Why Not Both?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's a certain amount of people out there that I'm
sure are not working today, and he might be saying,
wait a second, no work today. Yeah, I forget about
this day all the time too. Yeah. So it is
Columbus Day slash Indigenous People's Day. Now, we have a
lot of fun on this show, but one of the
things is we like to see day, what day did? Like,

(00:23):
what are we celebrating today? Well, these are two days
that are intertwined together. Very specifically. Columbus Day has been
a thing in something that people have noted. They say,
October the twelfth is really the day in fourteen ninety
two that he made landfall in the Caribbean, discovered the

(00:46):
New World, or the Americas or the Western Hemisphere, and
we're sitting here trying to, you know, figure out exactly
what he did. Now we have a lot of evidence
that it didn't go super well. He yes, he showed up.

(01:07):
It's an incredibly consequential moment in world history that we
had somebody from Europe find the Americas essentially and go
back and report what they saw. We have evidence that
the Vikings and leif Erickson did that hundreds of years earlier,
but nothing really came of that, and they didn't really
do much exploring. They ran into it, they said they

(01:29):
found something, and then they kind of went back. But
alas Christopher Columbus finding the New World gave Spain and
France and England all the ideas that they could think
of the Portuguese as well of hey, we need to,
you know, have a presence over there. And the world

(01:49):
was in a conquerable state in the mid thousands. Can
you say that, you know something like in the fourteen
to fifteen hundreds, you see all the conquering, all of
the wars that were happening for the first five hundred years,
you know, medieval times and even beyond that. Right, there

(02:10):
are so many ebbs and flows over hundreds of years
that society made in Europe. Well, who's to say we
couldn't just do the same thing in the Western hemisphere,
especially if we know that we can grow some of
this stuff and some of this other stuff's available. As
we've gotten a little bit more aware of the atrocities

(02:34):
that are kind of tacked onto the legacy of Christopher
Columbus and a lot of those early explorers that came
and wanted to see what the New world was all about.
We've become a little more sensitive as a society, maybe
not person to person, but as a society as a whole.

(02:54):
That celebrating our commemorating a moment where a lot of
hardship was brought on the people who were already here
based solely on that happening. Now, Christopher Columbus wouldn't have
discovered the New World. Someone else would have, and it
would not have taken that much longer. Okay, somebody else,
some genius or some exploration would have said, you know what,

(03:17):
we're going to go the other direction and see what
we've run into. And they would eventually run into something, okay,
and I don't think it would have been that much
longer for them to find it. They might have landed
somewhere else. Maybe things would have gone a little bit differently.
I think we probably would have came to the same conclusion.
But this is what happens. Right. You have a figure,

(03:39):
historically speaking, that people say was incredibly important, and make
no bones about it, Christopher Columbus is incredibly important. But
also you have to understand that there were people that
lived on this land well before all of these immigrants
or explorers from Europe came over and eventually started to
take up parts of these lands, trying to either coexist

(04:01):
or war over these spots with the tribes that existed.
Now we act like the tribes that were existed, and
we as a society try to act like the tribes
that existed. Somehow were highly populated in very specific areas
throughout the entire country, and we just ransacked everybody and
told them to get out of the way. You got

(04:22):
to think about there were only four to five million
people in any one time in what we call the United
States of America. Now, I mean that's not a whole lot.
You think about the population between Iowa and Nebraska. There
are more people between those two states than there were
of Native American tribes when the United States started being
settled by the white settlers. So then what occurs, what

(04:46):
happens after that, Well, you have a lot of conquering.
You have a lot of land that's there. The tribes
were warring over a lot of those spaces for food,
for space, and land for leadership, and that was happening
well before anybody landed here. You know, I don't know
how much we take into account for that, but over time,

(05:09):
as more and more people came to inhabit this land
from Europe, specifically from Great Britain, or from Spain and France,
and of course eventually places like Ireland and Eastern Europe
and Russia and you know, the Asian American population. This
country became a true melting pot of pretty much every
conceivable nationality and background that you could think of, which

(05:31):
is why I find it pretty ironic that, you know,
there are so many people out there that are trying
to gatekeep people from coming in. In general, now, illegal
immigration not cool, never should be allowed, and we need
to do a better job with that. Legal immigration though,
that's really what the backbone of this country has always been.
After the Civil War, things kind of picked up in

(05:52):
manifest destiny took over, and many tribes who had originally
had agreements to have certain parcels of land or you know,
accepted different pieces of land that they were willing to
peacefully go to to avoid a major conflict against the
more well organized and well armed white men who were saying, hey,

(06:14):
our military says this is ours. Now, we want to
build a railroad through here and try to come to
some sort of deal. A lot of those treaties were broken.
There are three books that I have that I've read
and I really think do a good job of illustrating
this type of relationship and why it is important for
us to not just commemorate the historical achievement of Christopher

(06:37):
Columbus being the first European to come to the North
America's North and South America's I should say, the Americas
in general, landing and the Caribbean, but then going back
over and then there being a plan of like, hey,
we need to like really fully explore this. That's important,
but we also need to be acknowledging and celebrating the
indigenous peoples of this continent as well. I'll tell you

(07:00):
the three books that I think are worth reading if
you're interested in such histories, and we'll do that next
on news radio eleven ten kfab.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Emrie Sunger. On news radio eleven ten kfab.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
We were talking about the day. The day itself, we
have a day called Columbus Day and it's also on
the calendar as Indigenous People's Day, and we've you know,
in the last segment, I kind of talked about that
and why I think it's important for us to note
both of those. Right. I've read three books in the

(07:36):
last couple of years that I think to try to
understand the perspective of why I think Indigenous People's Day
is important to note. You have to understand the people
that were here before any of this stuff happened. I
have three of them. Number One sixteen nineteen by James Horn. Now,

(08:00):
this is not the sixteen nineteen Project, which I know
is notorious and kind of a liberal think tank kind
of thing, especially for people of color. I'm okay with them.
We like the it's the sixteen nineteen product doing whatever
makes sense to them. Right, That's not what I'm referencing here.
There's a book called sixteen nineteen. Now, if you google

(08:21):
that sixteen nineteen book, you got to make sure it's
the James Horn one. I don't want you to be
getting confused by anything sixteen nineteen Project or anything like that.
Sixteen nineteen is a book by James Horn which talks
specifically about Jamestown and what it says is the forging

(08:41):
of American democracy. It's called sixteen nineteen because in sixteen
nineteen two things happened that were incredibly consequential. Number One,
the people in Jamestown. The settlers were empowered by the
English for the first time to have someone in each
plot of land at the Jamestown Church and meet every

(09:04):
couple of weeks to discuss what needed to happen and
kind of govern themselves in a waiting for England to
tell them what to do. So first kind of inkling
that there could be a representative government in this country.
You know, it took one hundred, one hundred and seventy
years before you know, we fully had the constitution ratified

(09:28):
and we were off and running, but we got there eventually.
This was the first inclination of that. Also, in sixteen nineteen,
the first African slaves arrived to what was Jamestown at
the time and kind of started what became a tradition
in the South of slavery. But it doesn't harp on

(09:49):
that as much as it also talks about what life
was like for those settlers at the beginning of the
Jamestown settlement, which included their relationship with the Powhattan Native
American tribe, which was locate very close to where they
landed and where they were settling. Now, you have to
keep in mind here that a lot of this stuff
this information is being told through letters, it's being told

(10:10):
through diaries, a lot of information that we're trying to
kind of put together based on what we know. Again,
a lot of this stuff was happening at the beginning
of the sixteen hundreds, a long time ago. But it
does illustrate the initial interactions, the feelings that were there
between the Native Americans who had never seen the white
man before, except maybe if they had been a little

(10:31):
bit further south in Rono Coop, which was the first attempt.
There were a couple of attempts at settlements that didn't
actually pan out. Everybody ended up dying, right, what crazy
things to do, But you get to learn about the
people that were over there and how that relationship went.
Wasn't always peachy as you could imagine, but it also

(10:55):
the white settlers tried to play ball on multiple occasions
just to be like, hey, we're just trying to survive
over here and trying to coexist. And it worked for
certain times, and sometimes there were leadership changes, it didn't
work so well. So sixteen nineteen does a good job
of illustrating those relationships back in the early sixteen hundreds.
Book number two, it's a book called The Real All Americans.

(11:19):
The Real All Americans is by Sally Jenkins, noted sportswriter
from Sports Illustrated. If you remember, she wrote a book
called The Real All Americans and it kind of talks
about the Carlisle Indian School. Now, this was in an
age in the middle of manifest destiny in the eighteen
sixties and seventies, in the wake of the recovery and

(11:39):
reconstruction of the Civil War, where America was moving west
and Native American tribes were very sparsed out throughout the
American West. As the movement of America and our government
kept moving in that direction, well, a lot of leaders

(12:01):
in American or Native American tribes wanted their children to
get an education so they had a fighting chance to
be successful in this new world, in this new America.
And so people like from the Carlisle Indian School specifically
wanted to try to give them the best education they could.
Some who are more into the woke minded variations of

(12:23):
this one hundred and fifty years later are saying, oh, well,
that's assimilation and that's incredibly racist. You're trying to eliminate
their culture. You have to read how a lot of
those interactions went many of these Native American leaders wanted
to They volunteered to have their children taken to get
an education so they could be successful in this school

(12:44):
or in this society. But there's a lot more to that.
It's kind of told through the story of those who
went to that school over the fifty plus years that
that thing was happening in Pennsylvania, and also how important
their football team was to people like us, or people
in the North, or people who hadn't seen Native Americans,
and how we understand Native Americans to be very similar

(13:05):
to who we are. You know, even in the early
nineteen hundreds, many people just thought that they were still
savages and warriors, and they were, you know, something that
belonged in a circus more than they were just actual people.
And the Carlisle Indian School football team, led by characters
like Jim Thorpe, led by characters like head coach Pop Warner,
helped determine and change the way that people viewed Native

(13:27):
Americans as a whole. And I think it's an incredibly
positive story in the way that things kind of progressed
for throughout those decades that that school was operational. The
third book is a tougher one to read. And by
the way, that one called The Real All Americans by
Sally Jenkins. The third one's a tough one. It's called
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and it's by d. Brown.

(13:48):
It's a longer book that it goes tried by tribe
basically in the American West, as Manifest Destiny was moving
to the West coast in America. It was talking very
specifically about how each tribe i've lost their land or
the treaties that they had signed, the leaders in their viewpoints,
and how they were trying to either cooperate with the
settlers as in the military as things moved along, or

(14:11):
how they may have tried to be an obstacle and
didn't play ball necessarily in the right way, or preferred
to fight. How certain tribes were fighting with each other
over certain land areas and then would work with the
United States military to help ambush the other.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
It's a tough read.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
It's a tough book to kind of get through if
you get emotional about certain things, but it does an
incredibly good job of explaining some of the stuff that
was happening to Native American tribes from basically eighteen sixty
to eighteen ninety, when all this Old West stuff was
kind of going down and America was moving westward again.

(14:50):
I wouldn't give that book to somebody who's a fourteen
year old to read, because there's a lot of heavy
stuff in there. But if you are interested in how
America's reallylationship with Native Americans was going post Civil War,
that book does as good a job as any and
it does it in a lot of detail. Whether you
were hoping to see or read that or not. So

(15:13):
the three books highly recommended to learn more about our
relationship with Native Americans on this land that we're living
in right now. On this Indigenous People's Day sixteen nineteen
by James Horn, The Real All Americans by Sally Jenkins,
and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Deep Brown.
Those three is going to give you a pretty good

(15:34):
kind of snapshot at different points of time, but also
at different perspectives of how different groups of people saw
the way that things were going down. As the European
ancestry basically kind of continued to take over what this
land was from people who actually had been here for hundreds,

(15:57):
if not thousands of years, and the relationships with those
two sides as that was happening. It is very interesting
and I think it's worth mentioning here on this day
three forty eight. We'll come back with more on news
radio eleven ten kfab. I think it is important for
us to note Indigenous People's Day while also observing Columbus
Day because of how important that is as well it

(16:17):
can be both. I did have an email here from
Rob and he said, you know, there are some people
that are just making the play to like eliminate Columbus Day.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
And I get that.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
I understand why people are doing that, because that's just
another piece of the WO agendas. We need to erase
or pull down anything that we disagree with, and you know,
I think that some of that is appropriate, depending on
what we're talking about specifically. I also think that it's
incredibly naive and kind of stupid, frankly, to erase history

(16:50):
just because it doesn't necessarily agree with our current values
in our everyday society. So, yes, Columbus arrived in North
America or in the Caribbean specifically, on over the twelfth
of sept fourteen ninety two. So yeah, was he an
awesome guy? We don't have a lot of evidence to
state that he was a good guy. In fact, he
was probably doing what most of the explorers that were

(17:11):
out there would do and try to take as much
land and property as he possibly could, and he took
it back with him back to Europe so they could
take a look at and say, Okay, now we got
something here, let's go back and see what else we
can get. Because that's what the world was doing there.
And to think that no one else in the world,
specifically people in Africa and the tribal wars that they

(17:34):
were having down in Africa, plus all of the tribal
issues and wars that were going on in a variety
of ways here in the Americas before Christopher Columbus came
in discovered America. I mean, just I think pretty irresponsible
to just assume like none of that stuff was happening.
History is told by those who win. It is a

(17:55):
simple fact of the way things have been for the
entirety of mankind. It's unfortunate that those who lose have
their land taken away or property taken away, or have
had devastating losses of leadership, and maybe they haven't been
able to keep their way of life the way that

(18:17):
they would like. This is not a very specific ordeal
that is exclusive to us, I guess is my biggest
my big point here. At the same time, I think
it is important to recognize and understand the people that
were here before us and the relationship that we continue

(18:38):
to have with them, just like we are hopefully going
to have continuation of that relationship for the rest of time.
I think it is important to try to live with
people if they want to be here and they want
to do things legally and they want to do things
the right way. There are questions about what certain people
are doing on these reservations as well, and I think
that's a realistic thing that we can chat about it

(19:00):
as well. It just to me we don't do a
good enough job of trying to listen to other people
from different perspectives, and I think today's a good day
for both sides to lend an ear and understand how
each side feels and why they think that. That is important.
Even though the calendar, as far as the federal holiday
calendar is concerned, also reads Columbus Day, despite all of

(19:23):
the liberal minded people wanting to erase that from history.
Matt looks like we got a traffic tip here.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yeah, just got a call from a listener who told
me that Interstate eighty around the Waverly exit is shut
both directions. So I googled it and here from five
eleven Nebraska dot gov on traffic updates. Here, iwaity I
eighty westbound, there's a major hazardous materials fire between mile

(19:50):
markers four fourteen and mile markers four eleven. Now this
says the right shoulder is closed. That's what I'm seeing online.
I got a call from a listener who said that
I eighty both directions near the Waverly exit is shut down.
And he said that he saw a hazmat crew and
some smoke that would check out with what I'm reading online.

(20:13):
Major hazardous materials fire between miles marker four fourteen and
miles marker for eleven.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
So which road are we avoiding today? Now?

Speaker 2 (20:21):
This is I eighty west. This is saying ID westbound.
He's saying it's both the directions. So basically, if you're
going on I eighty and you are around mile marker's
four fourteen to four eleven, they're around the Waverly exit,
expect delays because it looks like there is a major
hazardous materials fire that people are working on.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
All right, So essentially, as you go that direction toward Waverley,
just keep your head on a swivel. And I don't
know if there's a lot of obvious and easy ways
to avoid i Eiti to get where you're go in
that direction, but just understand that things probably are going
to be a little bit tricky and sketchy in that
direction Interstate eighty westbound, but potentially in both lanes for

(21:02):
a bit in near the Waverly area. It's bad news
for the people trying to get to Omaha tonight if
they are going the other direction. Hopefully that gets cleaned
up quickly, but we will keep you posting on that.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
Hey, the four o'clock Hobur's coming up.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
We will do plenty more, have some fun, stick around,
a lot more to talk about with you right here
on news radio eleven ten KFAB