First America – It Happened Here | Episode 3
Just a heads up before we get started. This episode includes descriptions of violence against Indigenous people. Please take care while you listen.
Rebecca: Let me see if there’s a spot to pull over…like right here. I think I’m all the way off the road? Yeah.
Jordan Gass-Pooré: Alright.
Rebecca: Alright. Okay.
[exiting car / farm ambience]
This past fall I drove with my producer, Jordan, to a small town in eastern Tennessee.
Jordan Gass-Poore: So where are we right now?
Rebecca: We are in a bend of the Hiawassee River. Um, we’re kind of in the middle of someone’s farm. He’s actually on the tractor right now farming. There’s a horse and a donkey and a bunch of farm equipment. And you can see a really beautiful hill in the distance that I think is on the other side of the river. So we’re like walking distance from the river.
[tractor approaching]
Jordan Gass-Poore: It is just kind of wild, like even a person is farming right now as we are, are talking and may not know,
Rebecca: Yeah
Jordan Gass-Poore: The history of this land.
Rebecca: Yeah. Hi! He just yelled at us. We’re just recording some tape for a podcast.
Tulip Farmer: Sight seeing?
Rebecca: We’re re- Huh?
Tulip Farmer: You’re just sight seeing?
A man in short sleeves, jeans and a baseball cap climbed off his tractor to come and talk to us. He was friendly.
Rebecca: We’re, um, yeah, we’re talking about the history of the Trail of Tears in the area. We’re recording a podcast. Sorry to pull you off your tractor, yeah–
Tulip Farmer: No, no. You’re not bothering me.
Actually, where I live at, that’s part of the Trail of Tears up there.
Rebecca: Oh wow.
He told me he knows this land was part of the Trail of Tears.
Tulip Farmer: Right in on that river up in there.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Tulip Farmer: And uh, well the Indians, they lived up there, too. ‘Cause I, I’ve got a garden up there and I pick up stuff up there all the time, too. Arrowheads and hatchets and mill rocks and stuff. Y’know. It’s amazing. Every time I pick up one, I think, my gosh! How many year ago?
Rebecca: Yeah, how long ago–we’re just recording about some of the history in the area. So–
Tulip Farmer: I’ve been picking up Indian arrows around here all my life.
Rebecca: Oh really? How long have you lived here?
Tulip Farmer: Well, I’m 65. Born and raised up here. Working this farm. I actually live up on Upper River Road up there.
Rebecca: Oh okay. I don’t mean to take you away from plowing your field and bothering you–
Tulip Farmer: You’re not bothering me.
Rebecca: –but yeah, we’re just–
Tulip Farmer: She’s talking about planting some tulips. Full of tulips.
Rebecca: Oh, that’s all gonna be tulips?. You guys are gonna do a little tulip farm?
Tulip Farmer: In the spring. Twelve or thirteen thousand.
Rebecca: Wow. That’ll be really pretty.
Tulip Farmer: In the spring…
Rebecca: I’ll come back in the spring!
[ambi walking away, saying goodbye]
Jordan Gass-Poore: What are your thoughts and feelings are being here? Like, they’re gonna put tulips… How is this making you feel?
Rebecca Nagle: Ah…It’s just a really heavy place. Yeah, it’s just a really heavy place.
Rebecca Nagle: If you asked most like the average American, has the United States ever had a concentration camp on US soil? Um, I don’t think people would think of this place.
In 1838 this was part of Ft. Cass, which was a concentration camp where Cherokees were kept.
The United States federal government and also the states here in the south, they wanted all indigenous people in the southeast to be gone.
My family has a complicated relationship to this place. Some of my ancestors signed Cherokee Nation’s removal treaty. They thought it was the tribe’s best chance at survival. But most Cherokee people didn’t agree. The treaty set a deadline for Cherokees to leave their homeland.
And so the US military rounded them all up at gunpoint.
7,000 soldiers and militiamen, like, went out into all of the Cherokee towns. And it took, um, 25 days for them to round everybody up and put them into concentration camps.
People weren’t allowed to collect possessions, so people weren’t allowed to even, like, find loved ones.
There was a pregnant woman who was actually in labor, so they drove her from one of the, like, remote valley towns in North Carolina and forced her to walk and she gave birth and they would still not let her rest. And then close to this place she died.
Jordan Gass-Poore: That’s horrifying.
Rebecca Nagle: Yeah…I think when people think about the Trail of Tears, they’re like, oh, it was violent because people had to walk a long distance. But actually the most violent part of our removal was in the camps.
Disease was really rampant. I think disease is this stand-in for likewhy native people died in a way that lets the United States off the hook. But often it was the violence and the disease, worked hand in hand.
Rebecca: I don’t know. It’s really heavy. Um, uh, yeah,
I think what strikes me is, um just how deeply you can feel the collective forgetting of what happened here. That it’s just, like, a field and a subdivision.
Jordan Gass-Poore:Yeah.
When I started this project, I was on a quest of sorts. I wanted to answer a question. It’s a big question. But also kind of simple. How do I fit? How do Native people fit in American democracy?
Rebecca: You know, like…what democracy rounds an entire ethnic group up at gunpoint and puts them into a concentration camp?
BILLBOARD
[THEME MUSIC]
You’re listening to First America–the true story of how the United States came to be. And how our current political moment is 250 years in the making. From Pushkin Industries and Critical Frequency, I’m your host Rebecca Nagle. Gohini daqwadoa. Tsalagi Ayetli gela. Citizen of Cherokee Nation.
Before I made this history podcast, I reported on the Supreme Court. I followed one case where my tribe could have lost our reservation. And another one where all tribes could have lost the special legal status that protects everything from our land to our kids. During that reporting I traveled to DC to attend oral arguments.
[ambi]
It was the first time I stepped inside the Supreme Court building.
[inside court ambi]
The room was full of Native people who’d traveled thousands of miles to come watch. They had lined up before dawn to get a seat. To enter the courtroom, we had to go through security twice. A guard made one Native woman put a t-shirt over her traditional clothes, otherwise, she’d have to leave.
Woman: One of the guards she was, like, listen, political attire isn’t allowed. And I told her I was like, this is my culture. This is my religious practice. This is my traditional attire. [duck]
I sat behind more senior, white Supreme Court reporters. I watched two of them walk past a security guard yelling at them to stop. They just ignored her. Before the proceedings started, I stood up to get a look around the room. I was told to sit down. When the white reporters stood up, no one said anything.
A big part of our democracy–and especially our courts–is this idea of fairness. In this case about Native rights, it felt like this perfect example of how the rules aren’t the same for everyone.
[archival court audio, brief]
That day of oral arguments was one of those 14 hour days that started before the sun came up and ended after it went down. When I was finally walking back to my hotel, I got lost.
[outside ambi]
I was too tired to navigate the maze of DC streets. I sat down on the steps of a manicured office building and cried.
I had thought my job was to fix the inaccurate–and let’s be real racist–media narrative around these important cases. I wanted the Supreme Court to not harm my community. Or at least harm it less.
But what I felt in those sobs was powerless. As Native people, we were still defending such basic things. Power over our land, over our children. And we had to jump through so many hoops to even do that.
And that question of how Native people fit into US democracy. I didn’t have the words for exactly what, but I knew something was wrong.
[music cue]
The past two episodes we talked about the lead up to the Revolutionary War. We talked about the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence and why the colonists rebelled. In this episode, we are looking at the War itself.
As a country, we talk about the Revolutionary War as if it was fought between England and the colonies. It’s a story of David standing up to Goliath, and we get to be David. Like everyone else, that’s the story I learned in school. But as an adult I found out that story was wrong.
Google Maps: Turn left onto Great Gully Road.
Rebecca: Okay, so it’s supposed to be at this the corner.
Scott Stevens: See nothing there. Let’s look up here,
Rebecca: that’s the site of Cayuga Castle, New York, 90 and Great Gully Road.
I was looking for a historical marker. We didn’t see the marker from the car so we got out and walked around.
[getting out of car ambi]
Rebecca Nagle: what’s the weather like today?
Scott Stevens: Balmy, a beautiful upstate New York Day. Um, it is heavy and gray as it usually is this time in November.
Rebecca: [laughs]
This is Scott Manning Stevens
Scott Stevens: which is my settler name, [speaks in Mohawk] is my Mohawk name. I’m a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and a member of the Bear Clan.
He’s the Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University in New York.
Scott’s tribe, the Mohawk, is part of a larger Indigenous Confederacy. And that confederacy played a big role in the Revolutionary War. You’ve probably heard of them as the Iroquois, but that’s just what the French called them.
Scott Stevens: We call ourselves collectively the Haudenosaunee which means people of the Long House
The Confederacy was originally made up of 5 tribes.
Scott Stevens: So starting with the Mohawk, then the Oneida, the Onondaga in the center, the Cayuga, and then Seneca.
The tribes came together under a peace agreement around 1,000 years ago. Many consider the Haudenosaunee one of the oldest democracies on Earth. It’s four times older than the United States.
[more ambi of us looking around]
Scott and I were standing on the side of a two lane highway. We still hadn’t found the marker. But from google maps we knew we were close.
This place, that’s now fields and farmland and highway, was once the capitol of Cayuga Nation, one of the tribes in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Rebecca Nagle: so if you were to like, close your eyes and like imagine what this would’ve looked like in 1778. Like, can you describe it?
Scott Stevens: Beautiful.
I love the Finger Lakes they’re these really, you know, they’re, they’re quite long, but thin, so you can see across them easily. and uh, I find them kind of serene.
It would’ve been forested in some places and farmland in, in others.
there’d be a number of large, um, traditional style long houses,
Rebecca: Can you describe what would’ve happened here in 1779?
Scott Stevens: I imagine just chaos, if we assume that sullivan and Clinton’s troops behaved the way that Washington urged them to behave. To come shrieking in with bayonets drawn into a village, to terrify the population. It had to be utterly terrifying. And they’re, you know, they’re burning and laying waste to everything.
During the Revolutionary War, part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy sided with the Americans. But a bigger part sided with the British.
A few years into the war, a group of British troops and Mohawk warriors attacked colonists. George Washington ordered a scorched earth campaign as retribution.
General John Sullivan led the campaign. He used an entire third of Washington’s army to destroy dozens of Haudenosaunee towns. His men targeted food so that the people would starve. The army would spend days slashing and burning acres of corn. Then they would pile the bushels into houses and set it all on fire. They destroyed over 11 million pounds of corn this way.
The army also killed hundreds of civilians. In one early massacre, militia men speared children with bayonets.
Scott Stevens: So you were running for your lives and um, and you saw behind you everything you knew being burned down.
More than 5000 refugees of Sullivan’s Campaign made it to Fort Niagara, which was still controlled by the British. The British wouldn’t let the refugees inside the fort, and so they camped around it. The British gave them food, but not enough for people to survive.
Scott Stevens: And probably, you know, 500 or more are dead by the spring.
Some historians estimate that during Sullivan’s campaign, between direct killing, exposure and malnutrition, half of all Haudenosaunee people died.
Do historians consider Sullivan’s campaign an act of genocide?
Scott Stevens: I mean, we, we do.
Scott and I got back in his car and kept looking for that historical marker. Like often happens, we were close; it was a few hundred yards down the road. We pulled over on a little patch of dirt and got out.
Rebecca: Can you describe what it looks like?
Scott Stevens: So it’s a kind of, oh, almost six foot tall, upright stone, and it has a bronze, but there’s a map of this region of Central New York.
Scott Stevens: and the various routes that the soldiers took in attacking the different Haudenosaunee communities across the region.
Rebecca: What does it feel like to see a monument celebrating that?
Scott Stevens: It’s a bitter thing
Scott Stevens: And you know, it would be hard to imagine this in a country like Germany today because it would be read as genocidal and like, oh, we should take that down, type of thing.
[music cue]
Some people might say what happened to the Haudenosaunee during the Revolutionary War–while horrific and tragic–is just part of what happens during war. After all, they attacked colonial settlements too. But during this period, colonial militias attacked Native communities that were neutral or allied with the United States. Communities that were peaceful. One of those communities was called Gnadenhutten. It was a congregation of Lenapes and Mohicans who had converted to Christianity through German missionaries.
In 1782, after warriors from a different tribe killed and captured some colonists, the militia of Washington County, Pennsylvania went to investigate Gnadenhutten.
When the militia men reached the area, they told the congregation they just wanted to take them to a nearby fort where they would be safe from the British. The congregation was cautious, but eventually opened their doors, and even offered the militia food. The militia separated the men and the women into two buildings and tied every one up. And then they took a vote: would they take the captives to the fort or would they kill them. The militia men chose slaughter. Knowing they would die the next day, the Christian Natives spent the night singing hymns. Both this German sect of Christianity and Lenape and Mohican cultures had songs for death. And believed that singing them aided spirits in their passage.
The militiamen spent the night drinking communion wine, and preparing two killing houses. One for men. And one for women and children.
In the morning, the militia took congregation members into the killing houses, two at a time. They used a large wood and metal mallet to kill each person with a blow to the head. They then scalped and piled the bodies.
We know what happened thanks in part to two children who survived. One, named Thomas, was knocked unconscious and scalped by the militia members. He awoke to dead friends and family members stacked around him. He didn’t move. As it got dark, he hid behind the house and then escaped to another village.
Before the militia men left, they burned the bodies of all the townspeople and the buildings they had killed and stacked them in. They looted and ransacked the town. And then they left with what they had taken. Horses, blankets, food, and the scalps of 30 men, 32 women and 34 children.
Congress, and the state of Pennsylvania ordered an investigation. But no one was ever held accountable.
[music cue]
The UN defines genocide as the intent to destroy a group of people–in whole or in part. The term was coined in the 1940s, but has been applied to historical events.
The popular story of the Revolutionary War is wrong. It wasn’t just a fight for liberty and freedom, or even independence. It was also a sprawling conflict over who would control the continent North America. And to stake out their claim, the United States was willing to commit unspeakable acts of violence.
It is a big shift in how we think about it, in how we teach it to our children. The Revolutionary War was also a campaign of genocide.
When I started seeing the Revolution this way, I stopped asking how do I fit into this democracy. And started asking a different question. One that has broader implications and higher stakes and is frankly just scary.
Is this even a democracy? Was it ever?
That answer, after the break.
————MIDROLL———————
In this quest to figure out U.S. democracy I decided I needed to talk to an expert. Some one who understands the structure of our government better than I do.
Rebecca Nagle: The first thing we’re gonna do is get your levels. could you just tell me what you had for breakfast?
Maggie: The awkward thing is I haven’t yet had breakfast. I had coffee.
Do you?
It’s been that kind of a day.
And so I sat down with a constitutional law professor
Maggie Blackhawk: I am. Um Maggie Blackhawk. I teach law at NYU Law School. Uh, and I’m fond Lac Band Ojibwe. Should I say my formal title? I’m Maggie Blackhawk. and the Moses Grossman professor of law at NYU Law School.
I’ve known Maggie for years. She’s really helped shape how I think about these issues. And so I first wanted to get her take on my original question: How do Native people fit into US democracy?
I’m a citizen of the United States, but I’m also a citizen of Cherokee Nation. And my tribe has a nation to nation relationship with the federal government that’s based on the treaties that we signed.
Rebecca : Yeah. I, I feel like I’ve had, um, as like a native person, when I think about my relationship to the government,
Like I have that relationship as an individual, but then I also have a relationship through my tribal nation.
Maggie: But what relationship is that?
Rebecca: Like between Cherokee Nation and between
Maggie: you and your tribal nation and the United States, what is that relationship? if you had to put a word on it.
Rebecca: Oh God. Um, I mean old
Maggie: What about now?
Rebecca: I mean, I guess it would be // nation to nation. I mean, it’s
Maggie: like France to the United States?
Rebecca: But we’re subordinated.
Maggie: Like you are, and it’s a big word, subordinated. You’re unequal, you’re, you know.
Yeah. But what would you call it? I know you wanna call it government to government, and. But when I press on that, it doesn’t quite fit. I
Rebecca: mean it’s, you know, it’s a relationship of like the people who’ve been colonized, the people who colonized us.
Maggie: There you go. We got a word. But it took a long time. And if you actually ask most native people, okay, what’s the relationship? They will stumble over it. Like we, but
Rebecca: I think it’s just because it’s so hard to say that like, because I think we want to, like, we want to assert the sovereignty that we still have.
What Maggie got me to say is this. My relationship to the federal government is that it colonized me and my tribe. It’s hard to admit. But that’s how I fit into US democracy. I think that’s what I felt that day at the Supreme Court, before I had words for it. That despite all the things that Indigenous people have done to assert our sovereignty, our self-determination, we are still stuck under the foot of this government that has done so much harm.
It’s hard to reconcile that with the story of America I was taught in school.
Rebecca : I think when we think about the founding of the United States, it feels like the sort of penultimate myth is this idea that our founding fathers created this great democracy that rejected the tyranny of the King of England.
Um, is that the full story of our government?
Maggie Blackhawk: No. The story we tell ourselves about the United States origins as throwing off, um, a king, throwing off monarchy and establishing democracy leaves out empire.
Maggie says that story of our founders building a democracy–it’s only half true. Part of the government they built was democratic. But part of the government they built was something else.
Maggie Blackhawk: They wanted to be an empire for liberty from the beginning.
Maggie: So the break with Britain was less about throwing the colonialism behind and more about throwing the king. Behind.
Rebecca: So it’s kind of like democracy for us, colonialism for them.
Maggie: Yeah, no, exactly right.
Rebecca: In terms of sort of the fight in the US over sort of, are we a democracy?
Rebecca: Are we sort of not living up to those ideals? Um,
Maggie Blackhawk: it’s even a harder question, I think.
Rebecca: Do you? Yeah.
Maggie Blackhawk: Do I have a position on it?
Rebecca:
Maggie Blackhawk: I think when you bring in the story of expansion territorial government and colonialism, it just explodes the conversation because it’s not even about building a government that just doesn’t give everyone the same kind of political power. It really is that the US is building governments that are not representative.
When the US expanded into Native territories and later into places like Guam and Puerto Rico, those places didn’t get democracy.
Maggie: So you wouldn’t have elections, you wouldn’t have accountability. This was not, uh, the American dream that the constitution at least promised for those who were within the polity and within the several states.
In the early years of our country, unelected leaders governed two thirds of all land in the United States. The only person they answered to was Thomas Jefferson.
Maggie: If you look at least the, you know, the land mass, had more area of our government governed by top down, unilateral, non-representative government for much longer than we have had actual, even if restricted forms of representative government within the U.S..
Rebecca: When did we stop governing territories that way?
Maggie: We haven’t.
Here is how I understand what Maggie is saying.
Imagine a circle.
What’s inside that circle is the United States government you know. It’s got things like courts, elections, constitutional rights, local, state and federal government.
But the US also governed people and places outside of that circle. And outside the circle, the US gave itself a different set of rules. And those rules were first created to colonize Indigenous people.
The U.S. government controlled where we could live, what religion we could practice, what language we could speak, what food we ate, how we raised our children, if we could even keep or have children. All against our will.
So while our founders did build a democracy, they also built something else. You can call it empire. You can call it colonization. I call it authoritarianism. Top-down government that controlled the lives and lands of Indigenous people.
Rebecca: Do you think that most Americans think that what our government did to Native Americans affects them?
Maggie: No.
Rebecca: Should they?
Maggie: Yes.
Rebecca: Why?
Maggie: Well, because we had to build a government to do that.
Maggie: We had to build a government to dispossess. We had to build a government to expand. We had to build a government that colonized, and that government is still our government.
A lot of what our government can and cannot do is based on “precedent.” Which is a legal way of saying if our country did something before, it can do it again.
Maggie: Um, especially if we’ve done it before a lot and you let us do it, there’s no actual rule in how long we have to do it or, uh, how many times we have to do it. Usually it’s more than once.
We don’t actually think through, Ah, was this a good idea when we did this quite a few times?
The one area of exception is around, um, the area of human enslavement and Jim Crow segregation, and those are areas where we have explicit constitutional as well as decisions that have later repudiated things.
The legacies of slavery and segregation are still with us–just look at voter ID laws. But the policy of enslaving people is no longer legal.
Maggie: But think in the area of Indian law, you don’t get big amendments.
Rebecca: it’s almost kind of scary, like when you think about everything that our government did to Native Americans, that we’ve never gone back and edited our government and said, oh, actually, ooh, like we really, really shouldn’t commit genocide again.
That was bad. Like we shouldn’t put people in concentration of camps again. What you’re saying is like, we’ve never had that edit.
Maggie: so I dug really deeply into the, the question of Japanese American incarceration and, Indian law.
And come to find out that detention camps under the war relocation authority were built on Indian reservations the Bureau of Indian Affairs actually ran and established the first camp , um, because they knew how to detain people and govern them.
The science of governing other people through force is sadly something that takes forms of expertise. And the US developed that and then they applied it to different and new people.
[music cue]
There’s this feeling I have every time I talk to Maggie. This history is so important. Why don’t more people know about it?
Rebecca: Yeah. I think something that I’m grappling with, is that like, I feel like we’re of, we’re left out of the, like America rah rah version of the history, but I feel like we’re also left out of the, like the founding fathers were flawed.
They made, you know, like women weren’t, you know, like all these people weren’t included. I, I feel like we’re left out of that version too.
Maggie: Yes. Well, it’s because if you bring in native people and American colonialism into the constitutional and national story that we hold, it pulls a thread that unravels the entire myth at once.
Doing this reporting, I realized I don’t fit into the story of American democracy. But I am still part of the origin story of this country. You actually can’t understand this country without Indigenous people. Because what our history tells is the story of American authoritarianism.
Right now, in the face of authoritarianism, it’s tempting to want to go back to a time before. Before authoritarianism took hold in the United States. What I’ve learned is that time doesn’t exist. Empire and authoritarianism have always been part of our government.
What we can do is go back to the time when American authoritarianism was first planted. To understand how it took root. That way, we can rip it out.
[music transition]
After the winter that Haudenosaunee refugees camped at Fort Niagara in 1779, they returned home. But not much was left. Following George Washington’s orders, the army had burned everything.
Brad: And the people who survived in the spring came back to Onaga to rebuild with nothing.
This is Brad Powless
Brad: My name is Dedi. I am from the Onondaga Nation. I am a retired teacher from the Onondaga Nation School, and also a council member on the Onondaga Council of Chiefs.
Brad’s father first told him the story when he was 15.
Brad: And, he goes, it’s a good thing. It’s a sad story, but it’s a good thing too. both at the same time.
When the Onondaga returned to their land, they saw what the army had burned: their homes, their crops, their food stores, even their fruit orchards. People had barely survived that winter and now they were facing more starvation. But then, something happened. The cicadas came out.
Brad: And that’s when our friend ogwenyo’da came, came and, and provided a food source for us.
The cicadas came out.
The people ate the cicadas to survive.
There’s something really special about this. You see, the cicadas on Onondaga land live in one small area and only come out every 17 years. The rest of the time they’re hibernating. If this had happened any other year, or any other place the people would have starved.
Brad gets emotional when he talks about this.
Brad: It really tears me up thinking about it is that something that creator gave us that year? I don’t know.
I teared up too while talking to Brad. I know my ancestors went through hell so that me and my tribe would still exist. But this example is just so visceral.
Brad taught me how to say Cicada in Onondaga.
Brad: So, yes. (practicing in Onondaga)
The cicadas or Ogwenyo’da still come out on Onondaga land–every 17 years. And it’s quite a site to see. The first time they came out, Brad was a teenager.
Brad: Oh, they are everywhere. Like you walk outside and they’re just drip, like rain dripping off the trees.
Brad: oh, it was, they come out during the summer, the trees are all, all green and beautiful. my mom was like, you gotta get ready to pick ’em. ’cause you gotta pick ’em early. So you get up early in the morning and you’re going through and you’re picking ’em off, off the trees.
Brad: if you’re really young, you’re a little scared. ’cause they’re, a big bug with big red eyes
Nowadays, when the Ogwenyo’da come out, the Onondaga fry them and eat them. Families make it together. People bring batches to share at summer ceremonies.
Rebecca: What does it, what does it taste like?
Brad: Everyone always says chicken, but it’s, it is always, it’s its own unique flavor for sure.
Brad: I guess the most, similar thing would be, it’d be like, kind of like a popcorn. You get a, a nice little buttery base, and you get your butter nice and melted, and you throw your cicada in, that’ll salt and pepper and that’s all you need.
The Onondaga didn’t always eat bugs. At first, they did it to survive. And now, they do it to remember.
Rebecca: the times in your life that you’ve eaten cicadas or, Okta?
Rebecca: do you think about your ancestors?
Brad: Definitely
There is something almost poetic about the Ogwenyo’da coming out every 17 years. It means once every generation, there’s this material way for the community to remember what their ancestors went through. And in one person’s life, you learn the story as a child. You pass it on to your children in middle age. And tell it again as an elder.
Rebecca: Do you consider Sullivan’s campaign an act of genocide?
Brad: Of course it is.
Rebecca: When you read George Washington’s letter to General Sullivan, right, like the goal is really to drive you all out, to get you away from your land. Um, was that successful?
Brad: We’re still here. Um, we lost so many people, so that’s sad to think about, but no, we still stayed and we were able to come right back home.
You know, for Indigenous people it’s not like this stuff is easy to talk about. It’s overwhelming. How much our ancestors lost. But we find ways, big and small, to remember. Because without that, we wouldn’t know who we are and how we got here.
The same is true for the United States. Genocide shaped and changed our country. And until we process that violence, we won’t know who we are or how we got here.
There’s this war you’ve probably never heard of. But it’s why our president can use the military the way that he does.
George: You know, my ancestors put dirt in those soldier’s mouths to say, if you’re gonna get our homeland, this is the only way you’re gonna get it.
Next time on First America.