Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
S03E01- The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Doctrine of Christian Discovery an interview with Robert P. Jones
We begin this season with a gripping conversation with Robert P Jones, founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute. Together, we continue to highlight the layers of American history, challenging familiar narratives and revealing Indigenous, Haudensoaunee, influences. Jones takes us on a personal journey into his own evolution as a scholar, sharing how being honest about his family's connection to the settler colonialism project has informed his work and opened it to a wider audience.
Our discussion delves into the interconnected histories of Indigenous and Black communities, the Doctrine of Discovery, and the 1619 project, peering into the complex relationships between colonists and Indigenous peoples. We shed light on the teachings of Native Americans to the founding fathers and Europeans about equity, fraternity, and liberty—a fresh perspective on American history—while discussing the narrative shift towards Indigenous People's Day instead of Columbus Day.
But it's not just about rewriting history; it's about understanding the power of truth-telling from various perspectives. We highlight communities in Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Minnesota, who are using storytelling to bring alive their local histories and spotlight Jerome Little, the first African-American elected county commissioner in Tallahatchie County. The conversation also acknowledges the influence of writers like James Baldwin and Vine Deloria Jr. We would be remiss not to praise Robbie's New York Times bestselling book, 'Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future', which captures this ethos of understanding and rewriting history through personal narratives. Get ready to challenge what you think you know.
View the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org. Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.
Hello and welcome to the Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast. The producers of this podcast would like to acknowledge with respect the Onondaga Nation Firekeepers of the Hood Nishoni, the Indigenous Peoples on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University now stands. Now introducing your hosts, phil Arnold and Sandy Bigtree.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the Mapping of the Doctrine of Discovery podcast series. This is the first of season three. My name is Phil Up Arnold. I'm faculty in the religion department at Syracuse University, founding director of the Scano Great Law Peace Center and the president of Indigenous Values Initiative.
Speaker 3:And I'm Sandy Bigtree, a citizen of the Mohawk Nation at Akvasasni, and I'm on the academic collaborative of the Scano Great Law Peace Center and on the board of the Indigenous Values Initiative.
Speaker 2:Today, we are very privileged to have Robert P Jones as our guest. Robbie, as he likes to be called, is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, in Washington DC. A leading scholar and commenter on religion and politics, jones writes regularly on politics, culture and religion for the Atlantic time and the religion news service. He is frequently featured in major national media such as MSNBC, cnn, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post and others. He holds a PhD in religion from Emory University and an M Div from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of White Too Long the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won the 2021 American Book Award, and the end of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawmire Award in Religion. He writes a regular substack newsletter at robertpjonesubstackcom. His new book, which will be the featured topic of the conversation today, is the Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path Toward a Shared American Future. Welcome, robbie, and thanks for coming. Thanks.
Speaker 4:I'm glad to be here, looking forward to the conversation.
Speaker 2:I'd like to start with that PhD in religion at Emory. We too at Syracuse University train religion graduate students and PhDs in religion. It's an uphill climb. We have a very modest graduate program on, like Emory or Chicago or the other big places. One of the things that I think we're known for is less sort of the academic elements in the study of religion and more of an engaged scholarship or, if not, an activist scholarship. I think that has served us pretty well.
Speaker 2:You're a unique person in the world of religion. You're someone who is a public intellectual, an engaged scholar. That's not the usual path of graduate students. I wonder if you could just talk briefly To give our graduate students some heart in this difficult time when religious studies is really not valued the same as some other areas of the university. We're still fighting for the importance of the academic study of religion, not the training of ministers or whomever in religion, but the critical study of religion in the academy. I think you're someone, more than others on this podcast, that can speak to that. I wanted to give you some time for that.
Speaker 4:Yeah Well, thanks, it's been an interesting journey, I think. For me, as you know, most graduate programs sounds like Syracuse. One is not quite like. So. Most graduate programs teach you to be fairly detached from the scholarship. You write in third person, you don't write in first person. If you ever use the word I write in a piece, it gets stricken from the record.
Speaker 4:Emery wasn't so strict on that, but there was this sense of objectivity, detachment of course, objectivity and at least the idea of putting your preconceived things to the side and letting them at least be in conversation with maybe new things that are. You know that research reveals is important, although I'm not one that thinks true objectivity is possible. We all bring our things, our past, our prejudices, all of that to the scholarship that we, not only to the scholarship that we do, but even to the subjects that we choose right. That's always a challenge that we always have to kind of think through. But I would say that my own work has evolved a bit to be more personal over time and so if you just look at the last three books, I'll not take a lot of time here. But I moved into writing trade books out of the kind of academic university press world into writing for trade presses because I wanted to write for a more general audience. And what I found over time is that to do that effectively I needed to write in a more engaging way, and the best way to do that was to kind of be honest about my placement in the story and what I had at stake and what brought me to the research. And I think I've gradually done more of that as I've written.
Speaker 4:So the first trade book was a book called the End of White Christian America and it was really about the changing demographics in the country. So a lot of demographic work there. I told a little bit of my own story there. But then the next book, called White Too Long the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, was really about a third memoir and that was the first time that I really thought, ok, I've got to be honest about why I care about this topic, what I think is at stake both personally and for the country, and write it that way.
Speaker 4:And so I had a lot of my own family stories, including my own family's connections to the whole American project of settler colonialism and how my European, mostly British Christian family fit into that narrative, and that was really a sea change, I think, from my writing and really I think opened up a whole different audience for the writing that I think sometimes academic writing doesn't reach and I've kind of continued that and in this book I have. A third of the book is about Mississippi, which is my home state, where I try to unpack that history and try to also be honest about having grown up in there, gone to public schools, had my college education at Mississippi College, thinking about what I was and wasn't taught in those settings and what that means. That's relevant, especially what I was not taught about American history.
Speaker 3:Well, it certainly brings it to life, and you're such a gifted writer. I really enjoyed reading these horribly dark stories, if that makes any sense. But yeah, I can remember vividly third grade, first introduction to history books. I was just horrified because there was no place for me in any of that history. If we can't relate to it, I think we're missing a vast percentage of our population being engaged in this process.
Speaker 2:Right. And of course, prri is known for your well-known pollster in religion politics. But anyone who reads these books White Too Long or the Hidden Roots of White Supremacy they're going to also learn that you're a master storyteller and your own narrative is there, but it doesn't interfere with the larger history that you're wanting to tell and examine critically. So I really do appreciate that. But how do those things develop in you, those two different strands, the mathematician and the storyteller?
Speaker 4:Well, as you know, but your listeners probably don't nobody's looked at my bio that carefully. But my undergrad degrees in computer science and math, and so I came out of that, came at the work, I think, through this very left brain, linear thinking kind of thing. But I was also a math major that went to seminary. So, and religion at its heart, it's narrative, it's stories. It's narrative. I mean you take the Christian tradition, I mean the first thing in the Jewish tradition on which it's based, you have the first book of the Christian Bible. The first book of the Torah is a story. It's a Genesis story, it's a creation myth. So it begins there.
Speaker 2:At least one story, maybe two, maybe three.
Speaker 4:And that's important too, right, because it preserves the plurality of stories, right, and it builds out of what was originally a narrative tradition. That gets written down much, much later and you get all of the ambiguity that you get with oral tradition things. Then they get put into text and kind of frozen in the Christian tradition. But so I think I've always been attracted to the stories and history and it's just taken me a while, I think, in my professional life to kind of pull them, you know, to pull them together and to figure out how to write in a way that you know not only draws on the data that PRI produces, but I also even think about that. And even in a paragraph that has percent signs sprinkled through it, it's telling a story, right, and you're using numbers, but you really are still trying to tell a story, to make it really concrete.
Speaker 4:When we get data back from a big national survey and most of our surveys will survey 5,000 people they may have a hundred different questions in them. So that means that when we get back is actually a grid, a database that has 5,000 rows, one row for each respondent in the survey, by a hundred columns for every answer every 5,000 person gave. So what? Your job as a social scientist is to look at that grid of numbers and to tell a story, all right. To look through the patterns, to look at what you see as recurrent patterns and what makes sense, and it's absolutely a storytelling endeavor, as much as the hardcore quant folks may wanna pretend. No, we're just kind of putting the data from the thing on the page, but you're always selecting which lens do you bring to it, which groups are you looking at, what rises to the four and the data guides what. You can't just tell any story from that data, but there's certainly multiple stories you could tell.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's fantastic. I really appreciated that one graph I think it's at the very end of the book pretty much Like what people think about the they might not know the term doctrine of discovery, but they do know what you're talking about. Right, you know that this is. I can't remember exactly what the polling question is, but it's like that America was destined to be a white Christian nation, something like that, and that, to me, is a story. I mean that graph right there that sort of reveals some.
Speaker 4:I want you to know it was great restraint on my part. I only have two charts in this book and they're both at the end, but that's right. And so we crafted that question as a way of trying to explicitly knowing the history of the doctrine of discovery. We crafted that question trying to say, well, look, is it a stretch to say that these 15th century documents still hold any sway in American consciousness? And so one way to find out is to ask about the core idea. And that core idea was whether America was designated by God to be a kind of promised land for European Christians where they could set an example for the rest of the world.
Speaker 4:That's the vision, that's the core vision of the doctrine of discovery. And so when we asked about it, yeah, I was. I kind of knew that it did just from watching American politics. But you can see at the data, it's about three in 10 Americans that agree with that vision of America, and it's a majority of white evangelical Protestants the group that I grew up being a member of and it's a majority of Republicans, self-identified Republicans that agree with that statement.
Speaker 4:So it tells you something about why it's still not just a kind of dusty old historical fact, but something that's quite live in determining the future of the country.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that there's a strong presence right now in trying to protect these origin stories, of instance in this country. And, as you had talked about, the so-called Indian problem and the Negro quote problem. If people dig deeper they will come to understand both are connected to the white Christian problem, which goes back to the doctrines of discovery, and your whole book kind of revolves around that theme and addressing all of that.
Speaker 2:And so for so long those two problems have been separate, those two constituencies really haven't been talking with one another. African-american people and indigenous or Native American people really haven't brought their sources of oppression together in some way. That is revealing of the history of the United States.
Speaker 3:So that's what I think is very important about this You've been able to do that. You begin this conversation and connecting these two.
Speaker 2:Yeah, can you talk? More about that I mean it's you very gently kind of deal with 1619 project and those kinds of folks that are doing some really important work but who we have not really been engaged with. Just put it that way, personal terms and then move it into the doctrine of discovery, which kind of is a zoom out, I think a little bit on the whole issue.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Well, that's the way I think about it too. I mean, I think about this as kind of just widening the aperture, if you're thinking kind of like a photography metaphor or painting on a bigger canvas or thinking kind of an art. I used to collect postage stamps and I remember when I think of 1776, I think of a particular postage stamp and I think it's good because it's small right. So there's little postage stamp and it's all the white guys in Philadelphia and their colonial finery with their kind of white knee socks and their quill pens, kind of awkwardly posed around a table signing the Declaration of Independence. And I think the gift that the 1619 project did was, at a kind of broader cultural level. It's like zoomed out, as you said, and kind of said no, no, no, we got to come back bigger. And they also gave us a different image. I think that's important Because, again, we do think in images and stories and the bigger image.
Speaker 4:If you remember the New York Times, the original thing that it published was not the white guys at that table in Philadelphia, but it was a vast ocean, was the image, and it was this kind of monochromatic, kind of ominous looking, dark ocean, gray sky, and then the other image that gave us was a single ship, right, and it wasn't the Mayflower, it was a single ship bringing kidnapped Africans who were destined for enslavement in the British colonies in 1619.
Speaker 4:So that's a different, very different vision, right, and I think if I'm learning anything and trying to do something different in the book, it's actually taking it even one step further, because the thing that kind of came crashing on my own consciousness, and largely from reading Indigenous scholars, was the realization that well, man, by the time 1619 rolls around, there's more than a century of European Indigenous contact that's unaccounted for in that picture.
Speaker 4:So you really have to kind of take it back even further to really take it back to. I argue that a good time to take it back to is 1493 in the book, which is the year Columbus goes back after his first encounter here and it's also the year that that papal bull, intercatera, is issued. That further gives the church blessing on the whole settler colonialism project, with the full blessing of the church. So I think that is a more fateful year. And we've been talking about stories. But I think the power then is that whatever we have in the frame, in our in the beginning, whatever follows that phrase. The rest of the story has to account for right.
Speaker 4:You can't tell the rest of the story without accounting for whatever's in that initial frame, and I think that's why we're fighting over it today in American culture, right, because if the only thing that's in that frame are those white guys in that postage stamp, well that's a pretty simple story to tell about European's place in America, right. But if it's a 1619 project that ocean, you know or if it's back to, you know, the kind of Columbus appeal to the Vatican, you know, for a kind of moral mandate for colonization, that's also a really different story that we have to tell about ourselves.
Speaker 3:Well, added into this mix is the Haudenosaunee origin story of first contact with the Dutch, and that was 1613. Yeah, right To Rampel. And Wampelm is still very prevalent in the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Raises chiefs. It's a method of condoling people so they can attain the right state of mind to speak and lead and listen and be aware of the surrounding world. But this two row Wampelm was the coming together of extremely different cultures and it spoke of the parallel paths along the river of life that the Dutch would stay in their boat, the Haudenosaunee would stay in theirs, not interfering with each other, but they'd be riding in this river of life together and respect and mutual understanding and good faith. And but with that you have to have some idea of your relationship with the natural world. So Indigenous people always understood that important relationship with the natural world. But the colonists came over and never were able to comprehend the depth of that understanding of partnership and living together.
Speaker 2:And that's the fundamental feature of the Doctrine of Discovery is really this extractive economy. Exactly Whether it's extracting slaves from Africa or later on involved in the extraction of different gold and silver out of Latin America, et cetera. So I think that with that comes a different sort of relationship to the world that I think right now we're seeing come to a real crisis point.
Speaker 3:Right and that has to be factored into these origin stories of First Continent.
Speaker 1:Do you need help catching up on today's topic or do you want to learn more about the resources mentioned? If so, please check our website at podcastdoctrineofdiscoveryorg for more information and, if you liked this episode, review it on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And now back to the conversation.
Speaker 4:You know the word that has stayed with me that actually I actually went back and read Alexa Detokeville's Democracy in America you know when I was doing research for this book because it had never quite occurred to me until I was doing the re like again, these kind of things that just stay in silos in your brain. I mean, I read that book, you know, 30 years ago I think for the first time and it just I don't think it was assigned that the at the end of volume one here's a whole chapter on thinking about African Americans and Native Americans in America like and what the future is between Europeans, africans and Indigenous people in the country wrestling with that. And you know he has a word that I ended up using in the book that I think describes what you're talking about, that extractive posture. And I should say I feel like you do this so well in your new book on the importance of Indigenous values.
Speaker 4:But the word that Detokeville used that I ended up using in the book was rapacious. It's not a word that I had used, I don't think it was. I mean it was in my book, I knew what it meant but I don't think I'd ever written it, you know before and ever used it. But I have found that that word has really stayed with me. You know it essentially means like aggressively greedy is what it essentially means you know, and just like insatiable, insatiably greedy, that's the piece of it, you know, and that that is probably the best like adjective that I think just describes the just devouring, you know mentality of kind of Europeans over land, resources, labor, you know it was, you know, just this kind of insatiable, yeah, rapacious energy that has not relented.
Speaker 3:You mentioned the Delta and destroying, you know, all the land down there to prepare it for crops and cotton, and in the early, explorers and farmers from Europe really had no clue on how to sustain those crops. Where in the Americas, you know, people were practicing regenerative forms of agriculture whereby you, you grow multiple crops and produce top soil as you're growing these crops to feed everybody, and that had to be eye opening.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, in some of the energy of moving into places like Mississippi was precisely because the tobacco had exhausted the soils in Virginia and the Carolinas and Georgia, and so you know the kind of European plantation owners were looking for new land because they had essentially destroyed the top soil, you know, in the lands that they had.
Speaker 2:And would continue to mine that top soil as it washes down the Mississippi River, right, so yeah.
Speaker 3:Right. It directly goes back to the Doctrine of Discovery to think you have the right to destroy water systems and till the soil and determine what crops are going to grow in these new kind of landscapes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean one of the things and I'll present it as an irony, but one of the things that we're trying to present at the Scano Great Law Peace Center is that, you know, among others, but primarily, the Hood and the Shoney sat in council with those founding fathers on your stamp, you know, in that frame and taught them about Western democracy. You know, and this kind of hidden history for me and, I think, for Sandy and all of us here in the heartland of the Hood and the Shoney, presents a kind of hope. You know that there are these relationships that were established. You know, back in 1987, joint resolution of Congress acknowledged the Iroquois contribution to Western democracy and a coin was minted, you know, in 2010, commemorating that. And yet no one knows about that. You know, I mean so.
Speaker 2:You know these hidden historical features of our history and our legacy of Western democracy is not just those white guys in the room right, there's all this. There's the peacemaker, thousands of years ago here at Onondaga Lake. There's Genesitego, who is a Onondaga loyani or chief, as you know, in common parlance. You know was presenting to, you know, benjamin Franklin and others at the Independence Hall. You know that this was the message of the peacemaker, and really the French, for example, didn't know anything about equity, fraternity and liberty, you know, until they encountered native people in the Americas, you know.
Speaker 3:So that's another sort of irony here that we're grappling with and the great orators laid out to them when they were taken to Europe. They were saying you imagine to be equal, but you're only equal under the authority of your monarchs and your pope. And I want to take you back again to the Turo Wampum concept. The Haudenosaunee envisioned a shared American future with Europeans coming in here, and that was abiding by the tenants of the Turo Wampum.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, I mean, it makes it maybe even more tragic, the stories you're telling, because, you know, as Orin Lyons often says, you know we have to craft the mythology or the myth history of our origins in the United States, where the native people are the bad guys, you know the indigenous people are the bad guys, because you can't take land or rob.
Speaker 2:You know the good guys. Yeah, I mean, you know what would it be, what would it mean if we were to shift the myth narrative, you know, and I mean I think ICU is being involved in that. You know, now push it a little bit further, because I know you're involved with this too is what's the shift from Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day all about? I mean, I think it indicates some kind of change, cultural shift that's going on here, you know, because if there's a face of the doctor who has discovered, it's gotta be Columbus, you know, and right there in the Capitol Building and you've published these images as well right there in the rotunda, you know, really right there. So what is that about? You know, I mean it's a complicated conversation. But then the shift in the last, what will just say five less than 10 years to Indigenous People's Day you know, I mean, how do you feel about that?
Speaker 4:You know I've been writing about that and I think it's far past time for us to kind of let Columbus go. You know, from that pantheon. So if you think about it, there are only three out of our federal holidays, only three are related to people. One is George Washington's birthday, the other is Martin Luther King Jr's birthday and the other is Columbus right. And you know, if you think about that as kind of a trinity of people, that I, you know it's hard to see Columbus fitting and that he never sets foot, you know, on any soil that's in the current boundaries of the country. You know, and it's really just kind of stunning, you know, really, I think the heart of it is that you know, columbus gets centered in American history, essentially because the fledgling nation wanted to seem older and more inevitable than it was right. So they bring Columbus forward and claim that legacy as a way of giving an infant, you know, nation a 300 year instant history, you know, and so it's kind of a rhetorical, strategic move to begin with to kind of center Columbus in general, you know there. But the thing is it does represent, it just represents, yeah, this kind of doctrine of discovery, a settler colonialism. You know, it's a straightforward, a straight line. You can't draw the line much straighter, you know than that. And so the question for us today is you know, when a country it's worth noting today, that the country I mean that was never.
Speaker 4:I think you know it's an anti-democratic claim. I was gonna say that straightforwardly, right. You can't both be a promised land for European Christians and a pluralistic democracy. These two things are completely incompatible, and so Columbus Day is celebrating the former and undermining the latter. I mean, I think we'd have to be really clear about that. It's also the case that, just from a pragmatic point of view, the country is no longer a majority white and Christian. So even if we serve where to take that from demographic today the country's only 42% white and Christian. So it doesn't even represent even if you were thinking about that as a very pragmatic ways, it doesn't even represent the majority of Americans today.
Speaker 4:So you know, biden became the first sitting president to make a proclamation for Indigenous people's day, and his first term was roundly criticized by Trump for doing so. And he's done that. I don't know, but I assume that he'll do that this year, but did it last year as well, and so, but he's done both right. He's made a proclamation for Columbus Day and a proclamation for Indigenous people's day. So I think we are in this moment of transition. You know. I hope that we'll be clear-eyed about it and see our way. You know, if we're thinking about, you know the other, I guess the other function that the holidays do is they orient us toward values. And so, if you think about that function of national days off, times of reflection, celebrations, what would serve us better going forward, if we're trying to live into being the you know, live into the promise of a pluralistic democracy, I think Indigenous people's day does a lot more for us on that front, and Columbus Day, in fact, directly undermines it.
Speaker 2:Well, not only that, I think, probably it bodes well for our eventual survival as well, I mean, given that we're in a total meltdown here with environmental crisis, by kind of revisiting those relationships from the 18th century, you know, with Indigenous people's 17th and 18th century and maybe, you know, inculcating some of those values, indigenous values. This is what you know. My point is that maybe we have a chance, you know, because and I think that might be what's what some of the pressure might be coming from, right, you know, we know that really the Columbus legacy is no longer viable, frankly, you know, and that we need to look for some other system of values or sort of make our capitalist society behave in certain ways, you know, that honors the earth rather than just using it up, you know. Yeah, I mean on that point.
Speaker 4:I'll just make one of their quick point on this.
Speaker 4:You know, I was speaking at Notre Dame University last year and they have these historic frescoes in the administration building glorifying Columbus, right, and they're, and you know they are, you know, from the 19th century and they've got, you know, columbus looking in all his regal finery, and native people, sort of smaller and diminutive, you know, in the paintings.
Speaker 4:And they've covered them up at Notre Dame, and it was a student movement at Notre Dame that said exactly that this is no longer a viable way to tell our story and we don't want to tell our story this way. And so what they've done is they've covered them up, they've contextualized them, they've done a whole kind of now, like, if you go in the administration building, there's a whole little kind of placards to tell the story of like why they covered them up, what they mean, how they've been reflecting on them, and now they uncover them once a year for a few weeks and students are actually now studying them, but studying them about like being more critically reflective of that legacy, and so I think that's a good example of the tide, or you know, the ship is turning, I think, on this question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. No, I think the you know here in Syracuse we have a Columbus statue has a very bad legacy. It's just really egregious. Has been for the last 100 years.
Speaker 3:He stands on four severed Indian heads looking for directions. His back is to the court system, so he's backed by the city courts, and he looks west through the main Catholic church in Syracuse. So just the way it's placed is so egregious.
Speaker 2:And we have a very strong, like old Italian group that wants to maintain. Yeah, businessmen, politicians that want to maintain the statue. Of course it was put up in 1933, you know, really during the rise of fascism, and you know.
Speaker 3:Mussolini helped pay for its shipment back to Syracuse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can't make up this history, you know.
Speaker 2:So it's, it's and, and you know there are continual demonstrations down there. But but this is the point I want to make and again kind of ties together African-American and indigenous movements is it was really the Black Lives Matters protests in Syracuse I mean they were everywhere but in Syracuse that called into question that. You know that statue, and I'm proud to say that one of our former grad students, who's a trans-African-American student, put up a changeorg petition and got like 25,000 signatures and it's something that politicians in Syracuse just couldn't ignore, right? I mean, you know so. So you know you can draw the line then between Black Lives Matter and you know this, this desire to change that myth history and take down the Columbus statue. You know, and I think that's that's happening all over the place. You know with Confederate statues and and you know other things.
Speaker 3:You know in California and otherwise, but yeah, I mean meanwhile those murals stand at the US Capitol building right and then, a few decades ago, they chipped away at the original columns leading into the old original Supreme Court chamber because the original columns were made of corn husks to reflect the indigenous roots to American democracy that came through the Haudenosaunee. So why were those covered? But now you can see them. So you're uncovering and covering these images that are in conflict with one another.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, yeah, um, yeah, uh. Let me pause here for a sec. Sure, so why don't you share for our listeners what you see, as you know, the possibility examining these hidden roots of white supremacy, what, what you see as the path toward a shared American future? I mean sort of you know how, how, how I mean solving our past is way too much to to talk about, but you know how, addressing our past because this is something my students often ask well, what's the solution? Right, I don't think there's a solution exactly, but I I think there is a way forward and that you indicate. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 4:Yeah well, you know I don't have a sterling 10-point plan at the end of the book. You know that we can all just follow and solve the problems and everyone should be suspicious if I did have such a thing at the end of the book. But I did learn some things from watching people on the ground, like in local communities, and I think that that is where I see some hope. You know, and I do think it starts with true telling and I should just say we are only at the very beginning of the process of telling the truth right in this country like.
Speaker 4:Just you know that we have, we've had this kind of, I think, rush of energy in the last few years around the Black Lives Matter movement. That has been, you know, I think, like nothing I've seen in my lifetime I was born in 1968 and certainly not in my adult lifetime have I seen that kind of energy around something, but I think it still has. It's a beginning, you know, point of telling the truth and but you know so in the book. I spent some time in Mississippi, I spent some time in Oklahoma and I spent some time in Minnesota and one in kind of three different states, but there's some commonalities that I saw in all places and they all involved, really, a story like you mentioned, like you know, you mentioned a graduate student that just said I'm gonna do something right and and started, you know, an online petition.
Speaker 4:You know, in Mississippi now there was a guy named Jerome Little who was the first African-American elected county commissioner in Tallahatchie County in early 80s. I think, and you know, first of all, it's worth saying why was he the first African-American in a half Black county? Because until after the Voting Rights Act, there were no Black people registered to vote in Tallahatchie County. So they finally get enough people registered to vote, elect their first African-American county commissioner. And you know he had grown up in that county and did not know the story of Emmett Till and that's where he was killed, where his trial was, and he was in Europe in the Marines when he learned the story of Emmett Till he's like wait, that's the county I'm from. And then went back and said like we are going to tell the truth about what happened here and it, you know, built some momentum and it ended up being, you know, a group of everyday people in this county, black and white, to kind of tell the story, and these were descendants of enslaved people and sharecroppers and in descendants of enslavers, you know that really got together to tell the story. And so I, in each of the places they really just come down to, people deciding in their local context, yeah, whether it's a statue or the absence of a story that should be told there, like that's often what happens as well.
Speaker 4:You're trying to tell these, these stories across the board. So you know, and I think that another reason I find hope is that these are not easy places Mississippi, oklahoma these are not easy places for these stories to succeed, you know, and yet I think they are making some headway, despite some of the prevailing political wins that are trying to, kind of, you say, cover up these stories, keep these stories from emerging. But I do, I don't think that that's ultimately going to win the day. I mean, I do think that the new story is coming out and continuing to come out are going to help help us shape, you know, our next steps, and I think it's only by getting those stories out there and us kind of telling them that we're going to be in a place to even know where to go, you know, but I think those stories are going to provide the foundation for it. So I'm kind of hopeful that you know that's really where the work has to be.
Speaker 4:Is these, these efforts at truth telling, because you know, back to your that vision, you know, of the kind of shared space and I am trying to think about that. How do we think about, you know, what a pluralistic democracy is right, sharing space, sharing resources on an equitable you know basis. You know those don't happen if we don't have the, the right stories of how we actually got to where we are right and you need this cross-cultural conversation?
Speaker 3:yeah, because you mentioned in your book James Baldwin you know talking about as, as groups of people are being oppressed, they're studying the oppressors and trying to understand what motivates these people. Well, the oppressor is not giving one bit of thought to the people they are oppressing. Yeah, so no, understand more about why. Yeah, I'll say this.
Speaker 4:So you know. So white christian guy, again mostly british. You know ethnicity from both sides of my family, but you know the thing that has like moved me, me, you mentioned Baldwin. So you know, with the last book I think it was Baldwin haunting my thoughts like what does a white christian guy from the south have to say?
Speaker 4:right to the indictment brought by Baldwin. And then you know, it's not just Baldwin, of course. I mean, it's king Frederick Douglass, like you know. I mean, it's not, you know. And then the other thing that became so clear to me is you know these other voices that I, frankly, didn't know before I really started doing the research. So vine to loria junior, right, yeah, uh. And I mean, you know, uh, custer died for your sins. What 1969? Right? Um, it's not new, um, you know. And he writes this open letter to the christian churches of north america in like 1972, I think.
Speaker 4:Um, you know, god has read god has read yeah right, I mean, there are these resources that are that have been out there for half a century, calling people like me to account, you know, and I think that's, I think partially. What's happening, uh, is there's an opening now, I think, for that conversation to happen.
Speaker 4:That just didn't happen 50 years ago you know, it didn't, but but the faithful work of those people, I think, has laid the groundwork for conversations that are just now happening today, um. So, and others who have, you know, obviously followed in their, in their, in their footsteps as well. That I've learned from uh as well. So I, I'm, I'm hopeful that that cross yeah, you said the kind of cross cultural conversation, both from voices that are no longer with us, uh, but that rang that bell really clearly when they were, um and the ones who are, you know, with us now, yeah, yeah, well, um, there's a little part in a little section in my book at the beginning, I think that's that I, that I um, I address why the white guy, you know uh, why should, why should we be invested in these stories?
Speaker 2:I mean, there is the tendency, well, and I think it's a needed lack in the academy, um, that native voices, african-american voices, other voices uh that are not white, need to be uh, speaking loudly and clearly. But I, I don't think that means that, you know, white guys like us uh shouldn't be involved in those conversations, right, I mean, I, I think it's, it's both. And you know, um, because, as my teacher, uh, charles H Long, who was recently passed away, but one of the founders of the discipline of history, religions, you know, african-american scholar, really wrote on black religion, african religions, as he often said, you know, everybody needs to be involved and invested in undoing colonialism, um, it's, it can't be just up to, you know, enslaved Africans. You know, uh, it can't be up just up to Native Americans, uh, because we, as white people, have benefited from that, that legacy as well. So, so we need to be invested in these conversations as well. So I, I really appreciate that too. Um, uh, about your writing and your commitment to these, to these ongoing conversations, and I do think the way forward is through, you know, sort of on the ground engaged education, you know, you know trying to trying to approach people where they live. Um, I will just say we're really looking forward to your coming to Syracuse for our conference in December.
Speaker 2:Um, you know the religious origins of white supremacy, the doctrine of discovery and Johnson v McIntosh, uh, which is something we didn't really talk about here today. But you know, johnson v McIntosh is really what creates a doctrinal you know um doctrinal emphasis on civilizing Native people through the acquisition of lands. Right, and, uh, he, he, you know so Marshall's the one that brings into um American law through the Supreme Court ruling, the. The doctrine of discovery is fundamental to to property title. That's a tough one. You know that's going to be a tough one. We're going to need a lot of people talking about that and how to address that. You know lawyers, you know activists of various kinds.
Speaker 3:So yeah you know, and you mentioned how, um, that decision opened the floodgates for federal anti-Indian law to be established, and that's what all Native people are dealing with now. Are these, uh, puppet regimes of the United States silencing the indigenous traditional people in all those territories? Yeah, and that's why we're in a unique place, because Anandaga and and the Haudenosaunee still need, according to their pre-colonial matrilineal clan system, and they don't have, like Christian, um you know, voices dictating their politics yeah, the federal government is not involved at Anandaga at all through the BIA, so they're unique in the country that way too, so so it's a unique place here.
Speaker 2:Um that, going back to the federal anti-Indian law, that's the title of a of a book by Peter Dorico just recently came out. He's going to be here. Finally, it's been, you know, an emeritus law professor at Amherst, and um, and, and I mean, you know, you think about it, beginning with mark uh, beginning with Marshall's trilogy of uh, of rulings, um, you know that, um, um, that really, that really is the beginning of federal Indian law. But it really is not for Indians, right? It's not for Native people, right? Yeah, it's.
Speaker 4:It's really antagonistic to their very existence and puppet regimes yeah yeah, you know, and the just one comment there, I mean the things that sort of stay with me from that ruling. You know, is this reference to the superior genius of Europe, right? Um, and that's, that's the moral justification, right, that's, that's, in a nutshell, like what it appeals to. Um, you know that the previous people that they've been convinced by the superior moral genius of Europe that that all of this was justified, um, you know. And then it goes on to say you know, and if the country's been founded on that principle, we can't question it. But that's not exactly a robust moral or legal argument yeah, civilization stands in for you know, digitization or something you know.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's like, uh, it's too obvious but everybody, I suggest you read your book.
Speaker 3:It's so go out and just draws you right in full of so much information and um you have an art of storytelling. So it's um. They're wonderfully written, oh thank you roots of white supremacy and the path to a shared American future. Robert.
Speaker 2:Jones just uh on the New York Times bestseller list, so congratulations on that as well, thank you the producers of this podcast were Adam DJ Brett and Jordan Lawn Cologne.
Speaker 1:Our intro in outro is social dancing music by oris edwards and reaches cook. This podcast is funded in collaboration with the Henry loose foundation, sir q's university at Hendricks chapel and the indigenous values initiative. If you like this episode, please check out our website and make sure to subscribe.
