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00:00:10.496Hello and welcome to the Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast.
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00:00:23.466The producers of this podcast would like to acknowledge with respect the Onondaga Nation firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee, the indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University now stands.
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00:00:28.751And now introducing your hosts, phil Arnold and Sandy Bigtree.
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00:00:33.792Okay, welcome back to Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery.
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00:00:35.606My name is Philip Arnold.
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00:00:45.073I'm in the Religion Department and Core Faculty in Native American Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University and the founding director of the Scano Great Law of Peace Center.
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00:00:58.924And I'm Sandy Bigtree, a citizen of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, and I'm on the board of the Indigenous Values Initiative and the Planning Collaborative for the Scano Great Law of Peace Center at Onondaga Lake.
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00:01:03.380And we're coming to you, sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation.
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00:01:06.763We're coming to you sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation.
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00:01:15.733Today we're in Boda, Norway, Honored to be here with Philip Deloria, who is a well-known author.
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00:01:31.781For the last 25 years has really galvanized Native American studies around issues having to do with stereotyping and playing Indian.
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00:01:32.042I'll say so.
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00:01:36.864We're going to have a wide-ranging conversation about a number of things, but just welcome Philip.
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00:01:40.427Thank you, so great to be here.
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00:01:57.737First I have to talk a little bit about Vine Deloria Jr, your father, ella Deloria, your great-aunt, and Vine Deloria Sr, who was an Episcopalian minister, as I understand.
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00:02:16.893So religion has always been a very important theme in your family, in the Deloria family, and I wanted to raise this up because particularly Vine Deloria Jr has really transformed my ideas and my work.
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00:02:40.551Just last month, for example, a grad student of mine who is like a shaker and mover she's doing two PhDs, one in like environmental studies and one in religion had never read Vine Deloria before African-American student and she said to me excitedly you have to know her to really appreciate this.
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00:02:49.348But excitedly she ran up to me and she said I just read Vine Deloria's God is Red and it explains everything.
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00:03:03.019I mean, you know it still has this real impact on students and I don't think it's as valued in religious studies as it ought to be, you know, or the work of your family.
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00:03:05.268I'm thinking, ella, you know as well.
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00:03:16.211I mean, and I don't know, it's not really a question, but it's really just, you know, something that I think needs to be that we need to focus on in religious studies.
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00:03:20.784But talk about your department quickly and how you talk about it, you do it.
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00:03:24.514God has read your department, phil.
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00:03:28.306Okay, pause, okay, pause, okay, that's a good point.
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00:03:30.586No, oh God, that's funny.
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00:03:34.239Talk about your department.
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00:03:37.830You talk about my department.
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00:04:30.329Yeah, the religion department at Syracuse University, back in the area of psychology of religion, philosophy of religion that's not really what I do, but we have a kind of secular theology element to our department and so they were involved with this death of God theology that hit Time magazine cover and I'm thinking like 65, something like that.
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00:04:42.682And then your father in response almost I'm not sure what wrote God is Red and I'm not sure how.
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00:04:46.910If it is connected, it's just poetic in many ways.
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00:04:57.963Um, I don't know if you have any like comments about that, but yeah, I mean, I think it is connected, it's um, so you're, you're completely right about the family.
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00:05:01.031Um, you know, my grandfather was an Episcopalian minister.
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00:05:02.723My great-grandfather, the person I'm named for was an Episcopalian minister.
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00:05:18.990My great-grandfather, the person I'm named for, was an Episcopalian minister, one of the first Native clergy in the Episcopal Church, you know, at a time when the Episcopalians, you know, were quite good at letting Native people take leadership positions compared to, say, the Catholic Church you know, which was not or some of the other Protestant denominations.
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00:05:31.723So you know there's a long tradition of this kind of leadership within the church, you know, of which the family's been part.
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00:05:33.247And you know my dad went to, you know, theology school.
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00:05:40.586He studied theology, earned a divinity degree, you know, and I think this was this would have been in the sort of late 1950s, early 1960s, and you know it's.
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00:05:49.091I think there's a line to be drawn between that moment of his life and his training and his thought, where he read a lot of classic religion and theology.
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00:06:07.922And if we skip over God is Red for a moment and go to the metaphysics of modern existence from the late 70s 79, as I recall, what you can see there, I think, is this sort of development of the ways that he was thinking in the late 50s, so 20 years earlier, and it's a kind of a.
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00:06:21.050That book is a really interesting book and it, like God is Red, doesn't really get much play either, but it's a rereading of the kind of classic theological literatures right that came out of the 40s and the 50s.
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00:06:27.346So you can see, I think, the ways that sort of religious studies, theology, really grounded his thinking.
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00:06:40.411So if you think about that trajectory and then you put him back in the context of the Red Power Movement of the mid to late 1960s, so you know he'd been the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians.
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00:06:48.334He had written Custer Died for your Sins, published in 1969.
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00:06:57.341And that's a really interesting book for the ways that I think it frames all the writing that he did during that period.
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00:07:09.829He wrote something like five books within the space of about five years Amazing, and tons of articles, and so he was just cranking out writing and you know you can, you can see Custer died for your sins.
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00:07:12.062He's learning to be a writer, you know it's.
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00:07:18.062It's a very important book but it's not exactly a taught, well-crafted, you know through line kind of book.
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00:07:20.745It's a set of kind of ramblings and essays and things like that.
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00:07:29.112Yeah, I say that book as a kind of that he's writing sort of in the trenches, you know, literally in the trenches in a car or whatever you know.
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00:07:30.774You know he wrote this in.
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00:07:57.752We lived in a very small little house on 2440 South Monroe Street in Denver, colorado, and you know this was a house that had like two bedrooms for four people and you for four people and, um, you know he sat on a easy chair with a typewriter on a coffee table and kind of pounded it out, you know, at night, um, you know, so it was sort of, I mean, that was him learning to be a writer, which he then sort of embraced over the next, you know, the next few years.
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00:08:04.709Um, and in that sense, god is red comes out of his red power kind of writing.
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00:08:22.024But it's also this book about religion, right, and like so many of his books, it starts with an explanatory chapter where he's saying, like dear white people, let me explain to you how you have understood us, how you frame native people, and why that's all wrong.
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00:08:37.765And after a chapter or two of that, so when you think about that red power context and you think about where God is red comes from, right, there's, there's in all of his writing at this moment there's always the deconstructive chapter where he's telling people you, you don't understand.
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00:08:44.749Now let me clear the ground and now we'll move forward with an argument, right, and so that's what he, you know, that's what he does in God is Red.
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00:08:55.548And the argument there, right, is so much of a critique of Christianity as a colonial kind of artifact, exactly, you know, but it's not really a historical argument.
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00:09:01.100No, it's not saying like, yeah, christianity and history came together, you know things like the doctrine of discovery.
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00:09:02.365He's not really saying that.
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00:09:11.344It's a theological and conceptual, you know kind of argument.
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00:09:13.753Where that really turns around questions about time and space and how people kind of imagine those things.
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00:09:15.620Yeah, and I think you know that's the kind of the irony of this.
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00:09:34.484You know that in a way because I think of him as a theologian, but in sort of on the ground and challenging the theological superstructure that the academy has built around religious institutions.
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00:09:56.188I guess Is it something like an open letter to church leaders or something like that that appears in God is Red, which many, many of our collaborators point to as theologically.
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00:10:26.255But then, on the other hand, he's very, very critical of the church and its origins in colonialism, and I think it's that kind of conundrum that creates this movement really in the doctrine of Christian discovery, with all these repudiations now coming after, you know, 2009.
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00:10:52.658So, and that's why I wanted to start there, because I think your dad helped all of us really frame these religious problems, you know, and now we're looking in archives and we're looking historical and you know, all these other kind of bringing in these other materials.
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00:11:01.525You know I mean, oh sorry, well, we have to look at this too like you're talking about your great grandfather being an Episcopalian minister or priest.
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00:11:02.206But it was a different time.
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00:11:04.572It's not like Native people wanted to become Christian.
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00:11:05.673They really had no choice.
00:11:05.673 -->
00:11:17.404So this is giving a great pathway through how Native people have dealt with this and to get in a place of authority like your father did.
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00:11:26.576He could then stay with his community and, you know, deal with them and guide them through some of this stuff as well.
00:11:26.576 -->
00:11:29.388So it's a different context than today.
00:11:29.567 -->
00:11:33.581It's like I know the narrative we turned around at Onondaga Lake.
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00:11:49.054You know the county was teaching our community that the Onondaga practically begged to be Christianized and that was a fallacy because the Andaga made the Jesuits leave within 18 months of their first arrival.
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00:11:53.912So it's a very brutal history and you have to contextualize this.
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00:11:59.528I don't want a listener coming in not knowing any of this and hearing this conversation right.
00:11:59.528 -->
00:12:13.677So you know you didn't have the choice and it was a place of influence if you became a minister or a priest at that time and thank goodness, with what your lineage did.
00:12:13.697 -->
00:12:17.190It's a complicated thing, it could still guide us through some of this history as well.
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00:12:28.765Well, this is you know the story in our families that my great-great-grandfather, sassouet, you know, had basically said to his son, philip J Tipi Sapa.
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00:12:42.725You know, look, this is in the wake of the Indian Wars and this is in the wake of, like all of this violent military, you know, colonialism and domination and the sort of restructuring around reservations and allotment and assimilation policy.
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00:12:54.821And you know said to him look, you know, there's the old venues of leadership, you know, have been under assault right and they are crumbling and there's new ways to imagine sort of serving and leading, and one of them is through the church.
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00:12:57.548So, you know, maybe you think about that.
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00:13:02.706And that you know that whole generation, that first generation of Lakota and Dakota ministers.
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00:13:05.513You know I mean my great-grandfather.
00:13:05.513 -->
00:13:08.789You know he did his sermons in the Dakota language.
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00:13:11.548He used the translated Dakota hymnal.
00:13:11.548 -->
00:13:18.488You know they used the Dakota Bible, right, they were keeping the linguistic and language tradition alive, even through literary kinds of means.
00:13:18.488 -->
00:13:21.926They'd have the annual convocations which looked a lot like the Sundance.
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00:13:24.571They'd have the men's societies which looked a lot like the Sundance.
00:13:24.571 -->
00:13:25.629They'd have the men's societies which looked a lot like the old men's societies.
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00:13:26.419They'd have the women's societies.
00:13:27.280 -->
00:13:37.828So in some ways, you know it was the church became this kind of umbrella through which you could reconstitute and reimagine, you know kind of older ways, older social organizations and structures.
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00:13:41.409And you know I mean my grandfather sort of.
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00:13:51.101You know oftentimes you know, had critiques of the church turned against the church.
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00:14:11.567You know that multi-generational thing by the time you get to my dad, you know, and I think this helps put God is Red in another kind of context which you know Custer Died for your Sins is in some ways I mean it's read as being a red power book in the same discourses the American Indian movement or the Indians of all tribes, but in fact it's really not that he's very much an institutionalist.
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00:14:25.626Right in that book he is in favor of well-run tribal government and he, you know, likes tribal chairs who know how to negotiate with the government, and so he's got an institutionalist kind of vibe to him how to negotiate with the government, and so he's got an institutionalist kind of vibe to him.
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00:15:16.893And in the early 70s he was invited to be on the National Council of the Episcopal Church, which he did for six months, nine months, something like that, floated all kinds of proposals which basically went back to that earlier structure, right, sort of saying like you need to recruit, you know, native ministers, you need to give them authority to sort of move in a native kind of way through the church, right, and the church was just not having it right, you know, just was not doing it and you know, so you can watch the Episcopal church as it sort of fades and declines from a very successful, you know kind of I'm doing air quotes here you know kind of very successful organization in the late 19th and early 20th century to, by the time you get to the mid century, a kind of sad faded, degraded, declining kind of thing.
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00:15:19.389My dad thought, well, maybe the church could reinvigorate itself.
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00:15:27.485He was watching black social activism which was so church based, and sort of thinking like could the churches actually provide an infrastructure for native folks?
00:15:27.485 -->
00:15:28.830You know as well.
00:15:28.830 -->
00:15:29.904And his conclusion was no.
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00:15:36.350And then he resigned from the church board and right at that moment this movie sits down to write Goddess Red.
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00:15:47.171But, goddess, through that period where you had no option but to congregate under the authority of the church, indigenous people were not allowed to congregate unless it was at the church.
00:15:47.171 -->
00:15:51.392That's what we were hearing from Onondaga, that they got fed in those places.
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00:15:53.707The best meals were served at the church.
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00:15:59.268And these are community folk, you know, and so the church was it, you know.
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00:16:00.041I also.
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00:16:20.586I mean, we don't have to talk about this, you know, because we could talk for hours about this but I was also thinking about Black Elk and his experience and the whole controversy about his being a catechist and things which I love to teach, because it is a complicated story, you know, and there's so many twists and turns.
00:16:20.586 -->
00:16:28.720But then that's the Catholic Church, very different than the Episcopal Church and I also wanted to note that different than the Episcopal Church.
00:16:28.720 -->
00:16:34.072And I also wanted to note that it is the Episcopalians, in 2009, that are the first to repudiate the doctrine of discovery.
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00:16:57.866Right, this comes out of Maine and some interactions between Episcopalians and the Penobscot, you know and they're the ones that really are are the first, and it just creates this wave of repudiations all through denominations, christian denominations, religious orders, all kinds of places.
00:16:57.866 -->
00:17:01.163Now they have different motivations.
00:17:01.163 -->
00:17:20.161You know, episcopalians are concerned about Cabot Charter, the British kind of colonial superstructure around the church and how that was used, and that it diminishes the Christian faith.
00:17:20.161 -->
00:17:24.584So they're concerned about their own Christianity in some ways.
00:17:24.584 -->
00:17:28.707Maybe they should be a little more concerned about what they did to Native people.
00:17:28.707 -->
00:17:34.631I'm not sure, but you know there's a lot of different motivations in these repudiations.
00:17:34.651 -->
00:17:44.336But we also hope, with this work, the Doctrine of Discovery, they can reflect and see what happened to them, what happened to their indigenous lineages right In Europe.
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00:17:45.057In Europe.
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00:17:45.577In Europe.
00:17:46.900 -->
00:17:53.152You know this is all connected because when Europeans came to this country, they knew darn well what they were doing.
00:17:53.152 -->
00:18:02.287I mean, they attacked us and focused right on how to make the quickest, most abrupt change, you know, in the least amount of time.
00:18:02.922 -->
00:18:14.413And you know we should talk, maybe, about the Irish yeah but I just want to insert here the American Indian Religious Freedom Act did not pass until 1978.
00:18:14.413 -->
00:18:18.967You know, you weren't really allowed to talk about anything but Christianity in these territories.
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00:18:31.375All of them, so you know, and your father and grandfather, great-grandfather, so you know, and your father and grandfather, great-grandfather, helped get people through this mire of domination.
00:18:33.843 -->
00:18:34.344Yeah, yeah.
00:18:34.344 -->
00:18:39.193I mean, the church was sort of for this period, was this interesting kind of repository?
00:18:40.579 -->
00:18:42.125I mean I didn't and what period were you talking about?
00:18:42.125 -->
00:18:43.269Like what time period?
00:18:43.339 -->
00:18:47.964Kind of late 19th through the mid to through the Red Power Movement.
00:18:47.964 -->
00:18:59.448Oh really, yeah, I did an interview one time with Albert Whitehat from Rosebud and he said you know when we kind of brought the Sundance back, you know, in a kind of visible way.
00:19:01.241 -->
00:19:07.107He said the first day there was a whole bunch of these Indian Christians who sat on their lawn chairs and watched us and just kind of folded their arms and didn't say much.
00:19:07.107 -->
00:19:25.498And by the third day, and we sang the two songs that we'd learned out of the ethnography, kind of thing, and he said, by the third day they engaged us and brought out all kinds of knowledge right, that they had been keeping under the rubric of the Christian church.
00:19:25.498 -->
00:19:26.903That's right, Right, you know.
00:19:26.903 -->
00:19:34.811So there are those ways in which these things are common and I would say, you know, I mean, certainly my great-grandfather was a person of Christian faith.
00:19:35.240 -->
00:19:42.162You know, I mean there was no doubt about it and my grandfather was episodically a person of Christian faith, right, I mean he mostly was, but then he wasn't.
00:19:42.162 -->
00:19:52.791And then there were these moments where he was questioning and he always said you know, I'm interested in Jesus the man, not Jesus the God, things like that.
00:19:52.791 -->
00:19:58.416And he would take, he would say, well, these four Lakota values and these four Christian values.
00:19:58.416 -->
00:20:03.769You know he had a lot of fluidity kind of back and forth, you know, kind of around these things.
00:20:03.769 -->
00:20:07.424You know, by the time you get to my dad right, you're in a different political context.
00:20:07.424 -->
00:20:21.972It became, I think, quite important to push back against the Christian church in its longer history, even while you sort of admitted the interesting things that had happened, you know, in the previous 80-some years.
00:20:22.901 -->
00:20:25.368Jeez, there's so much that's popping into my head.
00:20:25.368 -->
00:20:30.327Just the Red Power Movement, you know, and how your dad was involved with that.
00:20:31.041 -->
00:20:37.730How do you make that transfer into Christianity, though, when being indigenous is your proper relationship with the natural world?
00:20:37.730 -->
00:20:40.067Right, you know, and it's regenerative.
00:20:40.067 -->
00:20:49.392You know your food, and you're giving gratitudes to the food and the forces of nature and all the land, animals, and then have Christianity come in.
00:20:49.392 -->
00:20:59.163You have this very alive sensibility of being human in a very complex network of life, so you already have this.
00:20:59.163 -->
00:21:06.015It's not so much a faith, but you embody this power of knowing something greater than yourself.
00:21:07.500 -->
00:21:10.863And that's a trauma in and of itself, right, right, just that.
00:21:10.863 -->
00:21:13.395That reality shift, you know.
00:21:13.878 -->
00:21:29.674Yeah Well, and I think one of his points in God is Red was really to sort of, you know, he wanted to draw a pretty bright, categorical line right In the midst of this kind of murky murkier, more complex family history, right To say look, you know, christianity is a religion of temporality and time.
00:21:30.036 -->
00:21:49.435Right and native religions are practices of space you know, place making and you know, and if you take that seriously, right, the Christian thing will always be on a calendar, it will always start with, you know, creation, it will always end with redemption and everything is going to be directed in those kinds of ways.
00:21:49.435 -->
00:21:59.266Whereas in the native worlds he wanted to describe in large conceptual terms, he's stepping outside of any particular religious tradition to make these kind of theorizations.
00:21:59.266 -->
00:22:13.602The fundamental revelation of that is that the place itself is alive, right, that the land is alive, that it has certain kinds of characters and qualities to it, that you know.
00:22:13.602 -->
00:22:19.538If you are on a landscape that you know and live in intimately, you understand like there's some good places.
00:22:19.578 -->
00:22:21.366You want to go there's a few bad places.
00:22:22.604 -->
00:22:23.406And why is that?
00:22:23.720 -->
00:22:32.448It's because the land itself has a certain kind of character to it, and in your human relation to that land, over time you develop knowledges and things like that.
00:22:32.448 -->
00:22:43.847And so the second point here is that for him, and for Native folks in general, that categorical distinction between religion and science is completely meaningless.
00:22:43.847 -->
00:22:56.541So to be in the place and discover the nature of the place and to live it and to understand and put yourself in an intimate relationship to it, right is both a science and a religion, right in a way that destroys those categories.
00:22:56.541 -->
00:23:15.269Right is to understand, through empirical life, right, that there is a spiritual world right, of which you are, of which you are a part, and and I think his framing of that, it's a hard critique of Christianity in this sort of sense, and we should, I think, read it as such.
00:23:16.400 -->
00:23:26.292And there's so much more beyond what we were limited to become through the confined and dominance of Christian Christianity.
00:23:26.292 -->
00:23:40.173But yeah, the land identifies us, Our identity comes from the earth, which kind of leads to your work as you continue on with this legacy of scholarship and identity.
00:23:40.173 -->
00:23:42.163So it's oh, is that an invitation?
00:23:42.223 -->
00:23:43.008to say something.
00:23:43.720 -->
00:23:44.423I mean, I do see Identity politics.
00:23:44.423 -->
00:23:45.509So it's oh, is that an invitation to say something?
00:23:45.509 -->
00:23:46.275I mean, I do see identity politics?
00:23:46.295 -->
00:23:49.848I think we both see kind of that you're playing with issues of identity.
00:23:49.848 -->
00:23:53.720You know, I thought playing Indian was provocative.
00:23:53.720 -->
00:23:58.128In many ways it was also a condemnation of.
00:23:58.128 -->
00:24:03.746I mean, last year we went to what was that?
00:24:03.965 -->
00:24:04.186it's Queen?
00:24:04.186 -->
00:24:04.528Oh okay.
00:24:04.528 -->
00:24:05.871Last year we went to what is that?
00:24:05.871 -->
00:24:06.893It's a machine, oh Okay.
00:24:10.300 -->
00:24:12.809It's a great machine, but it's noisy yeah.
00:24:16.041 -->
00:24:16.884Are you done?
00:24:16.884 -->
00:24:17.848Okay?
00:24:20.962 -->
00:25:15.432Last year we were in Germany and for six weeks, and we were there, max Planck Institute, developing some workshops on the Doctrine of Discovery, and we had some Haudenosaunee people with us and of course we knew about Karl May in Germany, and Karl May is still just a phenomenon in Germany, which, frankly, just blows my mind, and so his museum is down near Dresden, and so we decided there was going to be a huge weekend Carl May event and we decided to go, and then, and frankly, I just don't know what to make of it.
00:25:15.432 -->
00:25:22.868You know, we talked to the director of the museum, the Carl May Museum, and he knew he knows a lot of Native people.
00:25:22.868 -->
00:25:23.984They all come over there.
00:25:23.984 -->
00:25:28.909They come there and they're invited, they're paid to, you know, like perform.
00:25:29.481 -->
00:25:54.184We know some Haudenosaunee performers that had come over there in the past and they I mean I think some of them said it just got too weird and you know they just decided not to, but they just love Indians, you know, and trying to enter into that whole kind of phenomenon is something I'm still trying to sort out, but I think that you probably have.
00:25:54.184 -->
00:26:00.615You know, you've been dealing with a lot of these, you know, playing Indian things for so long.
00:26:01.221 -->
00:26:02.827And this trumps them all.
00:26:03.943 -->
00:26:05.763Yeah, it was, we could go on about it.
00:26:05.763 -->
00:26:15.114It was germany and we took lots of film and you know, uh, germans dressed up like you know lakota people and the look.
00:26:15.580 -->
00:26:20.692The lakota people actually came to perform and they were at the event the night before.
00:26:20.692 -->
00:26:37.567In this little village they had thousands of germans dressed up as cowboys and cowgirls in a saloon an old Western village and then they had no designated place for the actual Lakota people to dance and they had to come in this like a crowd.
00:26:37.567 -->
00:26:38.779It was so intimidating.
00:26:38.779 -->
00:26:40.688The next day we're at the museum.
00:26:40.688 -->
00:26:46.365There's this huge designated space for dancing, but the Lakota were not invited there.
00:26:46.365 -->
00:26:49.349The Germans dressed up as Lakota and they were dancing.
00:26:50.101 -->
00:26:54.208And there were Confederate, you know, dresser.
00:26:54.208 -->
00:26:58.154They dressed up a whole unit of Confederate soldiers, trump caps.
00:26:58.154 -->
00:26:59.285There were Trump caps.
00:26:59.285 -->
00:27:01.467I don't know what's going on.
00:27:01.467 -->
00:27:04.703I mean, you know, I don't really know what's going on in Germany, that's one thing.
00:27:04.703 -->
00:27:05.528I mean, you know, I don't really know what's going on in Germany, that's one thing.
00:27:05.839 -->
00:27:12.232But Karl May, Hitler was an enormous fan of Karl May and distributed the books to his soldiers.
00:27:12.480 -->
00:27:14.436Probably even met him just before he died.
00:27:14.457 -->
00:27:17.650Yeah, probably I mean try to unpack that playing Indian.
00:27:17.650 -->
00:27:19.742I mean that's just beyond comprehension.
00:27:19.782 -->
00:27:27.075And his whole move into Poland which was seen as a kind of eastward, you know, rather than the westward migration, you know.
00:27:27.075 -->
00:27:36.163You know that epic story of, you know, moving west, manifest destiny, that was kind of mapped onto Poland.
00:27:36.243 -->
00:27:38.769Well, even referred to Poland as a reservation.
00:27:38.769 -->
00:27:42.664So this is so intertwined with the psyche of all around the world.
00:27:42.825 -->
00:27:45.681I it's crazy, but it's serious, crazy, you know.
00:27:45.681 -->
00:27:46.682I mean it's serious.
00:27:46.682 -->
00:27:51.292And indians just play into that whole kind of thing.
00:27:51.292 -->
00:28:01.423Um now, I don't know if you, you know I'm, this is maybe unfair, but but you know, the playing indian thing just does not go away, right?
00:28:01.423 -->
00:28:03.166No, no, that's true.
00:28:03.407 -->
00:28:04.009That's not.
00:28:05.171 -->
00:28:07.855So yeah, I, you know I mean so.
00:28:07.855 -->
00:28:13.848So one of the things you'll notice in that book Playing Indian is that I don't talk about the Germans.
00:28:13.848 -->
00:28:27.775Right, right, right, and you know, and it was a black hole, that was a dissertation and you know, one of the questions in the dissertation to book process was, you know, do I do Indians who dress up like Indians for themselves right and for others right?
00:28:27.775 -->
00:28:29.906Do I do the European thing?
00:28:29.906 -->
00:28:35.003And you know, the answer for me, after not much thought, was a resounding no.
00:28:35.003 -->
00:28:35.826Yeah right right.
00:28:36.279 -->
00:28:42.464Because the American thing is complicated enough and you know so.
00:28:42.464 -->
00:28:45.583The American thing is complicated enough and in a way it's, it's a.
00:28:45.583 -->
00:28:48.489It is a different story, right, it is a kind of.
00:28:48.489 -->
00:28:51.134It is a quintessential settler colonial story.
00:28:51.134 -->
00:29:12.723You know, one of the great moments of my life was Patrick Wolf coming up to me at a conference and saying I was reading Playing Indian, as I was writing my essay on settler colonialism, and you know, and because there is a kind of a, I wasn't theorizing settler colonialism, but this sort of sense of like you will erase the indigenous in order to assume the identities you will perform.
00:29:12.723 -->
00:29:32.220And what I tried to bring into the conversation was this aspect of performance, that it's not just once, it's not just um, that you imagine a kind of native, other and you kind of, but you actually internalize through performance, through putting on masks, and this is what the Germans are trying to do, and the Russians and the English and all the Ukrainians and all the other folks who do this and they're devoted.
00:29:32.500 -->
00:29:34.528Yeah, they're just devoted to this, yeah.
00:29:34.901 -->
00:29:37.269I mean, it's really kind of cultic, you know.
00:29:37.269 -->
00:29:54.372So I wanted to distinguish in some ways between that odd weird modernist, international culty kind of thing from the American thing, which I think is just a fundamental part of settler, colonial practice.
00:29:54.372 -->
00:29:56.265You know that.
00:29:56.265 -->
00:30:04.530You know, one of the reasons you erase the indigenous is to assume the, an indigenous identity for yourself, right, and to perform that identity.
00:30:04.530 -->
00:30:07.890So the erasure is absolutely fundamentally a part of it.
00:30:07.890 -->
00:30:11.089And yet you don't fully erase because you're actually assuming the identity.
00:30:11.089 -->
00:30:16.147So the people you're erasing are the material people, are the actual people.
00:30:16.208 -->
00:30:41.210You get rid of those people, you kill them, you move them further west, you contain them, you transform them, all of these different kinds of things so that you can be them, in order to and this is sort of a little bit where maybe there's some affinities between some of my dad's work and some of my work In order to claim that you are of the continent, that you are of the place, you are of yourself, and the only signifier of that is the indigenous.
00:30:41.210 -->
00:31:08.643So that sort of habit of dressing up like an Indian and playing like an Indian, up like an Indian and playing like an Indian, you know from the Boston Tea Party through all the fraternal things of the 19th century to campfire girls and Boy Scouts and YMCA, indian guys, tammany societies, you know, to the sort of, you know, 60s counterculture people, to the kind of new age folks of the 80s and 90s, right, I mean, it's just this continual thread, right, and it's so.
00:31:08.782 -->
00:31:22.336You got to've got to ask, I mean, if this is something that plays out different forms, different practices, different variations, but the continuity of the practice across American history, why would that be?
00:31:22.336 -->
00:31:23.681Why would that be?
00:31:23.681 -->
00:31:26.402It's just very curious, you know.
00:31:26.402 -->
00:31:43.752So it is an argument really about the two-faced quality of sort of settler, colonialism and domination and conquest, right, that you kill and displace and then you take, right, you take that identity because it is meaningful, right, it is a meaningful identity.
00:31:44.113 -->
00:31:55.766I mean, I oftentimes frame it this way If you're an English colonist sitting on the Atlantic seaboard, you look over your shoulder and you think like, oh my God, the king, these parliament, they just dominate us.
00:31:55.766 -->
00:32:00.125I hate them, we're not them, you know.
00:32:00.125 -->
00:32:06.830And in order to sort of make that argument back across your shoulder, you say we're of this continent, right, we're aboriginal, we're indigenous.
00:32:06.830 -->
00:32:12.284We're American right, we're aboriginal, we're indigenous.
00:32:12.284 -->
00:32:16.497American savages, exactly franklin says yeah, and then you look westward and you say like, oh my god, these violent, savage people, we're not them either.
00:32:16.497 -->
00:32:21.580We're very civilized, we have tea in the afternoon and we're part of the you know kind of european tradition.
00:32:21.580 -->
00:32:31.601So it positions the sort of settlers in that place to grab both of these things as it suits them, right, and to reject them as it suits them.
00:32:31.601 -->
00:32:36.623So it's a relationship of love and hate, desire and repulsion, right, that happens simultaneously.
00:32:36.623 -->
00:32:46.069I think it's an incredibly generative social, cultural kind of position that then leads to generative political and economic kinds of consequences.
00:32:46.211 -->
00:32:47.565Yeah, it's a serious thing.
00:32:47.565 -->
00:32:49.900It's not just play Right.
00:32:49.900 -->
00:32:51.560It's not just playing Indian.
00:32:51.560 -->
00:33:00.409There are serious consequences and I wondered if that you know, if that's also true in terms of, like, you know place names.
00:33:00.409 -->
00:33:02.210You know, you know.
00:33:02.210 -->
00:33:23.770You know the erasure of native people from Ohio or Indian, you know in Illinois or you know Massachusetts or whatever right, and then so you name the places after the people that have been destroyed and I wonder if that's similar to what you're talking about.
00:33:24.240 -->
00:33:25.826I mean it feels like it's a variation, right?
00:33:25.826 -->
00:33:30.103I mean you look across the geography of the United States and you see multiple kind of strands of practice.
00:33:30.103 -->
00:33:32.892Right, I mean you look across the geography of the United States and you see multiple kind of strands of practice, right?
00:33:32.892 -->
00:33:38.105One is to sort of appropriate the indigenous place name and make it your own, you know.
00:33:38.105 -->
00:33:43.085A second is to erase the indigenous place name and give it, you know, new York, new.
00:33:43.184 -->
00:33:45.430England, you know, to those things you know.
00:33:45.451 -->
00:33:52.550and the third strand, which you know, you all know from being in New York State, is to impose a classical Greco-Roman.
00:33:55.001 -->
00:33:55.766What is that?
00:33:55.766 -->
00:33:57.984Munich, syracuse?
00:33:58.086 -->
00:33:58.266Rome.
00:33:58.286 -->
00:33:59.369Ilium yeah.
00:33:59.369 -->
00:34:06.339Which is interesting that, that sort of begins in a New York thing and then sort of spreads out, moves into Ohio Valley Is that right?
00:34:06.339 -->
00:34:08.027It kind of moves a little bit west.
00:34:09.121 -->
00:34:14.309Well, I wonder if that's attached to the doctrines of discovery which came out of the Vatican right?
00:34:14.309 -->
00:34:18.851I mean this lineage back to Rome and the empire.
00:34:18.911 -->
00:34:21.865Sure Choosing to be Romans.
00:34:22.221 -->
00:34:24.429Conquest and empire building.
00:34:24.429 -->
00:34:26.206New York is the empire state.
00:34:28.581 -->
00:34:32.467Yeah, this is going to be a little rambling, but one of the things that we're working on.
00:34:32.467 -->
00:34:47.835So Sandy and I were involved in the development of the Scano Great Law Peace Center, which, as she just mentioned, was formerly called the French Fort, and it was iconic from 1933.
00:34:47.835 -->
00:34:54.713And then it became St Maria of Mount Iroquois in the 70s.
00:34:55.655 -->
00:34:55.835Yeah.
00:34:56.000 -->
00:34:58.429And that became kind of a friendlier notion.
00:34:58.429 -->
00:35:11.927But it still was the Jesuit relations narrative of them coming into Onondaga Nation territory and essentially welcoming, you know, the Onondaga begged, you know begged them to come to be Christianized.
00:35:12.300 -->
00:35:15.168In exchange for 600 square miles of land.
00:35:15.409 -->
00:35:16.862Right, right, you know.
00:35:16.862 -->
00:35:55.190So the land, we have the land grant, we have these documents, and sure enough, they were just issued in Montreal, where they came from, in Canada came into Onondago Nation territory with this land grant, which is the example of the doctrine of discovery, you know, taking land of non-Christian people when Christian people enter those lands, so automatically deeded back to the sponsoring, you know, nation, in this case France, the Vatican, enslaving those people and taking all their worldly goods.
00:35:55.190 -->
00:36:02.150Well, the Onondaga figured this out pretty quick, you know, because they were amassing weapons in this fort.
00:36:02.150 -->
00:36:05.860And all this, and eight months 18 days, the Jesuits were amassing weapons.
00:36:05.900 -->
00:36:07.807Yeah, the Jesuits were amassing weapons.
00:36:08.460 -->
00:36:09.644And what's the story?
00:36:09.644 -->
00:36:10.648Some little.
00:36:10.708 -->
00:36:20.425A little French boy befriended the local Onondaga and shared with them that there's a stash of weapons under the altar, so he kind of leaked.
00:36:20.425 -->
00:36:22.530You know what was going on.
00:36:22.530 -->
00:36:32.090So I guess the Haudenosaunee went and, as Lauren said, they told the Jesuits they had asked them to leave prior.
00:36:32.090 -->
00:36:40.728They were not leaving, so apparently at this date and time they took his hand and chopped off one of their fingers and said we mean business, you need to leave.
00:36:40.728 -->
00:36:47.288And apparently they left like the middle of the night and that was in 1658.
00:36:47.288 -->
00:36:47.829Yeah.
00:36:49.822 -->
00:36:53.150And this does not appear in the Jesuit relations.
00:36:53.150 -->
00:36:53.431However.
00:36:53.451 -->
00:36:54.494Of course not Right.
00:36:55.061 -->
00:36:57.449No textual resource for this at all.
00:36:57.449 -->
00:37:25.766There's a wampum belt that talks about and this is an example of oral tradition which I think is a kind of strange way to frame what a wampum belt he does, you know, and so you can juxtapose the Jesuit relations story, which is, you know, those lousy Mohawks were stirring stuff up and then we had to get out of town really quick and we got them all drunk and then they you know totally different story, you know.
00:37:27.202 -->
00:37:31.648Do you need help catching up on today's topic or do you want to learn more about the resources mentioned?
00:37:31.648 -->
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00:37:43.572 -->
00:37:45.608And now back to the conversation.
00:37:46.961 -->
00:37:58.630One of the reasons that the Onondaga really wanted this center transformed is that the French fort had told this Jesuit friendly story.
00:37:58.630 -->
00:38:07.873And what we did, because it closed, what we did was we transformed the story to emphasize Haudenosaunee values.
00:38:07.873 -->
00:38:11.088Haudenosaunee values instead of history.
00:38:11.088 -->
00:38:30.125And I'd be interested in what you as a historian, because from our point of view we couldn't be a museum because the council just said, you know, museums are just repositories of stolen goods, so we can't do that.
00:38:30.125 -->
00:38:48.967So then we had to be a center and we had to organize it around, you know, teaching people values of the Haudenosaunee rather than a kind of anthropological or historical kind of approach.
00:38:49.800 -->
00:38:55.750And that's how we develop this narrative, sandy, and I largely develop this narrative.
00:38:55.750 -->
00:39:05.000But you wouldn't understand the Jesuit story without first exploring those values of Scano, for example.
00:39:05.000 -->
00:39:11.233Peace can only be attained when human beings are in proper relationship to the natural world.
00:39:11.233 -->
00:39:24.851These are ancient values, the great law of peace, the Thanksgiving address, and all of that I kind of explain or explore in the book.
00:39:24.851 -->
00:39:33.971But then when you have that, you can start that kind of archival historical work.
00:39:33.971 -->
00:39:38.920And it was through this what we call the two row wampum methodology.
00:39:38.920 -->
00:40:02.920This was the original treaty from 1613 in Albany, that we were able to create a kind of a method by which we could validate each other and the reasons for why we were doing, you know, this work at the Scano Center yeah yeah yeah, the two row you know talks
00:40:03.039 -->
00:40:11.811about parallel paths, where the Dutch would sail in their ship and then the Haudenosaunee in their canoe, without interfering with one another, down the river of life.
00:40:11.811 -->
00:40:16.155And so I always emphasize the river of life was beyond comprehension for the Dutch.
00:40:16.155 -->
00:40:24.692Because look at our environment, you know, because our Tata Dao says peace can only be obtained when you're in proper relationship with the natural world.
00:40:24.692 -->
00:40:32.114So there isn't like when Christianity came in, it forced these dichotomies of good and evil, black and white.
00:40:32.114 -->
00:40:33.505They weren't interactional.
00:40:33.505 -->
00:40:40.313They were opposing forces, which was a setup for, like warfare, because that's what they did when they came here.
00:40:40.313 -->
00:40:48.231So you're talking about identity and you're dealing with the perfectionists of the British and they're drinking tea.
00:40:48.231 -->
00:40:49.974And then the savage Indians.
00:40:49.974 -->
00:41:01.045Again, that's that stark history lesson we've all been taught, you know, and both sides are just perceptions, they're not interactional.
00:41:01.900 -->
00:41:08.751You know we're in opposition to one another, and I think that's what your you know dad is trying to do.
00:41:08.751 -->
00:41:11.188Is these identity politics.
00:41:11.188 -->
00:41:12.686They're all false identities.
00:41:12.686 -->
00:41:18.293People are trying to latch on to their preconstructions, fantasies.
00:41:18.293 -->
00:41:25.233We're all living in some kind of an imposed fantasy on this planet.
00:41:27.025 -->
00:41:28.418And trying to get back to something.
00:41:28.438 -->
00:41:29.061I guess, how do we?
00:41:30.023 -->
00:41:31.007break through it.
00:41:31.507 -->
00:41:32.920Well it's it's used to me.
00:41:32.920 -->
00:41:35.590It's like you know, you've got two things going on right.
00:41:35.590 -->
00:41:52.744One is the sort of you know, the 30,000 foot life of ethics and morals and values and sort of the ways in which we live, and and the other is the sort of very real kinds of social differentiations, that and conflicts that just happen right among people.
00:41:52.744 -->
00:41:54.668And how do you sort of navigate those things?
00:41:54.668 -->
00:42:03.630Where's the moment where you're in conflict and you reach up and claim your values as being the ground of your, as opposed to like, no, I just want your land, I'm going to take it right.
00:42:03.650 -->
00:42:11.914Well, I think I think that's what I wanted to, because values is a is a is slippery concept, because value can also be valuation.
00:42:11.914 -->
00:42:22.811Right, it can be, you know, monetary valuation or gift economy or whatever kind of economies that you're working, operating in that have very real world consequences, you know.
00:42:22.811 -->
00:42:35.043So I tend to think of ceremonies, for example, as gift economies, you know, or expressions of value exchange that's going on, you know, in between various beings.
00:42:35.043 -->
00:42:42.161So so values, it can be that 30,000, you know, can be those moral ethics and values, that.
00:42:42.161 -->
00:42:46.927But it also in in, you know, a monetary economy.
00:42:46.927 -->
00:42:52.795You know value is exchanged and the meaning of land is exchanged only monetarily.
00:42:52.795 -->
00:42:59.088So that becomes a different way of value, kind of context.
00:42:59.088 -->
00:43:03.969But anyway, I just wanted to make that case because that kind of connects the two that you were making.
00:43:05.382 -->
00:43:07.891Well, it's also the moment where history has to creep back in.
00:43:07.913 -->
00:43:18.327I mean Well you know, it's also the moment where history has to creep back in, right, I mean, you know there's a lot of tribal folks who would say, oh, the great law of peace looks great for you all, but for us it means join or die.
00:43:18.327 -->
00:43:20.746Right, I mean, we think about the ways.
00:43:20.746 -->
00:43:33.630So the question you could imagine a question that said how is it that in some of these early treaty negotiations the Haudenosaunee are taking the liberty of trading away other people's lands, right?
00:43:33.630 -->
00:43:39.088Or claiming domination over other people, claiming people who are minor parts of the Confederacy, right?
00:43:39.088 -->
00:43:41.492I mean, so is that?
00:43:41.492 -->
00:43:55.266Do we then have to turn to a historical explanation for that and say well, you know, this is part and parcel of the kind of early colonial period, right, and the moment of the fur trade and the competition that happens there over land and territory and trade.
00:43:55.266 -->
00:44:08.030And suddenly, right, and that's the point at which the 30,000-foot question about sort of values and transcendent truths becomes really quite difficult, because on the ground people are having to navigate other kinds of things.
00:44:08.652 -->
00:44:10.679I see what you mean yeah, people are having to navigate other kinds of things.
00:44:10.679 -->
00:44:19.885I see what you mean, yeah, so how do you use oral tradition right in a historical context?
00:44:19.885 -->
00:44:26.086I mean, it's a very general question, but you know what is your thinking around.
00:44:26.086 -->
00:44:28.652What constitutes oral tradition?
00:44:28.652 -->
00:44:33.663You know in these Native American histories that we need to develop.
00:44:35.106 -->
00:44:37.530Yeah, it's a really hard question, you know.
00:44:37.530 -->
00:44:39.434I mean you can.
00:44:39.434 -->
00:44:46.050So I differentiate between oral tradition and oral history and between memory.
00:44:46.050 -->
00:44:52.992You know these kinds of things, you know I did a whole series of interviews with my dad, for example.
00:44:52.992 -->
00:45:03.45160 hours worth of stuff, that's memory work that blurs into some oral history, right, that he was hearing from his father and from his aunts and stuff.
00:45:03.451 -->
00:45:06.668But then there's also older stories that are part of that.
00:45:06.719 -->
00:45:23.329That kind of take you further back into time where suddenly the kind of I mean I'm a historian enough to believe that like there's not a clean, clear trend, you know, translation across these things across long stretches of time, but there is a continuity across time, you know for sure.
00:45:23.931 -->
00:45:35.931And so we imagine the ways in which oral tradition, um, you know, continues to sort of hold truths and values and stories and memories and all kinds of things which have a ton of legitimacy, you know, to them.
00:45:35.931 -->
00:45:39.228You know, is it clear that we should read them literally?
00:45:39.228 -->
00:45:48.284To me it's not totally clear that we should, right, as opposed to things which you know kind of fit within that oral history category, which I'm much more interested in.
00:45:48.284 -->
00:45:51.329Sort of thinking like this is not conceptual knowledge.
00:45:51.329 -->
00:46:03.771This is actual historical knowledge, and we do what we do as historians, which is we cross reference these kinds of things and we sort of imagine, like is there a moment where someone else's oral history is going to confirm or problematize this?
00:46:03.771 -->
00:46:08.547Is there a moment where a documentary or archive is going to actually do those kinds of things?
00:46:08.586 -->
00:46:19.391I mean, there was a moment, you know, in this field 20 years ago where, you know, a group of younger scholars said, like you cannot use any written document, it's a document of the colonizer, and so on.
00:46:19.431 -->
00:46:28.686It's like, well, that makes it really hard to actually make progress on land claims and things like that, right, if you can't use those things, if everything has to be oral.
00:46:28.686 -->
00:46:44.809You know oral kinds of tradition and you know, and what you find is like, I think, a lot of moments where oral tradition starts to converge through its repetition, right, that the things become simpler and simpler, right, where, in fact, there's a ton of complexity attached to this stuff.
00:46:44.809 -->
00:47:01.672I've been working with these winter Plains, winter counts, you know, for the last year or so, and if you go through this, you know kind of the many counts, year after year after year, what you see is this incredibly complicated world, right, that was going to be transferred his historical knowledge through oral stories, right Through stories.
00:47:01.672 -->
00:47:10.780Here's a little, you know, picture of crows falling from the sky, you know, and what is it?
00:47:10.780 -->
00:47:16.742Oh, that was the winter and it was so cold that birds froze while they were flying you know, and then what are the stories that are attached to that right?
00:47:17.445 -->
00:47:38.706So you know, if you think about, like, what that universe of stories must have looked like, right for the keepers of those counts who would sit there and sort of swap these kinds of things and tell those stories, you know, I mean this was an incredibly complex historical record right, incredibly complicated kind of thing, and each story generates other stories.
00:47:38.706 -->
00:47:44.440Oh, I remember in that year when that happened, this other thing happened, or these other people you know had this other thing you know.
00:47:44.440 -->
00:47:53.525So there's all kinds of interesting stuff happening, you know, in that universe, all kinds of interesting stuff happening, you know, in in that universe.
00:47:53.525 -->
00:48:00.565But I think you know what happens in our contemporary moment, you know, is sometimes we're able to sort of you know, um, connect up to that, to those worlds.
00:48:00.565 -->
00:48:09.411Other times we're ending up sort of just repeating things that everybody says all the time right and that's the way that orality oftentimes work.
00:48:09.452 -->
00:48:13.193It's like I heard this thing, I heard this thing, I heard this thing, I heard this thing, I heard this thing, and now I'm going to distill it.
00:48:13.193 -->
00:48:20.827Like, for example, the contemporary boarding school discussion to me has simplified, has narrowed.
00:48:20.827 -->
00:48:22.184You know that.
00:48:22.184 -->
00:48:36.380You know you can hear today people who were in boarding schools in the 1960s repeating tropes that were sort of Carlisle 1890, 1890, 1890, right.
00:48:36.619 -->
00:48:41.987You know, as Brenda Child has argued right, boarding schools become kind of a metaphor for all the bad shit you know.
00:48:41.987 -->
00:48:58.181So, which isn't to say that, like, those memories are not true memories, right, but they are also part and parcel of this kind of other world right of things which become metaphoric, tropic, shared kinds of you know kinds of memories.
00:48:58.181 -->
00:49:22.500Um, so you know, I I just think it's, it's, this is the world in which we sort of live when we're going to deal with oral tradition, that that we should just admit it's a complicated world, just like being a human being in the world is a complicated thing, just like any kind of knowledge of the past where our memories and our collective memories get blurred up and messed up and complicated, right.
00:49:22.500 -->
00:49:35.414I think to sort of valorize this and say that it is pure and unbroken and unquestionable just doesn't make sense to me.
00:49:35.519 -->
00:49:39.322Well, we're talking about values, though In oral tradition.
00:49:39.322 -->
00:49:46.514If it's this connection to the natural world, then you're paying attention to these cycles.
00:49:46.514 -->
00:49:51.644You're talking about the birds falling and freezing, so you're going to watch the cycles, not the birds.
00:49:51.644 -->
00:49:57.161You're going to watch the flocks and take in consideration the weather.
00:49:57.161 -->
00:50:01.733It's more complex History, the recorded history.
00:50:01.733 -->
00:50:05.744They came over here under the doctrines of discovery to take land.
00:50:05.744 -->
00:50:11.094So that's the motivation and how it was all written and it was a different orientation.
00:50:11.639 -->
00:50:24.760But if truly indigenous sensibility is understanding that peace can only be obtained when you're in proper relationship with the natural world, food will be continued to be provided.
00:50:24.760 -->
00:50:28.766You know you're going to get in sync with these cycles.
00:50:28.766 -->
00:50:33.835It's just a different orientation and we've been extracted from participating in that.
00:50:33.835 -->
00:50:44.465So I think, like your father got us through people, through this horrific period of domination, we're not back there yet.
00:50:44.465 -->
00:50:48.900We're not allowed to live in balance with this earth because the waters have been polluted.
00:50:48.900 -->
00:50:52.992There's been dams constructed on almost every single territory.
00:50:52.992 -->
00:51:00.440You know, if we don't start breaking down these dams and start freeing the earth, we're not going to become freed either.
00:51:00.440 -->
00:51:06.333So we're talking about systems and just ways of thinking and being human.
00:51:06.800 -->
00:51:14.114You can't totally put it in either camp right now because we've all been so disrupted, but things have to change.
00:51:15.581 -->
00:51:34.862This is where you get a distinction between sort of life practice in a spiritual world right, of which there are many, many sort of historical accounts right, those kinds of things, and the practice of history right, which is a different.
00:51:34.862 -->
00:51:36.168These are different things, right.
00:51:36.168 -->
00:51:39.630I mean one is to sort of theorize, a kind of way of being.
00:51:39.630 -->
00:51:42.568Another is trying to figure out what happened, you know.
00:51:43.561 -->
00:51:43.942And those are.
00:51:44.163 -->
00:51:47.481you know they ask fundamentally different kinds of questions, right.
00:51:48.382 -->
00:51:58.030I mean the thing about wampum and I think wampum is a good example for this, but I think there are other indigenous media.
00:51:58.030 -->
00:52:03.487But the wampum belts have their own kind of status, they have their own kind of living presence.
00:52:03.487 -->
00:52:34.509And so, for example, when wampum belts are returned, peabody Museum at Harvard has dozens of wampum belts and we were there 25 years ago looking at these wampum belts and I collected all the photographs of these wampums and I showed Tadadaho Sid Hill when we came home and he said you know, know, I was flashing through the different ones and he said we've been looking for that one, you know, and it was.
00:52:34.509 -->
00:52:35.311You know it was.
00:52:35.311 -->
00:52:55.811It was collected by p buddy in, I'll say, 19, at least 100 years ago, um, and and yet that wampum belt has a place, a situation, where that was kind of extracted from its use.
00:52:55.811 -->
00:52:56.985It was a condolence belt.
00:52:56.985 -->
00:53:04.369So in the ceremony of raising their leadership they used these wampums Loyani.
00:53:05.601 -->
00:53:11.668They used these belts and strings and it has to do with condolence.
00:53:11.668 -->
00:53:20.914But then the return of those wampum belts that have been treated with arsenic and all kinds of things.
00:53:20.914 -->
00:53:38.990They have to reassemble the meaning of some of those things and they do this through dreams and other, you know, activities, ceremonies and things like that, because the wampum itself has some living presence.
00:53:38.990 -->
00:53:52.291So again, the complicated nature of what we're calling oral tradition, you know, and having people who know about wampum, who read wampum.
00:53:52.291 -->
00:53:57.608You know I can't read wampum, you know I only just sort of communicate.
00:53:57.648 -->
00:54:01.480what other people have said like what Oren tells me about, like wampum belts.
00:54:01.639 -->
00:54:03.266It's such an intricate part.
00:54:03.266 -->
00:54:07.451Each title holder has a specific wampum to identify their title.
00:54:07.451 -->
00:54:13.766They're not elected chiefs, they're Loyani representative, representative of the Klan, and it's a whole other process.
00:54:13.766 -->
00:54:17.951And this process is recognized at the UN.
00:54:17.951 -->
00:54:25.791Their governance goes pre-contact and still recognized by the UN and the US.
00:54:26.500 -->
00:54:28.786Yeah, and so what Sandy's talking about?
00:54:28.806 -->
00:54:51.831It's a different way to go about their deliberations and consensus that this kind of ongoing interrelationship with the natural world is not something that is, you know, just happens, like you know, in a discrete way, but is also active in their recovering their past, you know, and where they should go into the future.
00:54:51.831 -->
00:55:03.023So I don't know, I mean, I think this idea of oral tradition is just such a misnomer in many ways.
00:55:03.023 -->
00:55:08.786I think more in terms of religion, you think more in terms of history, but it's like, you know, there's a lot there.
00:55:09.068 -->
00:55:14.086Yeah, well, maybe that the word tradition is kind of the thing that's leading us astray, right?
00:55:14.186 -->
00:55:23.862I mean, yeah, that, um you know, tradition is always uh you know uh reliant upon a pastness right, the possibility of staticness, right that knowledge doesn't change.
00:55:24.304 -->
00:55:32.431I mean, I think repatriation is a great example of the ways that knowledge actually does change and practice does change and things have continuities to the past.
00:55:32.431 -->
00:55:41.135But, like you know, lots and lots of tribal nations you know who had a traditional ceremony for the return of ancestors.
00:55:41.135 -->
00:55:54.150Like people have to, people now recreate out of old content and new things, looking forward to the future, right, I mean, it's a living tradition and I think that's the thing that's most important about it.
00:55:54.150 -->
00:56:11.221And it may just be that the way that this debate got framed sort of for me as a historian it kind of leads to a particular set of critiques and contemplations right as opposed to sort of the ways that it might work differently for you as a religious studies scholar, right, I mean?
00:56:12.003 -->
00:56:14.431or people who are actually on the ground doing practice.
00:56:15.041 -->
00:56:16.887Right, right, I think.
00:56:16.887 -->
00:56:17.869Well, there's a lot there.
00:56:17.869 -->
00:56:34.443And then, finally, I'd just like to talk a little bit about where you see Native Studies going, because I see it kind of opening up into a lot of different kind of venues.
00:56:34.443 -->
00:57:08.172There's a lot of possibilities now, and one of the things we're working on is the 250 celebration of Declaration of Independence, of, you know, Declaration of Independence, and we've been selected the Scano Center as a site for the Smithsonian traveling exhibit called Voices and Votes, because there's nothing there that you know connects the founding of Western democracy to the Haudenosaunee, which has been formally acknowledged.
00:57:08.172 -->
00:57:13.603So I think that's kind of where our work is developing too.
00:57:15.152 -->
00:57:28.701And then also on the English side, when we were looking at these documents, yeah, I think there's surprisingly big interest coming from Europe into what's going on in America.
00:57:28.701 -->
00:57:46.699I mean this conference being held here in Buda, indigenous practitioners and scholars all coming together and they have a whole host of agendas, different kinds of indigenous peoples coming together.
00:57:46.719 -->
00:57:48.708People are longing for something you know.
00:57:48.708 -->
00:57:49.329I'd just be curious.
00:57:49.369 -->
00:57:59.422People are longing for something I mean clearly something is wrong and there's definite rise of fascism and domination in the world.
00:57:59.422 -->
00:58:00.809It's happening all over the world.
00:58:00.809 -->
00:58:07.920People are, I think, in shock and they're trying to find a different way of living on the earth.
00:58:07.920 -->
00:58:11.550You know, maybe they're looking to find a different way of living on the earth.
00:58:11.550 -->
00:58:22.775Maybe they're looking to the United States, because the indigenous people there went through this genocide much more recently and retain the memory of what happened better than they can.
00:58:23.277 -->
00:58:26.914Yeah, so I'm wondering what you think of where we're headed.
00:58:27.074 -->
00:58:35.443you know, in this, in this area yeah well it's quite a complicated question, right and um.
00:58:35.443 -->
00:58:38.652It's simple, it's a simple question, simple question where are we going?
00:58:38.652 -->
00:58:44.512So you know, I, my survey class, is a native studies class as opposed to a native history class.
00:58:44.512 -->
00:58:48.762Oh, okay, and I you know, so it's sort of for me it's worth sort of separating out those things.
00:58:48.989 -->
00:59:23.144There's some great stuff going on in Native American history right now, primarily economic analysis, and this goes back, I think, to the, you know, bobby Lee, tristan Atone, landgraab University's study, which was a huge, you know, giant database, 187,000 records, you know, and that fantastic article, followed by a fantastic article by Emily Connolly, you know, called Fiduciary Colonialism, which really sort of says, you know, look, we used to go to the BIA records and military records.
00:59:23.144 -->
00:59:24.326What if we went to Treasury?
00:59:24.326 -->
00:59:34.981You know, the Treasury records and all those things which are, you know, in treaties are framed as annuities which I've always, you know, read annuity, okay, it's plows, it's cattle, it's, you know, it's like.
00:59:34.981 -->
00:59:39.880No, no, these are actual financial instrument annuities and the management of those.
00:59:40.210 -->
00:59:56.855There's a moment, right, at which, you know, the federal government stops delivering wagon loads of specie, you know, and starts saying we're setting aside a trust fund, a big pool of capital for you, a trust fund, and we will pay you the annuities off of this right, the interest off of this.
00:59:56.855 -->
01:00:04.659So, you know, the management of that money turns out to be one of the most important sort of facets of American slash, Indian history.
01:00:04.659 -->
01:00:10.376Right, the southern states that go bankrupt after the panic of 1837, they're all bailed out by Indian money.
01:00:10.376 -->
01:00:15.253Right, their infrastructure is all built with Indian money through these loan instruments.
01:00:15.514 -->
01:00:25.730So this is complicated economic history, you know Michael Wittgen's sort of, you know, political economy of plunder Dave Beck has a new book coming.
01:00:25.750 -->
01:00:51.681So this sort of financial analysis right, where we've always said, you know, the wealth of the United States was built around slavery, you know, and the extraction of labor from black bodies, this is true, true, but we've not paid much attention to the ways We've always sort of known like Indian land, yes, was, you know, converted to property and et cetera, et cetera, but like people are now really crunching the numbers and doing the on the ground fiscal analysis Right.
01:00:51.681 -->
01:01:13.911So this is like I think this incredibly booming kind of, or potentially booming kind of, area within American Indian history Right, right, to sort of figure those kinds of things out as well as the kind of work that everybody's been doing, you know, kind of either community-based kinds of stuff and community collaborative kind of work that everybody's been doing, you know kind of ether community-based kinds of stuff and community collaborative kind of work right where it's like what do communities need?
01:01:13.911 -->
01:01:17.061How, his, how can historians actually kind of help?
01:01:17.163 -->
01:01:17.925meet those needs.
01:01:17.925 -->
01:01:26.373So those kinds of things are really, you know, kind of important, as well as the kind of bigger views I think that many people you know are taking.
01:01:26.373 -->
01:01:41.661I mean, it's, I think, coincidence that like we've had three big, four big survey books, 600-page tomes Ned Blackhawk won the National Book Award Pekka Amalainen's survey, kathleen Duvall a book just came out, margaret Jacobs.
01:01:41.661 -->
01:01:47.800So people are writing big synthetic things that are trying to sort of reimagine and reposition the history.
01:01:47.882 -->
01:02:15.057So you know, and I see a kind of convergence too with, at least in in religious studies, a convergence with, um you know, white evangelical racism for example, uh, the rise of christian nationalism and how that connects to these larger questions of the foundations of of, you know, the United States and other kind of colonial outposts.
01:02:15.057 -->
01:02:28.798So you know, I do think there are, there are native academics working with some other, you know, non-natives around these kind of more and more urgent issues.
01:02:28.898 -->
01:02:30.956You know Well I think this is the other direction.
01:02:31.070 -->
01:02:32.556I mean so maybe three directions for me?
01:02:32.556 -->
01:02:33.594No, no, that's a.
01:02:33.594 -->
01:02:36.170I mean the second direction would be a sort of studies direction, right, yeah.
01:02:36.289 -->
01:02:37.652Which is like you know.
01:02:37.652 -->
01:02:40.916Now we've had Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs and a bunch of films.
01:02:40.996 -->
01:02:41.376Oh yeah.
01:02:41.396 -->
01:03:00.860You know, we've got sort of and it's always, you know, I, my dad, made this argument, other people have made this argument that Indians come and go on a cycle of about 20 years, and the question is whether in fact we've reached the tipping point where Native representation and Native production is actually.
01:03:00.860 -->
01:03:03.230Before these things came out, these people all trained themselves making YouTube videos and things like that.
01:03:03.230 -->
01:03:05.759They've seized the means of production which now anyone can do.
01:03:05.759 -->
01:03:13.123So is it a new world for sort of thinking about native media, and is it then that world part of a global indigenous world?
01:03:13.123 -->
01:03:18.541Right, that sort of plays into the political formations of the last 50, 60 kinds of years.
01:03:18.541 -->
01:03:24.952So I think there's a whole set of studies, dimensions that take us into literature, art, media, you know all of these.
01:03:25.432 -->
01:03:41.382So these things, I think, are right for a new generation of scholarship and then I'd say the third thing is the kind of the political situation of the now right phil, so agreeing with you on this, it's like you know, when you think about climate change, we think about fascism, right, and you know kind of hard right authoritarianism.
01:03:41.382 -->
01:03:53.965Native studies, native history, you know um, native sociology, you know all these things have always responded right, not only to the histories but to the contemporary political moment in which we're in.
01:03:54.186 -->
01:04:11.023And I think one of the things we're seeing here in norway is the ways that the green economy, which we can sit in the us and celebrate wind turbines, all we want, and we can see the ways that it completely is attacking sami people exactly right and left you left across all of these Scandinavian countries.
01:04:11.023 -->
01:04:18.581I mean there's a kind of hard slap in the face for me, kind of hearing the accounts of what wind energy is doing here.
01:04:20.251 -->
01:04:39.269So this is one of these moments where it's like, okay, we've got to deal with not just climate change in an abstract kind of way, but we've got to deal with what the alternative economies look like, what the green economies look like, what nuclear waste disposal looks like for those who want to go down the nuclear path, what lithium mining looks like for those who are building batteries, right, All of these different kinds of things.
01:04:39.269 -->
01:04:57.402And then I think on the political side you know it's there is a real question about, sort of like, what our field has to say to the kind of hard right turns that everybody is making exactly, you know, and it's more than just playing indian right.
01:04:57.443 -->
01:05:06.018I mean, it's this, it's, it's that that indigenous peoples are real practical resource.
01:05:06.018 -->
01:05:12.706You know, you know for a future, if we're to have a future right.
01:05:12.969 -->
01:05:23.643You know, if we were to go back to the doctrine of discovery and think about the ways that it makes its way into American politics through Johnson v McIntosh, the Cherokee cases.
01:05:23.643 -->
01:05:24.952You know these things.
01:05:24.952 -->
01:05:29.641I mean you know what you can see, is you know?
01:05:29.641 -->
01:05:35.099I mean, I think, of it this way right, indian folks show up in the constitution as separate, individual tribal nations.
01:05:35.099 -->
01:05:39.849Right, they're excluded, they're written into the constitution literally to be excluded from the constitution.
01:05:39.849 -->
01:05:42.956You get to the cherokee cases, which are weird.
01:05:43.197 -->
01:05:45.871I mean we should just admit how weird they are right I mean.
01:05:45.911 -->
01:05:47.896So marshall saw that they were weird too, too.
01:05:47.916 -->
01:05:49.240Yeah, I mean, they all saw it.
01:05:49.240 -->
01:05:50.795Joseph Story saw how weird they were Right.
01:05:50.929 -->
01:05:52.757Everybody on that court was like what are we doing?
01:05:52.777 -->
01:05:55.675Yeah, but they were also quite willing to invent new narratives.
01:05:55.675 -->
01:05:59.623Oh, they're all nomadic, they never own property, they're all roaming around, they invent stuff.
01:05:59.623 -->
01:06:04.056They just made it up right.
01:06:04.056 -->
01:06:05.438So you notice, you've got.
01:06:05.438 -->
01:06:10.224You've got the first case right, which really is the foundation for american property law right.
01:06:10.224 -->
01:06:14.815Then you got the second big one, which gives you domestic dependent nations, right.
01:06:14.815 -->
01:06:16.342Right, they're inside and they're outside.
01:06:16.342 -->
01:06:18.934Maybe they're not, maybe we have a trust responsibility right.
01:06:18.934 -->
01:06:25.117Then you get the third case that basically goes back to the indigenous constitute elements of the constitution and says like yeah, actually.
01:06:25.117 -->
01:06:49.284So really you get this interesting trust sovereignty kind of thing that emerges out of those cases and then is developed over time as the United sovereignty movements of you know.
01:06:49.284 -->
01:06:53.967I mean, you've got like an utterly unique political formation.
01:06:53.967 -->
01:06:55.574It's not like anywhere else in the world.
01:06:55.635 -->
01:07:10.561It's not like anywhere else in our history right it's this intensely interesting political kind of structure that, um you know, we we look back oftentimes and lament at how crazy it is right and how much it is wrapped up in domination.
01:07:10.561 -->
01:07:15.541But you know, I mean I spent time in Taiwan and Australia, you know kind of other places.
01:07:15.541 -->
01:07:17.371Indigenous people around the world.
01:07:17.371 -->
01:07:22.661They look over at the United States and go, damn, if I could have those treaties, if I could have that, could I?
01:07:22.661 -->
01:07:23.181Get a treaty.
01:07:23.181 -->
01:07:24.425How could I have that, could we?
01:07:25.630 -->
01:07:33.739So I mean it's also we're thinking about the ways that it is something right that we ought to kind of think about like well, how do we actually lean into this?
01:07:33.739 -->
01:07:40.826Do more with it, think about how it actually structures American politics in ways that no American politician will readily admit.
01:07:40.826 -->
01:07:48.103Yeah, use it Like we've got a four-part kind of, you know federal, state, local and tribal.
01:07:49.153 -->
01:07:52.382Or anti-Indian law, anti, yeah, exactly.
01:07:52.382 -->
01:07:55.393Federal anti-Indian law, except on Ndaga.
01:07:55.393 -->
01:08:01.840They don't fall under that federal Indian law case because they never violated the treaty.
01:08:01.840 -->
01:08:05.217Nothing was held in trust for them.
01:08:05.217 -->
01:08:09.233They never accepted any money from the federal government, nothing was held in trust for them.
01:08:09.253 -->
01:08:11.297They never accepted any money from the federal government.
01:08:11.317 -->
01:08:16.442That's why your dad said the clearest line back to the original relationship with the US was through Onondaga.
01:08:16.542 -->
01:08:20.447Yeah, and they have no BIA government.
01:08:20.949 -->
01:08:21.291No BIA government.
01:08:21.291 -->
01:08:36.649They meet with presidents and dignitaries all the time and whether that can serve as a model for how to get back to this I mean Orrin explained how they stayed out of keeping the BIA out of there.
01:08:36.791 -->
01:08:58.480Because it was the churches in the different territories that were talking to their parishioners to vote in this BIA government Because traditional, in the quotes those air quotes, you know we were talking about that the practitioners of this culture didn't vote because it was a foreign government coming into their territories.
01:08:58.480 -->
01:09:12.158So Onondaga also heard about this election, going up to vote in the BIA government and for the first time the traditional people went knocking on each other's doors, getting those churches and voted down.
01:09:12.158 -->
01:09:18.859And so that's how they kept the BIA out of Onondaga and then other territories across the nation.
01:09:18.859 -->
01:09:29.507You know it was voted in the BIA governments were voted in through those churches and after the fact many nations said we don't want it.
01:09:29.507 -->
01:09:31.412You know we should have done what you did.
01:09:31.412 -->
01:09:32.695How do we get it back?
01:09:32.695 -->
01:09:34.860And the US said too late, you voted us in.
01:09:35.322 -->
01:09:53.541Right yeah so then, yeah Well, I think you know the variation across Indian country, the sort of you know, I mean, and given all the troubles and hardships that are still present, right, I mean the stuff that is happening in Indian country is interesting and it's in many cases revolutionary and radical.
01:09:53.541 -->
01:09:56.315And it's interesting from a political kind of perspective.
01:09:56.315 -->
01:10:05.492And if we're going to imagine the sort of dissolution of the United States in some kind of weird way, right then we had to got to be thinking like how do we reimagine what happens next?
01:10:05.492 -->
01:10:06.193Right, what?
01:10:06.212 -->
01:10:06.432does that?
01:10:06.472 -->
01:10:06.853look like.
01:10:06.853 -->
01:10:22.305And you know, I mean, and I don't know, I'm not a political scientist, I don't think hard about this stuff, it's not exactly my jam, but it feels to me like this is one of those places where, if we're thinking about the future of Native Studies, we need to do some kind of good, hard thinking.
01:10:22.305 -->
01:10:23.346And people are doing it.
01:10:23.346 -->
01:10:24.317They are Right now About what the future looks like.
01:10:24.317 -->
01:10:26.681Yeah, they are Kind of right now, you know, about what the future looks like, yeah.
01:10:27.050 -->
01:10:36.284But this federal Indian law category is a real problem because if you're of the government, then how do you have treaties?
01:10:36.284 -->
01:10:40.740How are you sovereign if you're a compartment under the United.
01:10:40.740 -->
01:10:43.649States, Federal state, federal Indian law.
01:10:43.750 -->
01:10:45.275I mean, that's the dilemma.
01:10:45.275 -->
01:10:46.238Here it came later.
01:10:46.590 -->
01:10:48.556That's not how this country was formed.
01:10:48.556 -->
01:10:49.801I mean, that's the dilemma here.
01:10:49.801 -->
01:10:50.423That came later.
01:10:50.423 -->
01:10:53.230That's not how this country was formed First.
01:10:53.230 -->
01:11:00.338International treaties were between Indian nations and the US, and only Congress had to ratify any kind of land transaction or trade among states throughout the country.
01:11:00.671 -->
01:11:06.661That's the dilemma that the Sami have here, because they're essentially wards of whatever nation.
01:11:06.661 -->
01:11:08.729Well, they're referred wards of, you know whatever nation.
01:11:08.750 -->
01:11:12.720Well, they're referred wards of the US as well, the United States.
01:11:12.930 -->
01:11:19.863But yeah, but you know, the sovereignty issue then becomes a slippery one to some degree.
01:11:19.863 -->
01:11:24.690Right, you know to what degree are you under the United States, if they can?
01:11:24.711 -->
01:11:29.983work towards at every stage, trying to assimilate Indian nations into the context of the United States.
01:11:29.983 -->
01:11:33.381Can we go in reverse and separate from the US?
01:11:33.381 -->
01:11:36.779Why does it always have to move towards assimilation?
01:11:36.779 -->
01:11:38.302You know Right.
01:11:39.331 -->
01:11:46.979Well, you could argue really that I mean the sovereignty movements of the last decades have actually moved further away from worship and more towards.
01:11:47.140 -->
01:11:53.139I hope so right, you know so I think this is why it's an interesting moment.
01:11:53.391 -->
01:12:00.458The story of the 19th century is the extension of American jurisdiction, citizenship claims, all of these sorts of things.
01:12:00.458 -->
01:12:07.819What's interesting to me in the American context is usually the extension of citizenship is a good thing.
01:12:07.819 -->
01:12:09.698This is what every immigrant wants.
01:12:09.698 -->
01:12:12.219It's what the African-American movement was about.
01:12:12.219 -->
01:12:21.061But in fact for Native people it's actually quite a different thing, right, and it's the extension of, you know, surveillance, dominance, control, you know those kinds of things.
01:12:21.430 -->
01:12:33.461But that's part of our history and it's right there and you know, there's a few folks who managed to evade it perhaps but, most people not but the extension of sovereignty within a trust relationship, you know is.
01:12:33.461 -->
01:12:34.966Is this interesting?
01:12:34.966 -->
01:12:40.850It's a really interesting thing and I think you know far too americans don't know anything about it, right?
01:12:41.310 -->
01:12:45.001haven't thought about it and, like you know, I mean I just you know I'd see this with you.
01:12:45.041 -->
01:12:51.837Know you're at your kid's soccer match right and and you get these parents who are like, can I build a casino on my backyard?
01:12:51.837 -->
01:12:53.295It's like oh, my God.
01:12:53.395 -->
01:12:56.819Yeah, no, no, they have no idea why that was Right.
01:12:56.909 -->
01:12:58.798And then, of course, they think that's a funny question.
01:12:58.920 -->
01:13:09.606Yeah, so it's like it tells us exactly how much educating there is to be done out there before we can even imagine some sort of alternative futures out there before we could even imagine some sort of alternative futures.
01:13:10.711 -->
01:13:23.100Anand Daghoyani Dasgahi went to the world courts in Geneva in 1923 to protest the violation of the US violating all the treaties among Indian nations.
01:13:23.100 -->
01:13:28.577It was the very next year the US bestowed citizenship on Native nations.
01:13:28.577 -->
01:13:30.945Coincidence year the US bestowed citizenship on Native nations Coincidence.
01:13:30.985 -->
01:13:37.922Really yeah, right, well, and you know, canada was the evildoer in that whole exchange, right, I mean the Canadians.
01:13:37.922 -->
01:13:44.255This is the other thing that's so interesting to me is and we've seen this now with the boarding school you know kind of revelations.
01:13:44.255 -->
01:13:48.859People for so long have sat in the US and thought oh, you know, Canada, they've got their act together.
01:13:48.878 -->
01:13:52.282It's like actually not so much, not so much.
01:13:53.403 -->
01:14:08.774We visited the Pope last year Not the Pope, the third line to the Pope, sustituto Sustituto and several other people individually talking about the doctrines of discovery and they had made it.
01:14:08.774 -->
01:14:10.399The Pope had traveled to Canada.
01:14:10.659 -->
01:14:10.801Yeah.
01:14:11.011 -->
01:14:12.168That's why that came out of my mouth.
01:14:12.168 -->
01:14:24.981But we just ask them in the future, can you please come to Onondaga Nation territory, because they're not Christian representatives, they're not Catholic.
01:14:24.981 -->
01:14:31.176When you speak to Catholic tribal leaders, you're kind of talking to yourself, you know.
01:14:31.435 -->
01:14:31.615Yeah.
01:14:32.016 -->
01:14:34.878And we really need to move forward on all of this stuff.
01:14:34.979 -->
01:14:40.885So we're watching you you know Like yeah, risk management versus.
01:14:40.885 -->
01:14:42.367You know real progress.
01:14:48.949 -->
01:14:57.900Because we dealt with that at the Scano Center Before the Scano Center, when it was a French fort, the county was hiring Catholic Mohawks to give all the tours and during that period of time they wanted the Goodly to be canonized.
01:14:57.900 -->
01:15:00.559So they were all on board with the Jesuit story.
01:15:00.559 -->
01:15:04.430And I went in there and said, but this is not Onondaga Nation territory.
01:15:04.430 -->
01:15:06.979I mean, this is not Mohawk territory.
01:15:06.979 -->
01:15:17.810You're on Onondaga Nation territory, you can go west to Orysville where the shrine is there, and slowly they kind of moved out.
01:15:17.810 -->
01:15:19.594I felt that I could say that and I did.
01:15:19.594 -->
01:15:30.423But yeah, so it was pretty difficult breaking down that foothold the county had on that place telling that erroneous story.
01:15:30.829 -->
01:15:33.979Yeah, so all these yellow buses would come into the fort.
01:15:33.979 -->
01:15:37.992They'd learn about the Jesuit story and all that that's.
01:15:37.992 -->
01:15:40.479You know, sandy's childhood.
01:15:40.479 -->
01:15:42.273You know People come.
01:15:42.273 -->
01:15:43.939We still have the fort, you know.
01:15:43.939 -->
01:15:46.800It's still behind the Scano Center.
01:15:46.800 -->
01:15:53.989In fact, we had a papal bull burning ceremony there once in 2018.
01:15:53.989 -->
01:15:57.779That was very interesting, because they did that at like.
01:15:57.819 -->
01:15:58.502Standing Rock.
01:15:59.372 -->
01:16:03.854And I saw let's bring that guy out here and.
01:16:03.854 -->
01:16:09.753But now you know young kids are coming to the Scano Center, so they're learning a different kind of way of thinking.
01:16:09.753 -->
01:16:16.006You know young kids are coming to the Scano Center, so they're learning a different kind of way of thinking, you know, apart from that kind of colonial story that they were learning before.
01:16:16.006 -->
01:16:19.798So actually we're pretty proud of the fact that we were able to make.
01:16:19.798 -->
01:16:23.737You know it's a county facility and so it's county backed.
01:16:23.737 -->
01:16:28.520Onondaga Nation is helping out with.
01:16:28.520 -->
01:16:29.082You know.
01:16:29.850 -->
01:16:34.101Yeah, right, where the Great Laugh piece was founded at this lake.
01:16:35.951 -->
01:16:48.440So anyway, I think there are people are making different kinds of moves, you know, and I remain hopeful, you know.
01:16:48.440 -->
01:16:56.869Right it takes a continent and I remain hopeful in spite of the fact, in spite of the fact that it seems to be often times in the news moving in the wrong direction.
01:16:56.869 -->
01:17:00.519But you know, whatever, let's draw this to a close.
01:17:00.519 -->
01:17:10.001I want to thank you again, philip, for sitting here and being our guest on Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery.
01:17:10.329 -->
01:17:11.034It was my pleasure.
01:17:11.034 -->
01:17:11.881Thanks for having me.
01:17:12.270 -->
01:17:14.297Thank you, hope to see you again soon.
01:17:16.631 -->
01:17:19.900The producers of this podcast were Adam DJ Brett and Jordan Lone Colon.
01:17:19.900 -->
01:17:24.822Our intro and outro is social dancing music by Oris Edwards and Regis Cook.
01:17:24.822 -->
01:17:33.983This podcast is funded in collaboration with the Henry Luce Foundation, syracuse University and Hendricks Chapel and the Indigenous Values Initiative.
01:17:33.983 -->
01:17:38.980If you like this episode, please check out our website and make sure to subscribe.
