August 4, 2021 • 36 mins
David Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal in 2019. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Dr. Treuer and Dr. Kendi held a powerful conversation about the ramifications of historical erasure, anti-Native racism, and Treuer’s antiracist proposal to return the National Parks to the tribes. For further reading, resources, and a transcript of this episode visit pushkin.fm/show/be-antiracist-ibram-kendi/
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin the idea that natives are not actually here. There's
sort of an insistence in our national storytelling on our disappearance.
(00:39):
That idea undergirded the exploitation and settlement of this entire continent.
That was a story that people told even way back
when as people were manifesting their destiny to justify the
theft of land, because it's not really theft if no
one is here to own it. History makes a lot
(01:03):
of noise in the United States. In this moment, the
noise seems louder. Ever. GOP activists are packing into school
board meetings demanding school curricula be wiped of historical truth
on race. GOP legislators are passing laws like the recent
one in Texas. Texas Republicans wanted to be sure teachers
(01:26):
aren't telling your kids that white people are inherently racist.
So this last session they made a list of concepts
public schoolers should and should not Lawn requirements were dropped
for students to read Martin Luther King, Junior United farm
Workers leader Sizar Chavez, and suffragists Susan B. Anthony, And
(01:49):
for good measure, the Texas Senate dropped requirements to teach
the Ku Kux Klan as morally wrong. Behind all the
loud arguments about history is something more insidious, the menacing
silence from history, the present silence echoing history. What's there
(02:13):
but we can't see what has been erased in plain view.
I'm abramax Kendy, and this is be anti racist. I
did not grasp the menace of silence when I went
to school as a child in Jamaica Queens. I could
(02:34):
see black neighbors, Latin X neighbors, Asian neighbors, and a
handful of white neighbors. But I couldnt see Native neighbors,
though they were there. What I saw was a fabricated mirage,
racist portrayals of uncivilized so called savages on TV and
in films, caricatures of Native men grinning as mascots for
(03:00):
sports teams. When Native Americans were mentioned in stories of
the past, we were served the trope of the Vanishing Indian,
a sad but semi romantic story of manifest destiny gone
too far in doing a way with a once noble people.
I wasn't alone being fed to vanishing Indian myth. A
(03:22):
twenty eighteen survey found that forty percent of Americans believe
that Native Americans no longer exist forty percent. But when
will Americans replace the vanishing Indian myth for the truth?
The vanishing history, or is it better to say banishing history?
(03:42):
The banishing of the relationship between settler colonialism, frontier wars,
state sanctioned genocides, Indian removal, and the spread of the
enslavement of Indigenous and African peoples. The banishing of the
inextricable link between anti Native racism and anti black racism.
(04:04):
The vanishing Indian trope was as misleading as the trope
of a happy slave. The Indian remained and the enslaved
remained angry. Both resisted robbers of their land and labor
and lives, neither in silence. But the silenced were never silenced,
(04:26):
just muted. I've been learning to hear the loudness of
Native history, their cultures, their stories, their lives, their ideas.
Let's listen today Welcome to be Anti Racist in Action podcast,
where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism,
(04:50):
How to save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas
and the destructiveness of racist power and policy, How to
free humanity through the unity of anti racist ideas and
the constructiveness of anti racist power and policy. On be
anti racist, we discuss how to make the impossible possible
(05:11):
and how to bring into being what modern humans have
never known, a just inequitable world. You ready, let's roll
(05:35):
the number one story. The dominant narrative about American Indian
people is that we were once great, and we are
great no more. And if there's a history written about us,
history is only that which we have endured and maybe
somehow survived. And nowhere in those accounts does it suggest
that we are actors in our own lives. David Troyer
(05:55):
is an Ojibway Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota.
His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee Native
America from eighteen ninety to the Present, was a final
list for the National Book Award in the Carnegie Medal
in twenty nineteen. He is currently a professor of English
(06:16):
at the University of Southern California. Troyer has written powerfully
about the ramifications of historical erasure and anti Native racism.
We sent down to talk about his call for the
US government to return the National Parks to the tribes. David,
I've been looking forward to today for quite some time.
(06:38):
I have learned and grown and been inspired by your work.
You're one of those writers who when you publish, I
read thank you. Recently, Rick Santorum, who is a former
US Senator and CNN political contributor, talked about how European
(06:58):
colonists and settlers birthed a nation from nothing. We came
here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation nothing.
I mean, there's nothing here. I mean, yes, we have
Native Americans, but candidly that there isn't much Native American
culture in American culture. When you heard those comments, I mean,
(07:19):
what was your first reaction? You know, the kindest thing
I can say is that statement is radically uninformed. It's
not that different from the most commonly held belief about
Native people. Our social utility in this country is to
have been here, but to have died off. The facts
(07:44):
of history are quite different from the sentiments that Centaurn
is expressing in that comment. As someone who was a
senator who should know something about the growth of the
American Republic and its institutions, he of all people should
know that, for example, the first act of the American
(08:04):
Revolutionaries was to dress up like Mohawk Indians and dump
tea in Boston Harbor. He should know that the American
Revolution was in many ways about who got to capitalize
off of exploiting Indian lands, the British Crown or the colonists.
That was one of the main reasons for going to war.
He should also know, as a former representative that the
(08:24):
legislature in which he served was in part modeled after
the separation of powers in the Iroquois Confederacy. It's to
the Iroquois Confederacy that the Young Republic looked for its
political organization. So to say that there's no Native American
culture in American culture is just one of the most
(08:47):
destructive but widespread fantasies that Americans in general have. When
I think of anti black racist ideas, there's so many
different tropes, but I would probably say that the idea
of black people is dangerous. It's probably the worst of all.
(09:07):
Is this idea of nothingness that Ricks and tom expressed
that so many Americans believe. Would you consider that the
most dangerous, the worst, or how would you contextualize that
specific idea within the larger gamut of anti nativeness. It's tough.
Do I have to choose the most damaging. If I
(09:30):
did have to choose, I'd say, yeah, that probably is
the idea that Natives are not actually here, sort of
an insistence in our national storytelling on our disappearance. That
idea undergirded the exploitation and settlement of this entire continent.
(09:51):
That was a story that people told even way back when,
as people were manifesting their destiny to justify the theft
of land, because it's not really theft if no one
is here to own it, and that has proven to
be a durableness. Absolutely. People who listen to this podcast
may not be looking at me, but I'm pretty white passing.
(10:15):
I'm not recognizably visibly Native. My father's Jewish, dark complexed
black hair, my mother is Native, dark black hair. And
then the four of us kids that they had. My
older brother looks like a Hollywood Native guy, very handsome,
dark skin, black hair. There's me. I look more like
Jason Statham for those of you who can't see me
(10:37):
right now, so like an action figure. This kidding, I don't.
But my younger brother is sort of somewhere in between.
And my sisters got blond here and blue eyes. So
growing up as we did on the Leech Like Reservation
and then moving out into the world, that idea of
native disappearance was something that we all experienced in different ways.
My brother went away to college in New Jersey at
Princeton and people say, well, what are you, where are
(10:59):
you from? He told him where he was from, and
he told them what he was, and he had people
say to his face, well, that can't be true. And
he said, what do you mean that can't be native
and said, no, we killed all of you. He said,
I think you missed one and maybe more than one.
And then I followed him there David troy or a
Native from the Leech Lake Reservation, and they say, we
can't be native. I said, why who? We'll look at you.
(11:21):
But the fact is that you have never once met
a Native person, So who are you to categorize what
I do and do not look like? You? Know? So
that invisibility myth functions in a lot of different ways,
and it's pernicious. As of the last Census, over five
million people identified as native or part Native on the census.
(11:45):
That means there are more Native people in this country,
not that you would know it, than there are people
who identify as Jewish, and that there are twice as
many Native American people in this country today as there
are people who identify as Muslim American. Not only are
we not gone, but we are here in numbers beginning
(12:06):
to approach the number of Native people who were here
in fourteen ninety one before Columbus showed up. We have
been reborn. What do you think the nation fears collectively
will happen if they give up that myth of invisibility,
of nothingness of this virgin American soil before the arrival
(12:27):
of European columnists. I think that if America collectively gave
up that myth and that story, they would be forced
to contemplate themselves in ways that are deeply unflattering. America
is not good at performing that kind of inward look.
(12:48):
It has never managed to let go both of our
invisibility and the myth of its own innocence in order
to properly interrogate this country's actions since its founding. The
story of Indian removal and the drive in Washington and
in the South to makes happened is usually told as
(13:11):
an attempt to get gold. But Andrew Jackson was a
real estate speculator, as were his friends. And when you're
looking at real estate in the South in the eighteen
twenties and thirties, you're not looking for gold, You're looking
for land to expand the institution of slavery. Indian removal
(13:32):
was all about expanding slavery. To recognize that to un
invisible us would mean that this country has to confront
its behaviors that drift pretty far from its stated ideals liberty, justice,
pursuit of happiness, of fair play people. I want to
(13:52):
see that. No, they don't into complicate the myth of
native invisibility even more. It seems to me that there's
almost two branches to that myth, and I'm going to
sort of articulate both branches based on barbaric things that
have been said about Native people. So of course Native folks,
(14:15):
like black folks, have been called barbaric and savages, when
in reality, the ideas themselves were barbaric. One is this
idea that the only good Indian is a dead Indian,
and the other is let's kill the Indian and save
the man. And so with the first, it's the literal
(14:36):
destruction of the body in the invisibility of the body
and the forced violent attempt to eliminate the body. And
then with the second is the violent, forced destruction of
the culture of the identity. I want to emphasize these
(14:57):
two because I think there are some Americans who will
recognize genocide of bodies as a problem as violent as
a crime against Native people, but they may not recognize
attacks of Native cultures and ways of life in being
in the world as violent. Do you see that in
(15:18):
your work. One of the ways that they tried to
destroy Native nations was to break up tribes by breaking
up families, and there was nearly compulsory attendance of Native
kids at government and religiously run boarding schools. The whole
(15:39):
point of them was, in the words of the founder
of the first one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Colonel Pratt, to
kill the Indian to save the man. And this was
accomplished by beatings, near starvation, being punished for speaking one's
native language and practicing one's native religion, by being not
allowed to return home to visit family. I think it's
(16:03):
telling that these boarding schools, almost all of them, had
attached to them, not just cool rooms and classrooms and dormitories.
They all had cemeteries. Boarding school was in many ways
where you went to die, not just as an Indian,
but also as a person. There was another assault on
Native nations, on Native polity, and that was by trying
(16:27):
to mainstream us. The idea in the late nineteenth century
was that Native people, to the extent that we still existed,
were suffering because we couldn't get with the civilization program,
the primary component of which was the private ownership of land.
So Senator DAWs promoted and wrote legislation called the General
(16:51):
Allotment Act, or the DAWs Act. The DAWs Act, passed
in the late eighteen eighties, attempted to sever communal ownership
of tribal lands and to assign individual parcels to individual
Native people as a way to civilize us. That's the rhetoric,
but really, in fact, what that ended up doing because
our populations had suffered so much, because there have been
(17:13):
so much violence visited on our bodies, that individual parcels
were assigned to heads of household and the quote unquote
surplus land was open to settlement. So the passage of
the DAWs Act alone in the late eighteen eighties bled
over ninety million acres away from Native people's At the
(17:36):
same time, and as the result of legislation of the
same Senator, the National Parks were born. Roughly eighty seven
million acres of wild lands were put into national parks
and monuments. Bourgeou David Troyer and Naddish Nicaus Goobob and
(17:56):
Don and podcast nicodeg be Anti racist is nicodeg Minowa
dash ibramex Kendy. I want to share with you one
of my takeaways, particularly for your recent essay in The Atlantic,
which you argue for the returning of the national parks
to the tribes, and I want you to tell me
(18:19):
whether it's wrong, what needs to be complicated about it.
And so my general takeaway from the peace was, you tried,
but you couldn't take away our bodies. You tried but
you failed to take away our tribes, our cultures. But
you did take a tremendous amount of land, right, and
(18:40):
it was a tremendous amount of theft. And thereby the
only way to remedy that theft of land is with land. Yeah,
that takeaway is spot on. My proposal in Atlantic is
something that should probably be done for Native people. It's
also something that should be done for American people. My impression,
(19:01):
I gotta call it my impression, because honestly, I don't
really speak for anybody other than myself. I'm not an
elected tribal leader. I'm not an hereditary lead of anything.
I'm just a guy who writes things and causes trouble.
That's what I do. I know the feeling, right, But
my feeling is that my tribe, other tribes, Blackfeet, Tongfa,
(19:23):
de Nay, Pueblo, Lakota, you name it, most of us
understand ourselves as being who we are because of where
we are. That's at the sort of foundation of our
tribal understandings, which are cultural and political. Everything that makes
(19:46):
me in a Jibwe person is about geography. It's about homeland.
You couldn't practice the remotest part of our culture really
someplace else. There's no place else, for instance, where wild
rice gross, where the things we harvest that feed us grow.
In my case, so the theft of land was aimed
(20:09):
at destroying us as a nation and feeding the growth
of the American nation. The only way that that can
be even partially undone is by the return of land.
There's also that misconception that the National parks were sort
of pristine and untouched and they were the most virgin
(20:30):
of all American virgin land. M Yeah, you're absolutely right.
The National parks were talked about and sort of conceived
of as these natural cathedrals, and people don't live in cathedrals, right,
they just worshiped there. The American habit in America's relationship
with land has always been one of both taming on
(20:53):
one hand and revering on the other. And frankly, that's
exactly how people kind of think about natives, right, disappearing
us on one hand and appreciating our innate qualities as
people imagine them. And we've kind of treated America can
land in a similar fashion. There's land that is to
be exploited, tamed, done in, and then the parks of
(21:16):
this land that is empty, primal, never touched. But the
fact is everything that Europeans and then subsequently non Europeans
who have come here, everything that they saw, had already
been shaped by native people for millennium. Those beautiful old growth,
shady forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked that way because
(21:39):
of controlled burns by tribes there who designed them to
look that way. Buffalo, New York is called Buffalo New
York because native tribes had burned forests to increase grasslands
and range lands as far east as Buffalo, to encourage
bison to live there because they're a great food source.
(22:01):
Yosemite Valley itself had been tended and cultivated for centuries
for acorn crops, for example, which is a primary food
source of many California tribes. So there's nothing untouched about
this landscape, nothing quote unquote virgin about it. This landscape
had been something that we had lived with, modulated, changed
(22:25):
shaped before anyone else got here, and have continued to
do so ever since. The most galling thing, of course,
is that they created these national parks as places outside
of time, as places outside of the reach of humans.
In order to facilitate that fantasy, they oftentimes forcibly removed
or excluded Native tribes for whom those particular parks were homelands.
(22:49):
That happened at Yellowstone, happened at Glacier, happened at the
Grand Canyon, among other places. So yeah, it's a problem
deeply embedded, so to return them would be something grand
justice is not just a recognition that a crime has
been committed, but there's also accountability, awareness of the scale
(23:13):
of the crime. But then there's also restitution. And one
of the reasons I was so blown away by your
anti racist proposal to return the National Parks to the
tribes is because you rightly framed the National Parks as
the most hollowed American ground. There's many different lands that
(23:34):
could be returned, but to convey the most precious of
all American lands to return what you've right are sometimes
called America's best idea. I think that speaks, at least
for me as a non native person. That is the
level of restitution that non Native people, that non Native Americans.
(23:58):
That's how big we need to be thinking. That's how
it seems to me. But and this is, you know,
the anti racist bit. America needs this to happen, not
just for our sake, but for its sake. I think
it's important for this country to remember and to become
acquainted with the idea that this country can still perform justice.
(24:24):
It needs to become a habit. I really feel like
this country is suffering in myriad ways because of its
insistence on its own innocence its reluctance to look at
what it's done and what it is still doing, not
just viaus of a Native people, by any stretch of
the imagination, it's suffering a crisis that justice and the
(24:49):
habit of justice could restore. So it needs to give
those parts back. I could not agree more. And so
why now, why make such a bold and critical and
precise proposal like returning the national parks to the tribes?
I think now, more so than probably any other time,
(25:10):
it's a time of reconsideration. There is, if not a
process and if not a place, there is certainly an
impulse at least to take stock. It's a bolder idea
to take away native lands and then mismanage them. That's
a bold idea. What's bold is leaving the parks at
(25:32):
the mercy of people like Donald Trump. President Obama had enlarged,
for example, Bearsier's National Monument and added further protections to it.
Two or three weeks after taking office, Donald Trump undid
all of that and reduced Bearsier's National Monument by eighty percent.
(25:52):
And he did this why because he was mad at
the Park Service for reporting the real numbers of his
inaugural festivities, which of course occurred on the National Mall,
which is a national monument and was monitored and by
the National Park Service. They reported the real numbers of
(26:13):
the people who were and were not there. Trump was
very mad, so he destroys the protections that Obama extended
to bears. Ears. It's bold to keep our parks in
such a vulnerable state, vulnerable to the whims of this
or that administration. That's a bold idea. My idea not
so bold. Returning the parks to a consortium of tribes
(26:36):
to manage on behalf of and for the benefit of
all Americans. That doesn't feel that bold at all, because
we're actually good at this practical That's what I would
call my idea. Oh, I would agree. And I think
we're living in a time in which the idea of
returning the best of American land to the tribes scares
(27:00):
people because they're like, what's going to happen to the land,
as opposed to I think what you're saying is what's
going to happen to the land if we don't return
it to the tribes? Right. I could be biased, but
I don't think so. I think the last five hundred
years have shown us that Native tribes are better at
taking care of land than white colonial settlers. Whose hands
(27:25):
do you want to put it in? Ours or theirs?
I had put my money on us. I mean, my
money's on you too. As you write about Native people
have been tending to land for more than fifteen thousand years?
Did I get that? Recent archaeological surveys suggests it's been
much longer than that, much longer. For people who are inspired,
(27:49):
for people who see very clearly how the returning of
the national parks to the tribes could be a form
of restorative justice, how would you suggest they contribute to
what I suspect will very soon become a struggle to
make this idea a reality. Yeah, well, they can vote
(28:12):
with their feet, they can vote with their ballots, those
people lucky enough to not have their vote suppressed, and
they can take individual action. You might remember with greater
clarity than I do, who said it. But the sentiment
is that racism deforms the racist as much as the
(28:33):
people upon whom that racism is placed. The same is
true for theft, and so it's good to give back,
not just the people receiving the gift, but to those
giving it. On an individual level. After that article was published,
I had a guy from North Carolina reach out to
(28:53):
me and he said, I have I can't remember now,
forty fifty acres in North Carolina, and I would like
to find a way to give it back to the
Native people, the tribes in North Carolina. How do I
do that? And I said, that is wonderful. I put
some calls out on the socials. Native Twitter, Native Facebook
(29:14):
are vibrant. Shout out to Native Twitter and Native Facebook, right,
and that makes me feel really good. It's a tiny
parcel relatively speaking, right, forty acres, but that's something, and
it's profound. Yeah, that is something. There were slaveholders who
came across abolitionist literature who came to recognize the theft
(29:37):
of labor, the theft of the bodies that they were
partaking in, and so they decided as individuals to do
the unthinkable and free people. I see this direct connection
between the manumenting of enslaved people and the returning of
land to Native people. And I think we as a nation,
(30:00):
we applaud those slaveholders who were able to do that,
but we can't make the connection right now in this
moment that there are people who can do something similar,
or we as a nation can do something similar by
returning the national parks to the tries. And I just
hope that everyone really thinks deeply about what they personally
(30:25):
can do. And as you stated how, restorative justice and
this type of restorative justice is not just for Native people,
it's for people, it's for humanity. Back in the days
of intertribal warfare, when my tribe was fighting our neighbors,
when a death was considered murder, there were a couple
(30:46):
choices open to you, and they follow kind of a
cultural script. The bereaved family who lost somebody to violence
could either put the deceased person's spirit through a ceremony
to give them rest and to see them on. But
there is another path too. You could ritually and in
(31:07):
effect adopt a member, usually of the same sex and
same age as the person you lost, to replace them
spiritually as a member of the community. And there was
a third option, and the third option was called the
laying of gifts. If you killed somebody and you were
terribly sorry, you would literally cover their body with gifts
(31:29):
of incredible value to basically pay for that death. All
three are different forms of restorative justice practiced by my tribe.
And just as this country borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy
to shape their models of government, I invite this country
to borrow our sense of what justice looks like and
(31:53):
how to achieve it. That's a gift that I'm willing
to give to this country. That would mean something. Think
about what that kind of justice would look like. I'm
happy you use that cultural reference point and spoke about
it as a gift, because I think even when we
think about our own personal lives in a very micro sense,
(32:14):
when we have wronged someone and when we personally reach
out to that person to declare to them our recognition
that we wrong them, then we take that next step
to heal and repair. Certainly that is beneficial for that person.
But I don't know if there's a better word to
(32:36):
think about the way in which we ultimately feel that's
better than a gift, right, And that's a gift that
communities of color, African American communities, Native communities, those are
gifts that we have been giving to this country since
the beginning, and despite being rejected and burned and gaslighted
(32:58):
and so on, we keep giving it. Indeed, how can
we begin to solve and repair and create this world anew.
I think with your proposal to return to national parks
to Native tribes, it gives the United States that ability
to do that, and I think that's really incredibly important
for us in this time. Well, David, it was just
(33:21):
great to talk to you, to learn from you. Thank
you so much. I really appreciate this time, in this
conversation and your energies. It means a lot. Thank you
so much. Shortly after my conversation with David Troyer, CNN
(33:44):
fired their commentator Rick Santorum over his assertion that there
isn't much Native American culture. In American culture is the
vanishing Indian now the vanishing Indian culture. To mute history
is to mute culture. On the other hand, to return
the National parks to the tribes is to begin to
(34:06):
vocalize Native American history three and culture and rights. The
National Parks have been called America's best idea. They were
created simultaneously with Native reservations. At the time, Oglala Lakota
spiritual leader black Elk noted that the United States made
(34:28):
little islands for us and other little islands for the
Four Leggeds and always. These islands are becoming smaller, but
native people remain, and Astroyer wrote, some of us have
stayed stubbornly near the parks, preserving our attachment to them.
It is time for the US government to preserve their
(34:51):
attachment to them. Let us return the national parks to
America's original people. Let us begin repairing America's racist past
with an anti racist president. Let Us be anti racist,
(35:18):
Be Anti Racist is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.
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(35:38):
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(36:00):
listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or whatever
you like to listen. Don't go be with my
Pushkin the idea that natives are not actually here. There's
sort of an insistence in our national storytelling on our disappearance.
(00:39):
That idea undergirded the exploitation and settlement of this entire continent.
That was a story that people told even way back
when as people were manifesting their destiny to justify the
theft of land, because it's not really theft if no
one is here to own it. History makes a lot
(01:03):
of noise in the United States. In this moment, the
noise seems louder. Ever. GOP activists are packing into school
board meetings demanding school curricula be wiped of historical truth
on race. GOP legislators are passing laws like the recent
one in Texas. Texas Republicans wanted to be sure teachers
(01:26):
aren't telling your kids that white people are inherently racist.
So this last session they made a list of concepts
public schoolers should and should not Lawn requirements were dropped
for students to read Martin Luther King, Junior United farm
Workers leader Sizar Chavez, and suffragists Susan B. Anthony, And
(01:49):
for good measure, the Texas Senate dropped requirements to teach
the Ku Kux Klan as morally wrong. Behind all the
loud arguments about history is something more insidious, the menacing
silence from history, the present silence echoing history. What's there
(02:13):
but we can't see what has been erased in plain view.
I'm abramax Kendy, and this is be anti racist. I
did not grasp the menace of silence when I went
to school as a child in Jamaica Queens. I could
(02:34):
see black neighbors, Latin X neighbors, Asian neighbors, and a
handful of white neighbors. But I couldnt see Native neighbors,
though they were there. What I saw was a fabricated mirage,
racist portrayals of uncivilized so called savages on TV and
in films, caricatures of Native men grinning as mascots for
(03:00):
sports teams. When Native Americans were mentioned in stories of
the past, we were served the trope of the Vanishing Indian,
a sad but semi romantic story of manifest destiny gone
too far in doing a way with a once noble people.
I wasn't alone being fed to vanishing Indian myth. A
(03:22):
twenty eighteen survey found that forty percent of Americans believe
that Native Americans no longer exist forty percent. But when
will Americans replace the vanishing Indian myth for the truth?
The vanishing history, or is it better to say banishing history?
(03:42):
The banishing of the relationship between settler colonialism, frontier wars,
state sanctioned genocides, Indian removal, and the spread of the
enslavement of Indigenous and African peoples. The banishing of the
inextricable link between anti Native racism and anti black racism.
(04:04):
The vanishing Indian trope was as misleading as the trope
of a happy slave. The Indian remained and the enslaved
remained angry. Both resisted robbers of their land and labor
and lives, neither in silence. But the silenced were never silenced,
(04:26):
just muted. I've been learning to hear the loudness of
Native history, their cultures, their stories, their lives, their ideas.
Let's listen today Welcome to be Anti Racist in Action podcast,
where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism,
(04:50):
How to save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas
and the destructiveness of racist power and policy, How to
free humanity through the unity of anti racist ideas and
the constructiveness of anti racist power and policy. On be
anti racist, we discuss how to make the impossible possible
(05:11):
and how to bring into being what modern humans have
never known, a just inequitable world. You ready, let's roll
(05:35):
the number one story. The dominant narrative about American Indian
people is that we were once great, and we are
great no more. And if there's a history written about us,
history is only that which we have endured and maybe
somehow survived. And nowhere in those accounts does it suggest
that we are actors in our own lives. David Troyer
(05:55):
is an Ojibway Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota.
His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee Native
America from eighteen ninety to the Present, was a final
list for the National Book Award in the Carnegie Medal
in twenty nineteen. He is currently a professor of English
(06:16):
at the University of Southern California. Troyer has written powerfully
about the ramifications of historical erasure and anti Native racism.
We sent down to talk about his call for the
US government to return the National Parks to the tribes. David,
I've been looking forward to today for quite some time.
(06:38):
I have learned and grown and been inspired by your work.
You're one of those writers who when you publish, I
read thank you. Recently, Rick Santorum, who is a former
US Senator and CNN political contributor, talked about how European
(06:58):
colonists and settlers birthed a nation from nothing. We came
here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation nothing.
I mean, there's nothing here. I mean, yes, we have
Native Americans, but candidly that there isn't much Native American
culture in American culture. When you heard those comments, I mean,
(07:19):
what was your first reaction? You know, the kindest thing
I can say is that statement is radically uninformed. It's
not that different from the most commonly held belief about
Native people. Our social utility in this country is to
have been here, but to have died off. The facts
(07:44):
of history are quite different from the sentiments that Centaurn
is expressing in that comment. As someone who was a
senator who should know something about the growth of the
American Republic and its institutions, he of all people should
know that, for example, the first act of the American
(08:04):
Revolutionaries was to dress up like Mohawk Indians and dump
tea in Boston Harbor. He should know that the American
Revolution was in many ways about who got to capitalize
off of exploiting Indian lands, the British Crown or the colonists.
That was one of the main reasons for going to war.
He should also know, as a former representative that the
(08:24):
legislature in which he served was in part modeled after
the separation of powers in the Iroquois Confederacy. It's to
the Iroquois Confederacy that the Young Republic looked for its
political organization. So to say that there's no Native American
culture in American culture is just one of the most
(08:47):
destructive but widespread fantasies that Americans in general have. When
I think of anti black racist ideas, there's so many
different tropes, but I would probably say that the idea
of black people is dangerous. It's probably the worst of all.
(09:07):
Is this idea of nothingness that Ricks and tom expressed
that so many Americans believe. Would you consider that the
most dangerous, the worst, or how would you contextualize that
specific idea within the larger gamut of anti nativeness. It's tough.
Do I have to choose the most damaging. If I
(09:30):
did have to choose, I'd say, yeah, that probably is
the idea that Natives are not actually here, sort of
an insistence in our national storytelling on our disappearance. That
idea undergirded the exploitation and settlement of this entire continent.
(09:51):
That was a story that people told even way back when,
as people were manifesting their destiny to justify the theft
of land, because it's not really theft if no one
is here to own it, and that has proven to
be a durableness. Absolutely. People who listen to this podcast
may not be looking at me, but I'm pretty white passing.
(10:15):
I'm not recognizably visibly Native. My father's Jewish, dark complexed
black hair, my mother is Native, dark black hair. And
then the four of us kids that they had. My
older brother looks like a Hollywood Native guy, very handsome,
dark skin, black hair. There's me. I look more like
Jason Statham for those of you who can't see me
(10:37):
right now, so like an action figure. This kidding, I don't.
But my younger brother is sort of somewhere in between.
And my sisters got blond here and blue eyes. So
growing up as we did on the Leech Like Reservation
and then moving out into the world, that idea of
native disappearance was something that we all experienced in different ways.
My brother went away to college in New Jersey at
Princeton and people say, well, what are you, where are
(10:59):
you from? He told him where he was from, and
he told them what he was, and he had people
say to his face, well, that can't be true. And
he said, what do you mean that can't be native
and said, no, we killed all of you. He said,
I think you missed one and maybe more than one.
And then I followed him there David troy or a
Native from the Leech Lake Reservation, and they say, we
can't be native. I said, why who? We'll look at you.
(11:21):
But the fact is that you have never once met
a Native person, So who are you to categorize what
I do and do not look like? You? Know? So
that invisibility myth functions in a lot of different ways,
and it's pernicious. As of the last Census, over five
million people identified as native or part Native on the census.
(11:45):
That means there are more Native people in this country,
not that you would know it, than there are people
who identify as Jewish, and that there are twice as
many Native American people in this country today as there
are people who identify as Muslim American. Not only are
we not gone, but we are here in numbers beginning
(12:06):
to approach the number of Native people who were here
in fourteen ninety one before Columbus showed up. We have
been reborn. What do you think the nation fears collectively
will happen if they give up that myth of invisibility,
of nothingness of this virgin American soil before the arrival
(12:27):
of European columnists. I think that if America collectively gave
up that myth and that story, they would be forced
to contemplate themselves in ways that are deeply unflattering. America
is not good at performing that kind of inward look.
(12:48):
It has never managed to let go both of our
invisibility and the myth of its own innocence in order
to properly interrogate this country's actions since its founding. The
story of Indian removal and the drive in Washington and
in the South to makes happened is usually told as
(13:11):
an attempt to get gold. But Andrew Jackson was a
real estate speculator, as were his friends. And when you're
looking at real estate in the South in the eighteen
twenties and thirties, you're not looking for gold, You're looking
for land to expand the institution of slavery. Indian removal
(13:32):
was all about expanding slavery. To recognize that to un
invisible us would mean that this country has to confront
its behaviors that drift pretty far from its stated ideals liberty, justice,
pursuit of happiness, of fair play people. I want to
(13:52):
see that. No, they don't into complicate the myth of
native invisibility even more. It seems to me that there's
almost two branches to that myth, and I'm going to
sort of articulate both branches based on barbaric things that
have been said about Native people. So of course Native folks,
(14:15):
like black folks, have been called barbaric and savages, when
in reality, the ideas themselves were barbaric. One is this
idea that the only good Indian is a dead Indian,
and the other is let's kill the Indian and save
the man. And so with the first, it's the literal
(14:36):
destruction of the body in the invisibility of the body
and the forced violent attempt to eliminate the body. And
then with the second is the violent, forced destruction of
the culture of the identity. I want to emphasize these
(14:57):
two because I think there are some Americans who will
recognize genocide of bodies as a problem as violent as
a crime against Native people, but they may not recognize
attacks of Native cultures and ways of life in being
in the world as violent. Do you see that in
(15:18):
your work. One of the ways that they tried to
destroy Native nations was to break up tribes by breaking
up families, and there was nearly compulsory attendance of Native
kids at government and religiously run boarding schools. The whole
(15:39):
point of them was, in the words of the founder
of the first one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Colonel Pratt, to
kill the Indian to save the man. And this was
accomplished by beatings, near starvation, being punished for speaking one's
native language and practicing one's native religion, by being not
allowed to return home to visit family. I think it's
(16:03):
telling that these boarding schools, almost all of them, had
attached to them, not just cool rooms and classrooms and dormitories.
They all had cemeteries. Boarding school was in many ways
where you went to die, not just as an Indian,
but also as a person. There was another assault on
Native nations, on Native polity, and that was by trying
(16:27):
to mainstream us. The idea in the late nineteenth century
was that Native people, to the extent that we still existed,
were suffering because we couldn't get with the civilization program,
the primary component of which was the private ownership of land.
So Senator DAWs promoted and wrote legislation called the General
(16:51):
Allotment Act, or the DAWs Act. The DAWs Act, passed
in the late eighteen eighties, attempted to sever communal ownership
of tribal lands and to assign individual parcels to individual
Native people as a way to civilize us. That's the rhetoric,
but really, in fact, what that ended up doing because
our populations had suffered so much, because there have been
(17:13):
so much violence visited on our bodies, that individual parcels
were assigned to heads of household and the quote unquote
surplus land was open to settlement. So the passage of
the DAWs Act alone in the late eighteen eighties bled
over ninety million acres away from Native people's At the
(17:36):
same time, and as the result of legislation of the
same Senator, the National Parks were born. Roughly eighty seven
million acres of wild lands were put into national parks
and monuments. Bourgeou David Troyer and Naddish Nicaus Goobob and
(17:56):
Don and podcast nicodeg be Anti racist is nicodeg Minowa
dash ibramex Kendy. I want to share with you one
of my takeaways, particularly for your recent essay in The Atlantic,
which you argue for the returning of the national parks
to the tribes, and I want you to tell me
(18:19):
whether it's wrong, what needs to be complicated about it.
And so my general takeaway from the peace was, you tried,
but you couldn't take away our bodies. You tried but
you failed to take away our tribes, our cultures. But
you did take a tremendous amount of land, right, and
(18:40):
it was a tremendous amount of theft. And thereby the
only way to remedy that theft of land is with land. Yeah,
that takeaway is spot on. My proposal in Atlantic is
something that should probably be done for Native people. It's
also something that should be done for American people. My impression,
(19:01):
I gotta call it my impression, because honestly, I don't
really speak for anybody other than myself. I'm not an
elected tribal leader. I'm not an hereditary lead of anything.
I'm just a guy who writes things and causes trouble.
That's what I do. I know the feeling, right, But
my feeling is that my tribe, other tribes, Blackfeet, Tongfa,
(19:23):
de Nay, Pueblo, Lakota, you name it, most of us
understand ourselves as being who we are because of where
we are. That's at the sort of foundation of our
tribal understandings, which are cultural and political. Everything that makes
(19:46):
me in a Jibwe person is about geography. It's about homeland.
You couldn't practice the remotest part of our culture really
someplace else. There's no place else, for instance, where wild
rice gross, where the things we harvest that feed us grow.
In my case, so the theft of land was aimed
(20:09):
at destroying us as a nation and feeding the growth
of the American nation. The only way that that can
be even partially undone is by the return of land.
There's also that misconception that the National parks were sort
of pristine and untouched and they were the most virgin
(20:30):
of all American virgin land. M Yeah, you're absolutely right.
The National parks were talked about and sort of conceived
of as these natural cathedrals, and people don't live in cathedrals, right,
they just worshiped there. The American habit in America's relationship
with land has always been one of both taming on
(20:53):
one hand and revering on the other. And frankly, that's
exactly how people kind of think about natives, right, disappearing
us on one hand and appreciating our innate qualities as
people imagine them. And we've kind of treated America can
land in a similar fashion. There's land that is to
be exploited, tamed, done in, and then the parks of
(21:16):
this land that is empty, primal, never touched. But the
fact is everything that Europeans and then subsequently non Europeans
who have come here, everything that they saw, had already
been shaped by native people for millennium. Those beautiful old growth,
shady forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked that way because
(21:39):
of controlled burns by tribes there who designed them to
look that way. Buffalo, New York is called Buffalo New
York because native tribes had burned forests to increase grasslands
and range lands as far east as Buffalo, to encourage
bison to live there because they're a great food source.
(22:01):
Yosemite Valley itself had been tended and cultivated for centuries
for acorn crops, for example, which is a primary food
source of many California tribes. So there's nothing untouched about
this landscape, nothing quote unquote virgin about it. This landscape
had been something that we had lived with, modulated, changed
(22:25):
shaped before anyone else got here, and have continued to
do so ever since. The most galling thing, of course,
is that they created these national parks as places outside
of time, as places outside of the reach of humans.
In order to facilitate that fantasy, they oftentimes forcibly removed
or excluded Native tribes for whom those particular parks were homelands.
(22:49):
That happened at Yellowstone, happened at Glacier, happened at the
Grand Canyon, among other places. So yeah, it's a problem
deeply embedded, so to return them would be something grand
justice is not just a recognition that a crime has
been committed, but there's also accountability, awareness of the scale
(23:13):
of the crime. But then there's also restitution. And one
of the reasons I was so blown away by your
anti racist proposal to return the National Parks to the
tribes is because you rightly framed the National Parks as
the most hollowed American ground. There's many different lands that
(23:34):
could be returned, but to convey the most precious of
all American lands to return what you've right are sometimes
called America's best idea. I think that speaks, at least
for me as a non native person. That is the
level of restitution that non Native people, that non Native Americans.
(23:58):
That's how big we need to be thinking. That's how
it seems to me. But and this is, you know,
the anti racist bit. America needs this to happen, not
just for our sake, but for its sake. I think
it's important for this country to remember and to become
acquainted with the idea that this country can still perform justice.
(24:24):
It needs to become a habit. I really feel like
this country is suffering in myriad ways because of its
insistence on its own innocence its reluctance to look at
what it's done and what it is still doing, not
just viaus of a Native people, by any stretch of
the imagination, it's suffering a crisis that justice and the
(24:49):
habit of justice could restore. So it needs to give
those parts back. I could not agree more. And so
why now, why make such a bold and critical and
precise proposal like returning the national parks to the tribes?
I think now, more so than probably any other time,
(25:10):
it's a time of reconsideration. There is, if not a
process and if not a place, there is certainly an
impulse at least to take stock. It's a bolder idea
to take away native lands and then mismanage them. That's
a bold idea. What's bold is leaving the parks at
(25:32):
the mercy of people like Donald Trump. President Obama had enlarged,
for example, Bearsier's National Monument and added further protections to it.
Two or three weeks after taking office, Donald Trump undid
all of that and reduced Bearsier's National Monument by eighty percent.
(25:52):
And he did this why because he was mad at
the Park Service for reporting the real numbers of his
inaugural festivities, which of course occurred on the National Mall,
which is a national monument and was monitored and by
the National Park Service. They reported the real numbers of
(26:13):
the people who were and were not there. Trump was
very mad, so he destroys the protections that Obama extended
to bears. Ears. It's bold to keep our parks in
such a vulnerable state, vulnerable to the whims of this
or that administration. That's a bold idea. My idea not
so bold. Returning the parks to a consortium of tribes
(26:36):
to manage on behalf of and for the benefit of
all Americans. That doesn't feel that bold at all, because
we're actually good at this practical That's what I would
call my idea. Oh, I would agree. And I think
we're living in a time in which the idea of
returning the best of American land to the tribes scares
(27:00):
people because they're like, what's going to happen to the land,
as opposed to I think what you're saying is what's
going to happen to the land if we don't return
it to the tribes? Right. I could be biased, but
I don't think so. I think the last five hundred
years have shown us that Native tribes are better at
taking care of land than white colonial settlers. Whose hands
(27:25):
do you want to put it in? Ours or theirs?
I had put my money on us. I mean, my
money's on you too. As you write about Native people
have been tending to land for more than fifteen thousand years?
Did I get that? Recent archaeological surveys suggests it's been
much longer than that, much longer. For people who are inspired,
(27:49):
for people who see very clearly how the returning of
the national parks to the tribes could be a form
of restorative justice, how would you suggest they contribute to
what I suspect will very soon become a struggle to
make this idea a reality. Yeah, well, they can vote
(28:12):
with their feet, they can vote with their ballots, those
people lucky enough to not have their vote suppressed, and
they can take individual action. You might remember with greater
clarity than I do, who said it. But the sentiment
is that racism deforms the racist as much as the
(28:33):
people upon whom that racism is placed. The same is
true for theft, and so it's good to give back,
not just the people receiving the gift, but to those
giving it. On an individual level. After that article was published,
I had a guy from North Carolina reach out to
(28:53):
me and he said, I have I can't remember now,
forty fifty acres in North Carolina, and I would like
to find a way to give it back to the
Native people, the tribes in North Carolina. How do I
do that? And I said, that is wonderful. I put
some calls out on the socials. Native Twitter, Native Facebook
(29:14):
are vibrant. Shout out to Native Twitter and Native Facebook, right,
and that makes me feel really good. It's a tiny
parcel relatively speaking, right, forty acres, but that's something, and
it's profound. Yeah, that is something. There were slaveholders who
came across abolitionist literature who came to recognize the theft
(29:37):
of labor, the theft of the bodies that they were
partaking in, and so they decided as individuals to do
the unthinkable and free people. I see this direct connection
between the manumenting of enslaved people and the returning of
land to Native people. And I think we as a nation,
(30:00):
we applaud those slaveholders who were able to do that,
but we can't make the connection right now in this
moment that there are people who can do something similar,
or we as a nation can do something similar by
returning the national parks to the tries. And I just
hope that everyone really thinks deeply about what they personally
(30:25):
can do. And as you stated how, restorative justice and
this type of restorative justice is not just for Native people,
it's for people, it's for humanity. Back in the days
of intertribal warfare, when my tribe was fighting our neighbors,
when a death was considered murder, there were a couple
(30:46):
choices open to you, and they follow kind of a
cultural script. The bereaved family who lost somebody to violence
could either put the deceased person's spirit through a ceremony
to give them rest and to see them on. But
there is another path too. You could ritually and in
(31:07):
effect adopt a member, usually of the same sex and
same age as the person you lost, to replace them
spiritually as a member of the community. And there was
a third option, and the third option was called the
laying of gifts. If you killed somebody and you were
terribly sorry, you would literally cover their body with gifts
(31:29):
of incredible value to basically pay for that death. All
three are different forms of restorative justice practiced by my tribe.
And just as this country borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy
to shape their models of government, I invite this country
to borrow our sense of what justice looks like and
(31:53):
how to achieve it. That's a gift that I'm willing
to give to this country. That would mean something. Think
about what that kind of justice would look like. I'm
happy you use that cultural reference point and spoke about
it as a gift, because I think even when we
think about our own personal lives in a very micro sense,
(32:14):
when we have wronged someone and when we personally reach
out to that person to declare to them our recognition
that we wrong them, then we take that next step
to heal and repair. Certainly that is beneficial for that person.
But I don't know if there's a better word to
(32:36):
think about the way in which we ultimately feel that's
better than a gift, right, And that's a gift that
communities of color, African American communities, Native communities, those are
gifts that we have been giving to this country since
the beginning, and despite being rejected and burned and gaslighted
(32:58):
and so on, we keep giving it. Indeed, how can
we begin to solve and repair and create this world anew.
I think with your proposal to return to national parks
to Native tribes, it gives the United States that ability
to do that, and I think that's really incredibly important
for us in this time. Well, David, it was just
(33:21):
great to talk to you, to learn from you. Thank
you so much. I really appreciate this time, in this
conversation and your energies. It means a lot. Thank you
so much. Shortly after my conversation with David Troyer, CNN
(33:44):
fired their commentator Rick Santorum over his assertion that there
isn't much Native American culture. In American culture is the
vanishing Indian now the vanishing Indian culture. To mute history
is to mute culture. On the other hand, to return
the National parks to the tribes is to begin to
(34:06):
vocalize Native American history three and culture and rights. The
National Parks have been called America's best idea. They were
created simultaneously with Native reservations. At the time, Oglala Lakota
spiritual leader black Elk noted that the United States made
(34:28):
little islands for us and other little islands for the
Four Leggeds and always. These islands are becoming smaller, but
native people remain, and Astroyer wrote, some of us have
stayed stubbornly near the parks, preserving our attachment to them.
It is time for the US government to preserve their
(34:51):
attachment to them. Let us return the national parks to
America's original people. Let us begin repairing America's racist past
with an anti racist president. Let Us be anti racist,
(35:18):
Be Anti Racist is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.
It is written and hosted by doctor Ebram x Kindy
and produced by Alexander Garratton, with associate producer Britney Brown.
Our engineer has been Talliday. Our editors Julia Barton and
I show runner at Sasha Mathias, Our executive producers Jollie
tam Willad and Me and Lovelle Many thanks to Tammy
Wain and doctor Heather Sandford at the Sender for Anti
(35:38):
Racist Research at Boston University. For all of the health
at Pushkin, thanks to Heather Fame, Carli Migliori, John Schnars,
and Jacob Wiseberg. You can find doctor Kenny on Twitter
at d r Abram and on Instagram at Ebram x
k You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at
pushkin Pods, and you can sign up for our news
letter at pushkin dot fm. To find a Pushkin podcast,
(36:00):
listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or whatever
you like to listen. Don't go be with my
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