Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
S05E02: Exploring the Legacy of Vine Deloria Jr. on Native American Thought with Philip Deloria
Discover the transformative power of Native American thought and religious studies in our conversation with the esteemed Philip Deloria. Learn about the profound legacy of Vine Deloria Jr., whose influential works like God is Red have shaped the academic and theological landscapes. As we uncover the Deloria family's rich heritage of Indigenous advocacy, you'll gain a deeper understanding of how these experiences have informed their unique contributions to theology and Native American Studies.
Explore the intricate dynamics between Native American communities and Christianity as we reflect on Vine Deloria Jr.'s provocative texts Custer Died for Your Sins and his subsequent disillusionment with Christianity that led to God Is Red. Through these discussions, we highlight the enduring impact of colonialism and the resurgence of indigenous practices in contemporary Native life.
Unpack the unsettling phenomenon of "playing Indian" in both American and European contexts, exploring historical and contemporary examples from the Boston Tea Party to modern New Age movements. We also discuss the critical role of oral tradition and indigenous knowledge, emphasizing their dynamic nature. This episode provides valuable insights into the current trends in Native Studies, the intersection of indigenous rights with modern political movements, and the transformative potential of indigenous sovereignty and diplomacy. Join us for a thought-provoking and enlightening discussion with Philip Deloria.
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 Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery. My name is Philip Arnold. I'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.
Speaker 3:And 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.
Speaker 2:And we're coming to you, sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation. We're coming to you sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation. Today we're in Boda, Norway, Honored to be here with Philip Deloria, who is a well-known author. For the last 25 years has really galvanized Native American studies around issues having to do with stereotyping and playing Indian. I'll say so. We're going to have a wide-ranging conversation about a number of things, but just welcome Philip.
Speaker 4:Thank you, so great to be here.
Speaker 2:First 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.
Speaker 2:So 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. Just 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. But excitedly she ran up to me and she said I just read Vine Deloria's God is Red and it explains everything. I 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. I'm thinking, ella, you know as well. I 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.
Speaker 3:But talk about your department quickly and how you talk about it, you do it. God has read your department, phil. Okay, pause, okay, pause, okay, that's a good point. No, oh God, that's funny. Talk about your department. You talk about my department.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 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. And then your father in response almost I'm not sure what wrote God is Red and I'm not sure how. If it is connected, it's just poetic in many ways.
Speaker 4:Um, 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. Um, you know, my grandfather was an Episcopalian minister. My great-grandfather, the person I'm named for was an Episcopalian minister. My 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. So you know there's a long tradition of this kind of leadership within the church, you know, of which the family's been part. And you know my dad went to, you know, theology school. He 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.
Speaker 4:I 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.
Speaker 4:And 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.
Speaker 4:That 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. So you can see, I think, the ways that sort of religious studies, theology, really grounded his thinking. So 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. He had written Custer Died for your Sins, published in 1969. And that's a really interesting book for the ways that I think it frames all the writing that he did during that period. He 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.
Speaker 4:He's learning to be a writer, you know it's. It's a very important book but it's not exactly a taught, well-crafted, you know through line kind of book. It's a set of kind of ramblings and essays and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 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.
Speaker 4:You know he wrote this in. We 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. Um, and in that sense, god is red comes out of his red power kind of writing. But 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. And 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.
Speaker 4:Now 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. And 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. No, it's not saying like, yeah, christianity and history came together, you know things like the doctrine of discovery. He's not really saying that. It's a theological and conceptual, you know kind of argument.
Speaker 2:Where that really turns around questions about time and space and how people kind of imagine those things. Yeah, and I think you know that's the kind of the irony of this. You 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. I 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. But 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. So, 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.
Speaker 3:You 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. But it was a different time. It's not like Native people wanted to become Christian. They really had no choice. So 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. He could then stay with his community and, you know, deal with them and guide them through some of this stuff as well. So it's a different context than today.
Speaker 3:It's like I know the narrative we turned around at Onondaga Lake. You 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. So it's a very brutal history and you have to contextualize this. I don't want a listener coming in not knowing any of this and hearing this conversation right. So 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.
Speaker 3:It's a complicated thing, it could still guide us through some of this history as well.
Speaker 4:Well, 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. You 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. And 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. So, you know, maybe you think about that.
Speaker 4:And that you know that whole generation, that first generation of Lakota and Dakota ministers. You know I mean my great-grandfather. You know he did his sermons in the Dakota language. He used the translated Dakota hymnal. You know they used the Dakota Bible, right, they were keeping the linguistic and language tradition alive, even through literary kinds of means. They'd have the annual convocations which looked a lot like the Sundance. They'd have the men's societies which looked a lot like the Sundance. They'd have the men's societies which looked a lot like the old men's societies. They'd have the women's societies.
Speaker 4:So 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. And you know I mean my grandfather sort of. You know oftentimes you know, had critiques of the church turned against the church. You 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. Right 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.
Speaker 4:And 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.
Speaker 4:My dad thought, well, maybe the church could reinvigorate itself. He 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? You know as well. And his conclusion was no. And then he resigned from the church board and right at that moment this movie sits down to write Goddess Red.
Speaker 3:But, 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. That's what we were hearing from Onondaga, that they got fed in those places. The best meals were served at the church. And these are community folk, you know, and so the church was it, you know.
Speaker 2:I also. I 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. But then that's the Catholic Church, very different than the Episcopal Church and I also wanted to note that different than the Episcopal Church. And I also wanted to note that it is the Episcopalians, in 2009, that are the first to repudiate the doctrine of discovery.
Speaker 2:Right, 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. Now they have different motivations. You 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. So they're concerned about their own Christianity in some ways. Maybe they should be a little more concerned about what they did to Native people. I'm not sure, but you know there's a lot of different motivations in these repudiations.
Speaker 3:But 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. In Europe.
Speaker 2:In Europe.
Speaker 3:You know this is all connected because when Europeans came to this country, they knew darn well what they were doing. I mean, they attacked us and focused right on how to make the quickest, most abrupt change, you know, in the least amount of time.
Speaker 3:And 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. You know, you weren't really allowed to talk about anything but Christianity in these territories. All 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.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah. I mean, the church was sort of for this period, was this interesting kind of repository?
Speaker 2:I mean I didn't and what period were you talking about? Like what time period?
Speaker 4:Kind of late 19th through the mid to through the Red Power Movement. Oh 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.
Speaker 4:He 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. And 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. That's right, Right, you know. So 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.
Speaker 4:You 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. And 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. And he would take, he would say, well, these four Lakota values and these four Christian values. You know he had a lot of fluidity kind of back and forth, you know, kind of around these things. You know, by the time you get to my dad right, you're in a different political context. It 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.
Speaker 2:Jeez, there's so much that's popping into my head. Just the Red Power Movement, you know, and how your dad was involved with that.
Speaker 3:How do you make that transfer into Christianity, though, when being indigenous is your proper relationship with the natural world? Right, you know, and it's regenerative. You 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. You have this very alive sensibility of being human in a very complex network of life, so you already have this. It's not so much a faith, but you embody this power of knowing something greater than yourself.
Speaker 2:And that's a trauma in and of itself, right, right, just that. That reality shift, you know.
Speaker 4:Yeah 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.
Speaker 4:Right 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. Whereas 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. The 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. If you are on a landscape that you know and live in intimately, you understand like there's some good places.
Speaker 1:You want to go there's a few bad places.
Speaker 4:And why is that?
Speaker 4:It'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. And 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. So 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. Right 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.
Speaker 3:And there's so much more beyond what we were limited to become through the confined and dominance of Christian Christianity. But 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. So it's oh, is that an invitation?
Speaker 2:to say something.
Speaker 4:I mean, I do see Identity politics. So it's oh, is that an invitation to say something? I mean, I do see identity politics?
Speaker 2:I think we both see kind of that you're playing with issues of identity. You know, I thought playing Indian was provocative. In many ways it was also a condemnation of. I mean, last year we went to what was that?
Speaker 3:it's Queen? Oh okay. Last year we went to what is that? It's a machine, oh Okay.
Speaker 2:It's a great machine, but it's noisy yeah.
Speaker 3:Are you done? Okay?
Speaker 2:Last 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. You know, we talked to the director of the museum, the Carl May Museum, and he knew he knows a lot of Native people. They all come over there. They come there and they're invited, they're paid to, you know, like perform.
Speaker 2:We 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. You know, you've been dealing with a lot of these, you know, playing Indian things for so long.
Speaker 3:And this trumps them all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was, we could go on about it. It was germany and we took lots of film and you know, uh, germans dressed up like you know lakota people and the look.
Speaker 3:The lakota people actually came to perform and they were at the event the night before. In 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. It was so intimidating. The next day we're at the museum. There's this huge designated space for dancing, but the Lakota were not invited there. The Germans dressed up as Lakota and they were dancing.
Speaker 2:And there were Confederate, you know, dresser. They dressed up a whole unit of Confederate soldiers, trump caps. There were Trump caps. I don't know what's going on. I mean, you know, I don't really know what's going on in Germany, that's one thing. I mean, you know, I don't really know what's going on in Germany, that's one thing.
Speaker 3:But Karl May, Hitler was an enormous fan of Karl May and distributed the books to his soldiers.
Speaker 2:Probably even met him just before he died.
Speaker 3:Yeah, probably I mean try to unpack that playing Indian. I mean that's just beyond comprehension.
Speaker 2:And his whole move into Poland which was seen as a kind of eastward, you know, rather than the westward migration, you know. You know that epic story of, you know, moving west, manifest destiny, that was kind of mapped onto Poland.
Speaker 3:Well, even referred to Poland as a reservation. So this is so intertwined with the psyche of all around the world.
Speaker 2:I it's crazy, but it's serious, crazy, you know. I mean it's serious. And indians just play into that whole kind of thing. Um 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? No, no, that's true.
Speaker 3:That's not.
Speaker 4:So yeah, I, you know I mean so. So one of the things you'll notice in that book Playing Indian is that I don't talk about the Germans. Right, 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? Do I do the European thing? And you know, the answer for me, after not much thought, was a resounding no. Yeah right right.
Speaker 4:Because the American thing is complicated enough and you know so. The American thing is complicated enough and in a way it's, it's a. It is a different story, right, it is a kind of. It is a quintessential settler colonial story. You 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. And 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're just devoted to this, yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, it's really kind of cultic, you know. So 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. You know that. You know, one of the reasons you erase the indigenous is to assume the, an indigenous identity for yourself, right, and to perform that identity. So the erasure is absolutely fundamentally a part of it. And yet you don't fully erase because you're actually assuming the identity. So the people you're erasing are the material people, are the actual people.
Speaker 4:You 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. So 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.
Speaker 4:You 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? Why would that be? It's just very curious, you know. So 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.
Speaker 4:I 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. I hate them, we're not them, you know. And 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. We're American right, we're aboriginal, we're indigenous. American 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. We're very civilized, we have tea in the afternoon and we're part of the you know kind of european tradition. So 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. So it's a relationship of love and hate, desire and repulsion, right, that happens simultaneously. I think it's an incredibly generative social, cultural kind of position that then leads to generative political and economic kinds of consequences.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a serious thing. It's not just play Right. It's not just playing Indian. There are serious consequences and I wondered if that you know, if that's also true in terms of, like, you know place names. You know, you know. You 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.
Speaker 4:I mean it feels like it's a variation, right? I mean you look across the geography of the United States and you see multiple kind of strands of practice. Right, I mean you look across the geography of the United States and you see multiple kind of strands of practice, right? One is to sort of appropriate the indigenous place name and make it your own, you know. A second is to erase the indigenous place name and give it, you know, new York, new.
Speaker 1:England, you know, to those things you know.
Speaker 4:and the third strand, which you know, you all know from being in New York State, is to impose a classical Greco-Roman.
Speaker 2:What is that? Munich, syracuse?
Speaker 3:Rome.
Speaker 4:Ilium yeah. Which 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? It kind of moves a little bit west.
Speaker 3:Well, I wonder if that's attached to the doctrines of discovery which came out of the Vatican right? I mean this lineage back to Rome and the empire.
Speaker 2:Sure Choosing to be Romans.
Speaker 3:Conquest and empire building. New York is the empire state.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is going to be a little rambling, but one of the things that we're working on. So 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. And then it became St Maria of Mount Iroquois in the 70s.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that became kind of a friendlier notion. But 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.
Speaker 3:In exchange for 600 square miles of land.
Speaker 2:Right, right, you know. So 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. Well, the Onondaga figured this out pretty quick, you know, because they were amassing weapons in this fort. And all this, and eight months 18 days, the Jesuits were amassing weapons.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the Jesuits were amassing weapons.
Speaker 2:And what's the story? Some little.
Speaker 3:A 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. You know what was going on. So I guess the Haudenosaunee went and, as Lauren said, they told the Jesuits they had asked them to leave prior. They 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. And apparently they left like the middle of the night and that was in 1658. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this does not appear in the Jesuit relations. However.
Speaker 3:Of course not Right.
Speaker 2:No textual resource for this at all. There'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.
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Speaker 2:One of the reasons that the Onondaga really wanted this center transformed is that the French fort had told this Jesuit friendly story. And what we did, because it closed, what we did was we transformed the story to emphasize Haudenosaunee values. Haudenosaunee values instead of history. And 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. So 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.
Speaker 2:And that's how we develop this narrative, sandy, and I largely develop this narrative. But you wouldn't understand the Jesuit story without first exploring those values of Scano, for example. Peace can only be attained when human beings are in proper relationship to the natural world. These are ancient values, the great law of peace, the Thanksgiving address, and all of that I kind of explain or explore in the book. But then when you have that, you can start that kind of archival historical work. And it was through this what we call the two row wampum methodology. This 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
Speaker 3:about 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. And so I always emphasize the river of life was beyond comprehension for the Dutch. Because 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. So there isn't like when Christianity came in, it forced these dichotomies of good and evil, black and white. They weren't interactional. They were opposing forces, which was a setup for, like warfare, because that's what they did when they came here. So you're talking about identity and you're dealing with the perfectionists of the British and they're drinking tea. And then the savage Indians. Again, that's that stark history lesson we've all been taught, you know, and both sides are just perceptions, they're not interactional.
Speaker 3:You know we're in opposition to one another, and I think that's what your you know dad is trying to do. Is these identity politics. They're all false identities. People are trying to latch on to their preconstructions, fantasies. We're all living in some kind of an imposed fantasy on this planet.
Speaker 2:And trying to get back to something.
Speaker 3:I guess, how do we?
Speaker 1:break through it.
Speaker 4:Well it's it's used to me. It's like you know, you've got two things going on right. One 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. And how do you sort of navigate those things? Where'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.
Speaker 2:Well, 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. Right, 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. So 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. So so values, it can be that 30,000, you know, can be those moral ethics and values, that. But it also in in, you know, a monetary economy. You know value is exchanged and the meaning of land is exchanged only monetarily. So that becomes a different way of value, kind of context. But anyway, I just wanted to make that case because that kind of connects the two that you were making.
Speaker 4:Well, it's also the moment where history has to creep back in.
Speaker 4:I 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. Right, I mean, we think about the ways. So 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? Or claiming domination over other people, claiming people who are minor parts of the Confederacy, right? I mean, so is that? Do 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. And 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.
Speaker 2:I see what you mean yeah, people are having to navigate other kinds of things. I see what you mean, yeah, so how do you use oral tradition right in a historical context? I mean, it's a very general question, but you know what is your thinking around. What constitutes oral tradition? You know in these Native American histories that we need to develop.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a really hard question, you know. I mean you can. So I differentiate between oral tradition and oral history and between memory. You know these kinds of things, you know I did a whole series of interviews with my dad, for example. 60 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. But then there's also older stories that are part of that.
Speaker 4:That 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.
Speaker 4:And 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. You know, is it clear that we should read them literally? To 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. Sort of thinking like this is not conceptual knowledge. This 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? Is there a moment where a documentary or archive is going to actually do those kinds of things?
Speaker 4:I 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.
Speaker 4:It'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. You 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. I'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. Here's a little, you know, picture of crows falling from the sky, you know, and what is it? Oh, 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?
Speaker 4:So 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. Oh, I remember in that year when that happened, this other thing happened, or these other people you know had this other thing you know. So 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. But 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. Other 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.
Speaker 4:It'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. Like, for example, the contemporary boarding school discussion to me has simplified, has narrowed. You know that. You 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.
Speaker 4:You know, as Brenda Child has argued right, boarding schools become kind of a metaphor for all the bad shit you know. So, 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. Um, 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. I think to sort of valorize this and say that it is pure and unbroken and unquestionable just doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 3:Well, we're talking about values, though In oral tradition. If it's this connection to the natural world, then you're paying attention to these cycles. You're talking about the birds falling and freezing, so you're going to watch the cycles, not the birds. You're going to watch the flocks and take in consideration the weather. It's more complex History, the recorded history. They came over here under the doctrines of discovery to take land. So that's the motivation and how it was all written and it was a different orientation.
Speaker 3:But 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. You know you're going to get in sync with these cycles. It's just a different orientation and we've been extracted from participating in that. So I think, like your father got us through people, through this horrific period of domination, we're not back there yet. We're not allowed to live in balance with this earth because the waters have been polluted. There's been dams constructed on almost every single territory. You know, if we don't start breaking down these dams and start freeing the earth, we're not going to become freed either. So we're talking about systems and just ways of thinking and being human.
Speaker 3:You can't totally put it in either camp right now because we've all been so disrupted, but things have to change.
Speaker 4:This 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. These are different things, right. I mean one is to sort of theorize, a kind of way of being. Another is trying to figure out what happened, you know.
Speaker 1:And those are.
Speaker 4:you know they ask fundamentally different kinds of questions, right.
Speaker 2:I mean the thing about wampum and I think wampum is a good example for this, but I think there are other indigenous media. But the wampum belts have their own kind of status, they have their own kind of living presence. And 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. You know it was. It 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. It was a condolence belt. So in the ceremony of raising their leadership they used these wampums Loyani.
Speaker 2:They used these belts and strings and it has to do with condolence. But then the return of those wampum belts that have been treated with arsenic and all kinds of things. They 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. So again, the complicated nature of what we're calling oral tradition, you know, and having people who know about wampum, who read wampum. You know I can't read wampum, you know I only just sort of communicate.
Speaker 2:what other people have said like what Oren tells me about, like wampum belts.
Speaker 3:It's such an intricate part. Each title holder has a specific wampum to identify their title. They're not elected chiefs, they're Loyani representative, representative of the Klan, and it's a whole other process. And this process is recognized at the UN. Their governance goes pre-contact and still recognized by the UN and the US.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so what Sandy's talking about?
Speaker 2:It'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. So I don't know, I mean, I think this idea of oral tradition is just such a misnomer in many ways. I think more in terms of religion, you think more in terms of history, but it's like, you know, there's a lot there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, maybe that the word tradition is kind of the thing that's leading us astray, right?
Speaker 1:I 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.
Speaker 4:I 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. But, like you know, lots and lots of tribal nations you know who had a traditional ceremony for the return of ancestors. Like 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. And 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?
Speaker 4:or people who are actually on the ground doing practice.
Speaker 2:Right, right, I think. Well, there's a lot there. And 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. There'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. So I think that's kind of where our work is developing too.
Speaker 3:And 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. I 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.
Speaker 2:People are longing for something you know. I'd just be curious.
Speaker 3:People are longing for something I mean clearly something is wrong and there's definite rise of fascism and domination in the world. It's happening all over the world. People are, I think, in shock and they're trying to find a different way of living on the earth. You know, maybe they're looking to find a different way of living on the earth. Maybe 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm wondering what you think of where we're headed.
Speaker 4:you know, in this, in this area yeah well it's quite a complicated question, right and um. It's simple, it's a simple question, simple question where are we going? So you know, I, my survey class, is a native studies class as opposed to a native history class. Oh, okay, and I you know, so it's sort of for me it's worth sort of separating out those things.
Speaker 4:There'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. What if we went to Treasury? You 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. No, no, these are actual financial instrument annuities and the management of those.
Speaker 4:There'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. So, you know, the management of that money turns out to be one of the most important sort of facets of American slash, Indian history. Right, the southern states that go bankrupt after the panic of 1837, they're all bailed out by Indian money. Right, their infrastructure is all built with Indian money through these loan instruments.
Speaker 4:So 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.
Speaker 4:So 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. So 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? How, his, how can historians actually kind of help?
Speaker 4:meet those needs. So 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. I 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. So people are writing big synthetic things that are trying to sort of reimagine and reposition the history.
Speaker 2:So 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. So 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.
Speaker 4:You know Well I think this is the other direction.
Speaker 1:I mean so maybe three directions for me? No, no, that's a. I mean the second direction would be a sort of studies direction, right, yeah.
Speaker 4:Which is like you know. Now we've had Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs and a bunch of films.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 4:You 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. Before these things came out, these people all trained themselves making YouTube videos and things like that. They've seized the means of production which now anyone can do. So is it a new world for sort of thinking about native media, and is it then that world part of a global indigenous world? Right, that sort of plays into the political formations of the last 50, 60 kinds of years. So I think there's a whole set of studies, dimensions that take us into literature, art, media, you know all of these.
Speaker 4:So 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. Native 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.
Speaker 4:And 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. I 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.
Speaker 4:So 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. And 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.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's this, it's, it's that that indigenous peoples are real practical resource. You know, you know for a future, if we're to have a future right.
Speaker 4:You 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. You know these things. I mean you know what you can see, is you know? I mean, I think, of it this way right, indian folks show up in the constitution as separate, individual tribal nations. Right, they're excluded, they're written into the constitution literally to be excluded from the constitution. You get to the cherokee cases, which are weird.
Speaker 4:I mean we should just admit how weird they are right I mean.
Speaker 2:So marshall saw that they were weird too, too.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, they all saw it. Joseph Story saw how weird they were Right.
Speaker 1:Everybody on that court was like what are we doing?
Speaker 4:Yeah, but they were also quite willing to invent new narratives. Oh, they're all nomadic, they never own property, they're all roaming around, they invent stuff. They just made it up right. So you notice, you've got. You've got the first case right, which really is the foundation for american property law right. Then you got the second big one, which gives you domestic dependent nations, right. Right, they're inside and they're outside. Maybe they're not, maybe we have a trust responsibility right. Then you get the third case that basically goes back to the indigenous constitute elements of the constitution and says like yeah, actually. So 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. I mean, you've got like an utterly unique political formation. It's not like anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 4:It'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. But you know, I mean I spent time in Taiwan and Australia, you know kind of other places. Indigenous people around the world. They look over at the United States and go, damn, if I could have those treaties, if I could have that, could I? Get a treaty. How could I have that, could we?
Speaker 4:So 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? Do more with it, think about how it actually structures American politics in ways that no American politician will readily admit. Yeah, use it Like we've got a four-part kind of, you know federal, state, local and tribal.
Speaker 3:Or anti-Indian law, anti, yeah, exactly. Federal anti-Indian law, except on Ndaga. They don't fall under that federal Indian law case because they never violated the treaty. Nothing was held in trust for them. They never accepted any money from the federal government, nothing was held in trust for them.
Speaker 1:They never accepted any money from the federal government.
Speaker 3:That's why your dad said the clearest line back to the original relationship with the US was through Onondaga.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they have no BIA government.
Speaker 3:No BIA government. They 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.
Speaker 3:Because 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. So 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. And so that's how they kept the BIA out of Onondaga and then other territories across the nation. You 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. You know we should have done what you did. How do we get it back? And the US said too late, you voted us in.
Speaker 4:Right 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. And it's interesting from a political kind of perspective. And 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? Right, what?
Speaker 1:does that?
Speaker 4:look like. And 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. And people are doing it. They are Right now About what the future looks like. Yeah, they are Kind of right now, you know, about what the future looks like, yeah.
Speaker 3:But this federal Indian law category is a real problem because if you're of the government, then how do you have treaties? How are you sovereign if you're a compartment under the United. States, Federal state, federal Indian law.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's the dilemma. Here it came later.
Speaker 3:That's not how this country was formed. I mean, that's the dilemma here. That came later. That's not how this country was formed First. International 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.
Speaker 2:That's the dilemma that the Sami have here, because they're essentially wards of whatever nation. Well, they're referred wards of, you know whatever nation.
Speaker 3:Well, they're referred wards of the US as well, the United States.
Speaker 2:But yeah, but you know, the sovereignty issue then becomes a slippery one to some degree. Right, you know to what degree are you under the United States, if they can?
Speaker 3:work towards at every stage, trying to assimilate Indian nations into the context of the United States. Can we go in reverse and separate from the US? Why does it always have to move towards assimilation? You know Right.
Speaker 4:Well, you could argue really that I mean the sovereignty movements of the last decades have actually moved further away from worship and more towards.
Speaker 3:I hope so right, you know so I think this is why it's an interesting moment.
Speaker 4:The story of the 19th century is the extension of American jurisdiction, citizenship claims, all of these sorts of things. What's interesting to me in the American context is usually the extension of citizenship is a good thing. This is what every immigrant wants. It's what the African-American movement was about. But 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.
Speaker 4:But 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. Is this interesting? It's a really interesting thing and I think you know far too americans don't know anything about it, right?
Speaker 1:haven't thought about it and, like you know, I mean I just you know I'd see this with you.
Speaker 4:Know 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? It's like oh, my God.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, no, they have no idea why that was Right.
Speaker 1:And then, of course, they think that's a funny question.
Speaker 4:Yeah, 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.
Speaker 3:Anand 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. It was the very next year the US bestowed citizenship on Native nations. Coincidence year the US bestowed citizenship on Native nations Coincidence.
Speaker 4:Really yeah, right, well, and you know, canada was the evildoer in that whole exchange, right, I mean the Canadians. This 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. People for so long have sat in the US and thought oh, you know, Canada, they've got their act together.
Speaker 2:It's like actually not so much, not so much.
Speaker 3:We 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. The Pope had traveled to Canada.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's why that came out of my mouth. But 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. When you speak to Catholic tribal leaders, you're kind of talking to yourself, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we really need to move forward on all of this stuff.
Speaker 2:So we're watching you you know Like yeah, risk management versus. You know real progress.
Speaker 3:Because 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. So they were all on board with the Jesuit story. And I went in there and said, but this is not Onondaga Nation territory. I mean, this is not Mohawk territory. You're on Onondaga Nation territory, you can go west to Orysville where the shrine is there, and slowly they kind of moved out. I felt that I could say that and I did. But yeah, so it was pretty difficult breaking down that foothold the county had on that place telling that erroneous story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so all these yellow buses would come into the fort. They'd learn about the Jesuit story and all that that's. You know, sandy's childhood. You know People come. We still have the fort, you know. It's still behind the Scano Center. In fact, we had a papal bull burning ceremony there once in 2018. That was very interesting, because they did that at like.
Speaker 1:Standing Rock.
Speaker 2:And I saw let's bring that guy out here and. But now you know young kids are coming to the Scano Center, so they're learning a different kind of way of thinking. You 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. So actually we're pretty proud of the fact that we were able to make. You know it's a county facility and so it's county backed. Onondaga Nation is helping out with. You know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right, where the Great Laugh piece was founded at this lake.
Speaker 2:So anyway, I think there are people are making different kinds of moves, you know, and I remain hopeful, you know. Right 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. But you know, whatever, let's draw this to a close. I want to thank you again, philip, for sitting here and being our guest on Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery.
Speaker 4:It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:Thank you, hope to see you again soon.
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 Hendricks Chapel and the Indigenous Values Initiative. If you like this episode, please check out our website and make sure to subscribe.
