasion or depth if we frame it slowly and kind of somewhat subjective modified term so um who are the uh that you know these are colleagues at nearby institutions who who make these claims and so I often write it and say well um you know there's more than not just one American original sin there's more than one foundational American Institution and Indian land is necessarily one of the kind of central determining influences upon the motivations for Independence um right I have a question and K-12 so my question you mentioned something around lack of like academic infrastructure and also the lack of private resources related to Native American history so I'm just wondering in general very selfishly what advice do you give to Educators curriculum developers trying to bring this work into the K-12 classrooms with those just challenge this oh that's a great question and thank you for all the hard work that you do as a son of a public school teacher or high school teacher who likes to remind me fairly often she often says Ned what you do isn't teaching and it's true but I do work in certain capacities with teachers and and have kind of work in ways that hopefully are helping modify or Rectify these these challenges what I often say is there's probably more information than we realize and the challenge is what do we how do we access it and how do we what do we do with it and I often recommend as best as one can trying to um make sense of a local or Regional like indigenous history and if possible doing so in concert with local indigenous community members and or tribal members um and so we you know have two federally recognized tribes in Connecticut about the Mashantucket pequod and the Mohican nation and we try as best we can to involve our classes if not directly with their um kind of cultural offices you know we take tours of their museums and I have speakers and do things of of that kind of nature um and um I don't know how many I'm sure many people have been to the Manchester Pequot Museum um it's really an extraordinary um undertaking and achievement and they have a 25 000 square foot re-created uh Pequot Village and they also have movies that were made to kind of talk about the Pequot Massacre from the community's perspective and so you can learn a lot in those types of Partnerships or spaces and there are now I think over 200 tribally run cultural centers or museums in the country and ironically or not Connecticut has both the oldest and largest and so those are the kind of possibilities but it takes work it takes free education it's a kind of challenge that uh awaits many who come to this field but I think are rewarding if not at times daunting one well I'm a new consumer I'm the board chair and I just at the end of the evening want to stand up and thank you both very very much and thank everyone for coming here virtually um I'm sure others feel the same way I do but this has been a really exemplary MHS evening I mean we have always been an Aspire ever more perfectly to be the home for everyone's history and we're aspired to DNR the home for excellent excellent excellent uh historical discourse and Analysis and we are even happier when it involves an Innovative perspective on things so we couldn't be more thrilled to have you here and be promoting what your your work and so thank you for coming we're also really really interested in these guys to try and help them and you know just to say it Robin talked about 14 million documents they're just riddled with evidence of the encounter between indigenous and settler communities I mean we have cops of it and it hasn't even begun to be really sifted with that perspective so the distrust I'm sorry is it digitized uh uh well that is so it is and it would be amazed at how much it costs to digitize every single day anyone interested in giving us a hundred million dollars actually will gladly take it but no that's one of the many projects I'm working on here and you know as times change the perspectives changing another thing that changes is the perspective on what are the things that are important to prioritize and deciding decided anyway this has been an exemplary MHS evening it's just what we're trying to do and we were thrilled to all are here and I can't wait to read the book so thank you thank you thank you so much [Applause] thank you

Channel: GBH Forum Network

Views: 1,288

Keywords: Boston, WGBH, GBH, Native Land, History, Native History, US History

Id: nlt1QAaGSHY

Length: 58min 43sec (3523 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023