Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
S05E01: Bridging History and Today: Religion, Law, and Indigenous Influences in American Democracy with Winifred Sullivan
How have universities become the focal point of inclusive religious dialogue? Join us for a captivating episode as we converse with Winifred Sullivan, a professor at Indiana University, who brings a wealth of experience from her dual careers in law and academia. Learn about her pivotal role at the Center for Religion and the Human, where diverse voices collaborate on addressing contemporary issues such as climate change, political conflicts, and technological advancements. Sullivan underscores the importance of public universities as venues fostering robust discussions on religion and its intersection with today’s most pressing challenges.
Travel back in time with us as we unravel the complex history of religious freedom in the United States. Our exploration starts from the inception of the Constitution and its evolution through the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction Amendments. We delve into James Madison’s evolving views on federal power and citizen rights, leading to the 20th-century incorporation doctrine that transformed state governance. This legal journey is intricately tied to America’s religious diversity, highlighting pivotal cases like Johnson v. McIntosh and the doctrine of discovery’s enduring influence.
In our deep dive into indigenous influences on democracy, we spotlight the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s profound impact on Western democratic models. Discover how early recognition of Native American nations shaped governance and treaties, and how these indigenous roots resonate in today’s interpretation of religion in public life. We also reflect on the tragic self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell and its implications for understanding radical dissent. Rounding off the episode, we examine Joan of Arc’s political theology and the significant, yet often overlooked, contributions of the Haudenosaunee to American democracy, showcased in the Smithsonian’s "Voices and Votes" exhibit. This episode promises an enriching narrative that bridges historical insights with contemporary relevance.
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 Haudenosaunee, the indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University now stands, and now introducing your hosts, phil Arnold and Sandy Bigtree.
Speaker 2:Okay, welcome back to another episode of Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery. My name is Phil Arnold. I'm faculty member in the Religion Department at Syracuse University, core faculty member in Native American Indigenous Studies and the founding director of the Scano Great Law of Peace Center.
Speaker 3:And I'm Sandy Bigtree, a citizen of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. I'm on the board of the Indigenous Values Initiative and the Academic Collaborative of the Skano Center.
Speaker 2:This podcast, this whole series, is sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation and we're greatly appreciative of Henry Luce Foundation and their continued support of this work in the Doctrine of Discovery. Today we're going to have a conversation with an old friend who I went to graduate school with in the University of Chicago Divinity School, winifred Sullivan, or Winnie as we know her. Winnie, I'll let you introduce yourself, but first I just want to say a couple of things that I remember. Winnie was one of those amazing grad students that you always wanted to emulate. As I recall, you had already gone through law school and at some point were a practicing lawyer there in Chicago and decided you wanted to go back and do a PhD in religion, to go back and do a PhD in religion, and so you're just kind of the perfect person to give us a really kind of wide look at the role of law and religion and those relationships culturally speaking. But really a pleasure to see you here today. But why don't you introduce yourself where you are now and what you're doing?
Speaker 4:Thank you, phil and thank you Sandy. So I teach at Indiana University in Bloomington, indiana, which is a large public university in the middle of the country with a large religious studies department. I'm also affiliated with the law school and I run a center called the Center for Religion and the Human, and I've been at Indiana for 12 years.
Speaker 2:Thanks, thanks for that. Maybe we could just start there. So can you, as a lawyer, or a lawyer at one time, an academic in the academic study of religion, someone who is steeped in those different kind of disciplines Can you talk about your new center of religion and the human and how that's connected to your work in religion and law?
Speaker 4:Sure, and maybe I'll start by saying that we also have the Henry Luce Foundation to thank. We also have the Henry Luce Foundation to thank. Our center, the Center for Religion and the Human began five years ago with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, and so we're enormously grateful to their support of our work. And it comes out of the work of the grant to our center, an insight by Jonathan Van Antwerpen at the Luce Foundation, that public universities were a very important place in which to have a conversation about religion, about religious freedom, about religion in public life, and that they were, in a way, very well suited to such a conversation. We think of what we do at the Center as teaching religion in public. That is, we are, you know, all employees of the state of Indiana and we regard our work as public work on behalf of the people of Indiana. We teach students largely from schools, high schools all over Indiana, and we think it's a wonderful place to teach religion. A very open conversation that needs to take into account many, many perspectives and find ways to articulate what we do and talk about religion in a way that's accessible to everyone. So this is something we pride ourselves on.
Speaker 4:The Center comes out of an insight.
Speaker 4:The original founders of the Center were Lisa Sedaris, who's now at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who's an environmental ethicist, constance Fury, who's an early modern scholar at IU, and myself.
Speaker 4:Was that, given the many contexts that we all live in and this was before the pandemic, the pandemic in some ways, and recent wars and crises have deepened this context that we live in a time when what it means to be human is of particular interest because of climate change, because of social and political conflict, because of the pressure on the human from technology. And today is where we start from, and it's our argument that the human is essentially a religious question in a very broad sense. So here I use religion in the broadest sense. Maybe I'll say a couple more things about our center hosts a number of different projects, but what really they all have in common is that they're all collaborative. We believe very strongly in collaborative work, and so much of what our center does is to convene, bring together different voices around different topics, bring together different voices around different topics. Yeah, I could go and I could talk more about the different projects, but maybe that's enough of an introduction for now.
Speaker 2:That's fascinating, boy. I wish New York State would get this memo. I mean it's always been a difficulty for our students really to crack into SUNY schools for some reason or another, because it's always viewed with suspicion. Right that you know that you're teaching religion at a public university would smack of certain kind of violation of the you know the dividing line between church and state. But then you're in a, frankly in a red state that you're able to do these kinds of investigations in a more kind of you know, expansive way on religion and the human. I mean that's just fascinating what you've sort of developed there at IA.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think there isn't. I mean, naturally there are those who are uncomfortable with talking about religion in a public university, but this department has been strong for, you know, a very long time and I think in a way it sells itself. You know, when I first came here 12 years ago to be the chair, I would meet people on campus from every department and they say oh, the religion department, that's a great department.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 4:Everybody knew it. It's interesting. So we in a way made our own argument for ourselves. But I think partly one of the advantages of a public university, at least in our department, is that our department was never a seminary. There was never the sort of Bible, theology, church history. We study and teach all the religions of the world and the peoples of the world through time and space. There's no remnant really of that version of religious studies here.
Speaker 3:In this part of the country, being so close to Onondaga and upholding their ancient traditions they've not been violated by the US and to how they live. It's a stark awareness. Coming into this area and trying to use the term religion is coming into this area and trying to use the term religion, phil recently published his book the Urgency of Indigenous Values, because, working with the Haudenosaunee, it's very difficult to have this collaboration when you're talking about the category of religion, because religion played such a key role in undermining, trying to completely obliterate who we understood ourselves to be as human. You know it's really changed the way. You know Phil's done his work and how I do my work too.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that's very present with us as well. Of course there are Native communities in Indiana as well with whom we're working. We have a new Indigenous Studies program at Indiana and actually in the center our newest initiative is a being Human Indigenously project project, so very much in conversation across those old divides. I'm not in any way to discount what you say, sandy. For sure the category of religion as a legal category as well as an intellectual category has been very problematic. I think there are ways in which it can still be useful. I'm not one of those who would completely ban it. I think it's a difficult, it's often problematic to just ban words, but I think that history has to be to come with it for sure, and I respect those for whom the word remains too problematic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this really isn't about my book, but I did want to update History of Religions right. I kind of wanted to challenge it a bit. I don't want to ban religion by any means. I have admiration for those who taught us at, you know, the Div School at University of Chicago and I want to be able to utilize those ideas that that I learned there was inspired by and bring it into a conversation with you know indigenous peoples. So I think that's so. I think you're, I'm with you on that.
Speaker 2:I don't want to ban religion, but on the other, or the category of religion, I do think we need to have a more sophisticated historical understanding of what, how it's been deployed. And in that regard, winnie, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about. You know you're one of the foremost scholars on religion and law and can you just talk to talk us through some of those fundamental features of the American experience you know of? On the one hand, you know freedom of and freedom from, and, and you know how you see religion and law operating in the world today.
Speaker 4:Those are very big questions.
Speaker 2:That's what we deal with here.
Speaker 4:Maybe one thing I would say, as a sort of amendment to what I just said, is that I do think that religion is I'm inclined to think that religion should not be used as a word in law. I think it can be used in academic and public conversations, but I don't think it has proved to be helpful as a legal category. So I Say more about that.
Speaker 4:Well, one of the distinctive things about the US, of course, is that the way religion appears in the US Constitution, that the US Constitution, in its first form, did not mention religion at all, and one of the reasons for that was that the US Constitution was understood to be creating a government of limited competency, right Of enumerated powers, but not plenary power. I would say that one of the things I've learned I think that's most important is how distinctive the US is compared to Europe, for example, where most of the countries of Europe, most of the states of Europe, as you know, modern secular states, democratic states, inherited their ideas of themselves, their sovereign power, from kings, from the prior royal, you know, governments that governed them, and kings were understood to have all the power. There was right Sovereign plenary power, and they also were understood to have all the power. There was right Sovereign plenary power, and they also were understood to have a kind of paternal, in a good sense, care for their people. I mean an obligation, whether they actually did it or not, but that there was understood that the best kings, virtuous kings, would care for their people. The US is not that kind of state. It does not have the United States federal government does not have plenary power. The sovereignty in the United States is understood to rest in the people we, the people and originally had nothing to do with religion and originally had nothing to do with religion. A religion was not in the original plan because the federal government was only understood to have power was left to the states individually. But over time, and particularly since the Civil War, the federal government became more powerful, more and more powerful. And what happened with religion and it's hard to tell this in a brief way because it's a complicated story In order to get the Constitution, in order to come into effect, had to be confirmed by each of the original colonies, the 13 colonies.
Speaker 4:And the politics of that campaign led to people saying well, you have nothing in this Constitution that says that the federal government, you know, can't do certain things to citizens. There's nothing about the rights of citizens in this constitution. And the answer of people like James Madison was we don't need to have those in there because the federal government has no power over those things, you know, so we don't need to mention them because that's all left to the states. But it was impossible to have the Constitution be confirmed without adding in those 10 amendments that we think of as the Bill of Rights. So that was a political Accommodation.
Speaker 4:Accommodation right, which was regarded as basically unnecessary by the others, who said this is not the business of the federal government. We'll put this in here, but they don't have that kind of that's not their job Right. And so the the two clauses the free side clause and the no establishment clause are addressed to Congress. Congress shall have no power and they are addressed to the federal government. So in a way, they're what we would call jurisdictional. In their original form, they were just saying the federal government has no authority over religion.
Speaker 4:All of that was left to the states, and so what happened is that then this gets complicated at the time of the Civil War with the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments that were passed after the Civil War to guarantee rights to the newly enfranchised, enslaved persons, you know, ban slavery and give the right to vote to formerly enslaved persons, and also to guarantee equal rights.
Speaker 4:What happened then between 1865 and the first third of the 20th century, as we all know, is that the promise of those amendments was not met right, that, through the resistance of the South and other parts of the country and entrenched racism and Jim Crow laws, in fact, african Americans were not given the rights that were by the beginning of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 20th century, the pressure to enforce those amendments increased, and so, as we know, eventually you're going to get to Brown versus Board of Education and the kind of insistence on equality between African-Americans and white Americans. Also, though, what happened is that, when the Supreme Court finally gets to enforcing the 14th Amendment and the guarantee that two of equal rights to all Americans, the question came up well, what rights are these exactly?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And they said, oh, we have them listed in the Bill of Rights.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:So over the first half of the 20th century, those various elements from the Bill of Rights get changed from just being federal to also being applied to the states.
Speaker 4:This is called the incorporation doctrine. So as a kind of literary legal matter, these various parts of the Bill of Rights get incorporated into the 14th Amendment, such that the First Amendment no longer means, you know, congress shall make no law, but neither Congress nor the states shall make any law. So, beginning in the middle of the 20th century 1940, suddenly the Supreme Court gets in the business of deciding what religion is, gets in the business of deciding what religion is, and it comes about via the 14th Amendment and through what we still know is a deep tension in American constitutional life between states' rights and federal rights, between what is the matter of the states and what is the matter of the government. Up until then, issues around religion are decided state by state and each state constitution has its own mini First Amendment. They're not all the same, but each one has its own constitution, and that's the main way in which religion gets governed in the US up until 1940, when it suddenly becomes nationalized and that creates a new politics. This is a very complicated story.
Speaker 2:Fascinating.
Speaker 4:It is very interesting, and you know, phil, from the point of view of those of us who did degrees in religious studies, particularly for me, in American religious studies.
Speaker 4:If you think about the religious makeup of the US at the end of the 18th century, when the Constitution was written, the people who were present in the US were Native Americans, african Americans and mostly white Protestants, some Catholics, some Jews. But when you so if you think about that demography then and we could talk about religion and law, then then we would be talking very much state by state. Yeah, and we would be talking very much state by state, right, because different legal cultures in different states, different colonial histories at that point, very different colonial histories, which is when these now we're talking about the Second World War we've is that it becomes completely inadequate as a way to think about how religious diversity, really complex religious diversity, might be accommodated and how what we might call peaceable coexistence could work. Because they're stuck with a word that meant something. At the end of the 18th century Most people understood what it meant. It doesn't mean it included everybody, but everybody knew what it meant to a time when it was bewildering to the Supreme Court to have this word.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's one of the challenges that we all face, you know, in religion departments, because it seems as if the media today knows exactly what religion means, but it's such a complicated history and complicated word, I mean. But I would like to go back to Johnson. You know our conference last December was focused on Johnson v McIntosh, and you know how the doctrine of discovery really enters US law, right, because, interestingly, marshall really doesn't talk about religion I mean, just listening to you even though he's drawing on Catholic theological principles from the 15th century, right, and really British colonial documents and justifications for colonialism, doesn't really talk about religion, talks about civilization, talks about this project, you know, of the American project, and how, then he incorporates the doctrine of discovery, or the discovery doctrine as he calls it, into US law. And I wonder then how that slots into your really important narrative about the problem of religion and US law, or does it? I don't know.
Speaker 3:Well, you also have to consider that the hierarchical structure was in place in Europe, going from the line from popes to the monarchies, and then being transferred to england during the reformation and it became like uh, european or english law through the cabot charter. And so there's all these connections, religion is embedded in these hierarchical structures of domination before they even come here. Then there's the glimmer of encountering indigenous people here and there's many orders that go to Europe and they like what you're saying, they observe, they're going. You talk about freedom, but you're only free under the umbrella of your monarch. You're not experiencing freedom. We experience freedom in the Americas or in our homelands. And then the founding fathers in the late 18th century. They're talking to the founding fathers how to structure, you know, around their model of several entities unifying under this. You know the Haudenosaunee, you know and being under the great law of peace.
Speaker 3:But it's a whole other structure. It's not hierarchical at all. So that opens up new possibilities for establishing a new form of governance, which has indigenous roots to this democracy that influenced the Western world.
Speaker 4:So I think what you bring up is really, really important, sandy, and staying for a moment with this, at the end of the 18th century, you know, this is, you know, in spite of Marshall's really strong supremacist rhetoric.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:The fact is, at that point the US is nothing, right. I mean, this is, it doesn't have any power in the world at this point. And you know what you point to, I think, sandy. And I think this is actually in some ways weirdly evident in Marshall's opinion, far more than any later opinions, in the sense that Marshall does acknowledge that Native American peoples are peoples with governments, rights, ways of living in the land, ways of living with each other, rights, ways of living in the land, ways of living with each other. He doesn't shrink them down to people who might have a religion or a this or that he talks about. I mean, I don't know if you agree, but I think that's one of the strange things about the Johnson versus McIndosh opinion is that you know he was a man of the frontier, he grew up in Western Virginia, he was not a citified guy, so he had some sense of the reality of the multiple governing structures and communities that existed at the time of the making of the Constitution.
Speaker 2:As did many of the founding fathers. I'll say yeah.
Speaker 4:Yes, and so I think this is really important to sit with because, as you say, sandy, there was a possibility. Then there were actually robust, you know, coexisting, robust structures for thinking about what it means to be human in community.
Speaker 3:But more than community, these are nations, they're indigenous nations and all the treaties were drawn up as nation to nation agreements and it empowered the federal government. When it's having all this separation of the state like pulling away and trying to have their own autonomy, yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, and I think I mean Marshall does not use the language of nations there, although other people did and you know, and so A constitution.
Speaker 3:It's the law of the land Right.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, absolutely. A constitution, it's the law of the land, right, absolutely, absolutely. But I think that there's a way in which that is so much more real there than it's now. Almost 100 years after the incorporation doctrine that I was talking about, the federalization, and 50 years since I was in law school, the change to the word religion in public life in the US is very dramatic. In the last 30 years, the word has shrunk in meaning in ways, and I do think that there are ways strategically to use to try to recover or to maybe find a way to invest in this word as an alternative to certain. And so for me, you know, on the one hand, there is the media today in the US, which largely understands religion in a very binary way, so that the liberal media regards religion as being evangelical Protestants exclusively, and that makes it impossible to talk about anything of what we have in common, in my view, other than neoliberalism. That's what we have in common. Unless we can expand our understanding what it means to be human, I really worry.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Yeah, I think. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that. You recently wrote this piece for the Marty Center on the immolation. Who is the man's name? Aaron?
Speaker 4:Bushnell.
Speaker 2:Bushnell, yeah, and at one point in the piece you say I argue that protest invokes real law, law founded in religious understandings of the human and of human community, as well as of conceptions of justice and culpability, law that rivals the claims of modern secularist law. I wondered if you can talk a little more about that, because I think in that you're challenging both categories in a way. You know religion and law and what that means for the meaning of being human today.
Speaker 4:So maybe for the hearers, I might just very briefly explain who Aaron Bushnell was. Aaron Bushnell was an American airman who was stationed near the district of Washington DC and about two and a half weeks ago he set fire to himself outside the Israeli embassy and he filmed himself. He live videotaped himself on a Facebook post. Before he did this, he said the following. He said what would you do if your country was enforcing apartheid? What would you do if your country was enforcing legalized slavery? What would you do if your country was committing genocide? And then the next sentence was you are doing it now. I found this very, very powerful. And then, as he, just before he set himself afire, he announced that he was protesting the genocide in Gaza and that he was, and as he burned he shouted free Palestine. So many things have struck me about this event. First, it was not reported very much.
Speaker 2:Right, I noticed, yeah, that you mentioned that.
Speaker 4:Which I find kind of astonishing and scary, and there are many ways we could talk about that. But I think one of the ways which I tried to address in my piece was that I think people are scared. I mean even people that we maybe don't have a political view of this, that people are scared by this kind of thing, but also they don't understand it. And one of the strange things about the video is that in the video, as he burns, you see a law enforcement officer holding a gun on him, pointed at him as he burns, so it's as if. And then there's another law enforcement officer comes up with a fire extinguisher, holding a gun on him, pointed at him as he burns. So it's as if. And then there's another law enforcement officer comes up with a fire extinguisher.
Speaker 4:But in the way that that act has been written about, it seems, both from what the, from the gun and other things that have been written in the press, that people assume either he was a terrorist or he was mentally ill and that's been the main way that people have addressed it. Or for those who admire him, there's a sense, there's a sort of he's an individual conscience, he's a single person who somehow has a sort of saintly conscience, and that that's all you can say about this. For me, this was and you know, phil, from history of religions this is not something that is individual, this is something that is communal, and so I tried and, very importantly for me, it's legal. It is not just a question of conscience, but that what he is doing, what he was doing and what other people who have done acts like this were doing, is making a legal claim on us, shifting the burden and on, of course, the Israeli government and the US government, but also on us and that there's a legal structure to what he does. This would be called in law a shifting of the burden of proof that now it's on us. That's what he's done, and always.
Speaker 4:For me now and this is one of the projects we're doing in our center is called Unstately Religion. Always, we're interested in describing lifting up. This connects, of course, to Sandy's earlier invocation of nations that preceded the US, that of alternative sovereignties and coexisting sovereignties. Always there is legal pluralism, always, if you listen to the nation states today, they act as if they have a monopoly on law and a monopoly on violence. They do not, but they do not ever. There's always multiple laws and every individual is responsible to multiple legal orders. Sorry, I got a little bit creaky there.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, that's great. I get a better sense of what you're talking about when you invoke law. Now, it's not, you know, plenary power of the state. Yes, it's that, but it's something else as well. I mean, one of the things that you know, we've been talking about lately, or I've been talking about in my conquest class, is that, you know, Indigenous people do diversity really well, they understand diversity and they have protocols that have been in place for millennia to deal with.
Speaker 2:You know, like, you know another nation, that's 100 miles. That way, you know down, you know the path, or through the woods or whatever. And there are all these protocols for other nations that will come. You receive them. You, you know it's what it's called the edge of the wood ceremony for the Haudenosaunee they, they, what they call, they, they brush them down, they, they acknowledge their difficulties, their struggles, that sort of thing. There's food, there's all kind, but there's the acknowledgement that those nations have under their purview, their responsibilities are to those stories. Right, they live in their places that have their own languages, their own customs, their own, you know, their own ceremonial traditions that transact with other spiritual beings there. So there's always this acknowledgement of kind of radical plurality that's going on in Indigenous nations. So I mean and that's one of the striking things when you're dealing with Indigenous peoples this tremendous plurality of different traditions and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3:Going back to the Haudenosaunee, the first treaty was with the Dutch in 1613, known as the Two Row Wampum, and it's an agreement that shows two rivers, so to speak, where the Dutch would be sailing on one and the Haudenosaunee would be in their canoe on the other, and they traveled down the river of life without interference with one another and respecting each other, understanding of what the river of life means. So all got really lost in translation, because the Haudenosaunee lived that way with their neighbors.
Speaker 3:They were welcoming to colonists coming in so they could everyone could cohabitate in a new existence, but you have to be in proper relationship with the natural world and that just went right over their heads yeah, yeah and that's very deep, very deep part of the culture and understanding what it means to be human, because the natural world identifies each and every one of the Haudenosaunee as through their clan and who they are in relationship to the natural world know, we, we have a, we have a kind of strange understanding of, of plurality or diversity, I guess.
Speaker 2:Uh, because when we're talking about diversity, we're not just we're not talking about this kind of level of radical diversity, you know no, or diversity of of geographies or landscapes, right, um yeah right.
Speaker 3:Your, your identity comes from the land where you reside, and the land is diverse and it's ever-changing, and the waters are always changing and it's this regenerative energy that we're just part of, and when you go outside of it and start disrupting it, it's just going to create mayhem.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
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Speaker 2:And now back to the conversation. Does that coincide with some idea of the human or your reworking ideas of law, religion and the human?
Speaker 4:Absolutely. I mean, I hope you'll forgive me if I bring up my favorite subject right now, which is Joan of Arc. Yeah, please.
Speaker 4:I mean my interest in Joan of Arc. I've been teaching her trial for many years. You know, joan lived before the creation of the modern state. She lived at the beginning of the 15th century and my book is about her political theology, what I'm calling her political theology, but her ideas of governance, which I think have been obscured by the ways in which she became a figure for nationalism in the 19th century. But this was not the world she lived in. There was no France at the time. There was no France at the time of Jones.
Speaker 2:There was no Europe.
Speaker 4:No, no. And what she sought was peace. What she sought was relief for the people of the French territories from the aristocratic wars that had been going on and ruining the land, principally the war between England and France, but also there were civil wars involved. This was an aristocratic politics which was destroying the lives of ordinary people. She sought, you know, a restoration of a place in which people could live. This is, you know in part what you're talking about, sandy an attention to the possibility for people living in peace, in community, caring for one another, you know, at the level of the land and in places.
Speaker 4:You know, one of my favorite discoveries was the day I realized that she wasn't French, that this is all myth-making. So she came from on the edge of what now is France, but was not part of France then, and the voices she heard, as a young girl, said go to France. And I don't know, I've been reading this for years and finally I went oh right, she's not French, she's not in France. She went to France, which then was not anything like what we think of France today, but to the French court to help restore peace. And in a way you know, sandy, you might say this is maybe a little fanciful. She you know she was went as a person and she was not.
Speaker 4:She's often described as an illiterate peasant, as if she was brainless and, just you know, a dumb girl. Her family were farmers, well-off farmers, very involved in local politics. She was a smarty pants girl who knew what was going on when she got to court. She knew what she was talking about. So she brings a very strong notion of what it means to live in peace and to be responsible to your neighbors and to your place. And probably she expected to go back there, you know. But she gets captured and, as everybody knows, burned. But that's what they did. That wasn't what she was. That was not her project. I sometimes get frustrated by people who only focus on her martyrdom and don't focus on her political project, which I think is much closer to what we're talking about, something that was still possible before the invention of the modern state. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or she's mentally ill or something like that. You know she's just like a crazy person or something.
Speaker 4:Women who are always Right right right, yes exactly, exactly, exactly. But you know, she's so smart, she's so funny and she was really beloved by the soldiers that she led.
Speaker 2:And evidently a threat, you know.
Speaker 4:She was a threat to the English. For sure they were very scared of her.
Speaker 3:Well, when the Jesuits first came into our territories, I mean they were writing about the women being the firebrands of hell. I keep repeating this in so many of these interviews because it's so amazing so they would target the women, but they came here knowing how to do that. So obviously you know they had good practice and worked out that system of patriarchy takeover.
Speaker 4:But it is important to notice that there were, until she got to, the judges who persecuted her at the end, and for sure that was misogynist and um, motivated by misogyny. But you know the men, captains, who fought with her, they, they respected her, and that there were people in the church who supported her too. So it was a complicated world but she had many supporters and friends who really admired her and accepted that she cross-dressed. That's another thing. You know, people often say oh well, she was condemned because the church condemned cross-dressing. Well, those priests did. But before she got there there were plenty of people who accepted it. So it was complicated. There was, as some historians talk about, the queer medieval. Joan in a sense belongs as a part of the queer medieval In a very interesting way, politically queer, in a very strong sense. So not just her clothes, but in her political sense as well.
Speaker 2:Well, I look forward to that, that book coming out. That should be great as well. Well, I look forward to that book coming out. That should be great. I did want to mention, too, that you might be interested.
Speaker 2:So we're coming up on the what? 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, right, and there are a lot of land, and one of the things that we've been working on at the scano center actually is, um, this smithsonian exhibit that's traveling, called voices and boats. That is sort of a celebration of of american democracy. Um, you know, it's very red, white and and blue, and you know it's. It's this traveling exhibit, um and um. The Museum Association of New York, which is managing this for the Smithsonian, is um, specifically selected the Scano Center as one of the sites that um that they want to have this Voices and Votes exhibit in, and the reason is because there's no mention of the Haudenosaunee influence on American democracy. And so Sandy, mostly Sandy and I have been involved in creating like these banners, but you know, I mean these banners of like talking about the influence of the Haudenosaunee the great law of peace.
Speaker 3:We get four banners to accompany the tour.
Speaker 2:Yeah, these kind of supplemental you know addendum. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I mean and so it's going to be, I think, in 12 different places around New York State it's already like in Tennessee and other places state it's already like in Tennessee and other places. But that, so what we're doing is, is what? Not pushing back but I'd say supplementing that narrative, that kind of myth history that we all have to deal with? We're pushing a little, yeah, we're pushing quite hard, but but you know, but from this, from this point of view, that you know that this didn't just jump out of the heads of these white guys, fully formed, you know, you know Haudenosaunee, but also other confederacies around the, around what's now the United States. So I mean, I mean, I mean this has pretty much been proven in a variety of ways in, you know, george Washington papers and things like that. So we're quoting, we're lifting some of these quotes right out of American history and I mean it's like this.
Speaker 2:We have to grapple with our own myth. History too, right, I mean not just Joan of Arc's, but you know it's like you know, like, how do we push back? I think we're. I think we're pretty well positioned in religious studies to think mythically and to think you know how we can re-narrate this story of America and all that.
Speaker 3:Right, the local historical association sent out the first draft for each banner and they had to be nearly completely rewritten. You know, using things like the Onondaga had to cede their territories to, you know, washington, and so not exactly unceded lands, and so it had to be a whole revision envisioning of this project. So it was interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we don't know how it's going to, but if it, if it lands in a town near you just know that you've got these other kinds of supplemental banners that we've been on Maybe it's already in Indiana, I don't really know. It's going all over the place.
Speaker 3:Our banners aren't ready yet, though they're final Almost. Yeah, they're just aren't ready yet, though they're final Almost. Yeah, they're just about ready to go.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you know, as we get this our own Indigenous Studies Project off the ground, we should find some ways to talk together. It's being led by my colleague, michael Ng, who's a Native Hawaiian and who's working on Native Hawaiian histories and philosophies and issues, and my colleague, alexis McLeod, who's working with some Mayan elders in the Yucatan Very much. One of the objects of our center is to talk about America as a hemispherical project and not just to really push against limiting America to the US borders.
Speaker 4:And obviously the Haudenosaunee and the Onondaga are way ahead of us on that, I know.
Speaker 2:Well, we're fortunate, I mean we're fortunate to be here. I mean it's not like so. You know, we used to live in Missouri and you know Chicago. I mean, I grew up in Michigan, really didn't know anything about, you know indigenous peoples there, you know. I mean, in fact, when we were in Missouri we discovered that it was illegal, for in terms of the state constitution, illegal for Native Americans to actually reside in Missouri, I mean because they'd all been removed, you know, or that was the fiction that they were operating under.
Speaker 2:So the Midwest is a strange place here. There you are in Indiana, you know, and then you know, and then you know, what does that mean? You know, I can just kind of start there. But we're fortunate in New York, oddly enough, to be located near, you know, one of the last or few federally recognized, federally recognized Native American nations that do not have a Bureau of Indian Affairs government on their territory. They resisted that. They have their own passports. They, you know, they stick to this kind of sovereignty narrative, you know. And so in a way it's easy, in a way it's difficult because they're very mistrustful of people, just generally.
Speaker 3:But we've been able to work through it Well, very protective, yeah, very protective, maybe it's a better word yeah that's right, you're right.
Speaker 4:I got to see one of those passports when we were in Japan together, you may remember.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's right. Gosh, that was like oh five, something like that, that's right. Yeah, so so we're, we're fortunate in a way, and we, with the Scano Center, we're able to share some of that. They explicitly so, so they're not. They're not interested in sharing their language. They've got all the language programs and those kind of revitalization programs going on at the nation, but at Onondaga Lake they wanted this to be much more of a public kind of effort that pushes out their story, you know, to others, you know all kinds of others. So, yeah, it makes it a little bit easier than other territories.
Speaker 3:That aren't surviving and they're united on the front. They don't have a competing BIA government that silences their traditional people, which was the case at Standing Rock. I mean, the BIA leadership was not really entirely supportive of what the traditional people were trying to accomplish there and stopping the pipeline yeah, that's, that's a. It's a long story there's great clarity here at onondaga. They know who they are and they speak with a united voice. Yeah, it's unique, so I'll.
Speaker 2:So I'll be very interested in what you're doing there, Winnie, at your center. It's very, very interesting. I got a better sense of it in this conversation.
Speaker 4:Well, I've enjoyed the conversation and great to see you too. Thank you, great to see you.
Speaker 2:Thanks, all right.
Speaker 1:The producers of this podcast were Adam DJ Brett and Jordan Lone Colon. Our intro and outro is social dancing music by Oris Edwards and Regis Cook. This podcast is funded in collaboration with the Henry Luce Foundation, syracuse University and Hendrix Chapel and the Indigenous Values Initiative. If you like this episode, please check out our website and make sure to subscribe.
