New Insights: Native American History in the Colonial Period

Alan Price:  –Director of the Kennedy Foundation. 

And on behalf of our colleagues, on the Library side and the Foundation side, we welcome you to this evening's Forum.

It would be marvelous if everyone here could just take the moment to silence any electronic devices you may have brought with you. We would very much appreciate that.

I would like to acknowledge the generous support of our underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: our lead sponsors Bank of America, the Lowell Institute, and Gourmet Catering; and our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, Xfinity, and WBUR.

I'm also delighted to welcome all of you who are watching tonight's program online.

Colin Calloway has kindly agreed to sign copies of his new book following tonight's program. And for your convenience, our bookstore has copies of the book for sale.

We are so pleased to have the opportunity this evening to enhance our understanding of American history by bringing renewed attention and new technology to bear on Native American life and the intersections with Colonial settlers and Europeans during this period.

I'm now delighted to introduce tonight's guests. Colin Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr., 1943 Professor of History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans and the Birth of the Nation, and numerous other works, including, The Victory With No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army and Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty-Making in American Indian History.

Julia A. King, a professor of anthropology at St. Mary's College in Maryland, has 30 years' experience studying, writing and teaching about historical archeology and Chesapeake history and culture. Her book, Archeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past: The View from Southern Maryland, received a book award from the American Association of State and Local History in 2013.

Philip Deloria is a professor of history at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural, and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of Indigenous peoples in a global context. He's the author of Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places and the co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to American History and the co-author of American Studies: A User's Guide. 

Please join me in welcoming our special guests this evening. [applause] 

Philip Deloria:  So I'm going to begin with, I think, something that's appropriate for us to do whenever we gather together. [delivers land acknowledgement] I'm Phil Deloria. I'm coming to you from Harvard. My family comes from the Yankton people in South Dakota. We're gathered together this evening on the ancestral territory of the Massachusett people. Many Indigenous communities have lived and moved through this place over time, and so we recognize also the Wampanoag and Nipmuc people, among others. And it's worth our recognition that Indigenous people from many nations live and work in this region today. 

So I ask you to join with us in acknowledging their communities, paying respect to their elders, past and present, and recognizing their active presence and their futurity reposed in the generations present and to come. 

So what I've just done is a land acknowledgement. It's something that happens in Canada. It's something that happens in New Zealand. It's something that happens in Australia. And increasingly it's happening in the United States. And it's part of, I think, a general sense that we need to think hard about the land that we're on and to recognize the people who still have ties to that land or who are still here in relation to that land.

Native people make up about 1.5 to 1.7% of the American population. That's according to the last census. And I think one of the things that those of us who study Native people and care about Native people and are affiliated and committed to Native people understand is that Native people get about 1.5% of our collective attention. Or maybe less. And that this is actually not right. It's not right in relation to the very structures on which the nation's built. It's not right in relation to the policies and to the laws and the legal structures that are a part of the United States today. And so, part of our effort I think as scholars and as people who study these things is to think hard, and hopefully with you, about how we actually bring more than 1.5% attention to Native people.

As we were talking before we went on, Colin mentioned that land acknowledgements at Dartmouth have become a bit more of an important kind of thing, and I wonder if we might start, Colin, with you reflecting about what those things do for us, what they mean, how they function, why they're important, how they connect to the sort of histories that we're talking about today.

Colin Calloway:  Of course, yeah. For those of you who are not familiar with Dartmouth, Dartmouth was founded in 1769, ostensibly, as a school for the education of Native Americans. Didn't do terrifically well in that regard up until 1970 when the college recommitted itself to the education of Native Americans. And since 1970, I think our Native alumni now number in excess of 1100, from every tribe from Abenaki to Zuni. And every class I have has Native students in it.

So Dartmouth, one would hope, would be a little bit more sensitive to these issues. And I think it is. The Hood Museum at Dartmouth – which has recently reopened after being closed and renovated over a couple of years – has included in its architecture, if you like, a land acknowledgement statement recognizing that the museum and Dartmouth College sits on Abenaki homeland. And not only that, but it mentions that this is unceded land because the Abenakis did not make treaties in New Hampshire and Vermont. And that raises a question. 

But people have asked about that – why do this? Is it just a matter of respect? Is it just a formality? And certainly it's a matter of respect, but I think, from my perspective, non-Native perspective, but as a historian studying this continent, it does matter because, whatever else it does, it's a reminder to us of the bottom line, as I see it. And that is that this is a nation built on Indian land. And that is not revisionist history; that's actually just a fact – in 1491, it was all Native American land. And now most of it is not. 

And I use that not so much as to let us all feel good or guilty about anything, but, rather, as a basis for rethinking American history. When I teach and write about Native American history, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm not Native American. When I teach American history, I'm conscious of the fact I'm not an American. [laughter] But, so what I can bring to the study of Native American history is not insights from tribal culture – I'd be foolish and presumptuous to try to say that was the case – but, rather, to look at American history with Native Americans not ignored, as Phil suggested, but included. 

And increasingly over the years, I've become convinced that we cannot understand American history without Native Americans in it. So even writing and teaching Native American history is more than just showing respect, perhaps delayed recognition to Native people. It also matters to the rest of us because we all live on this continent and we deserve a better understanding of how things came to be they were and how the history of this continent unfolded. Lots of things don't happen without Native Americans. There are lots of things that make no sense if Native Americans are not included. And yet, very often I think in our history, it's written and told as if that were not the case.

And so, what we're left with, I think, sometimes, is what Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as a shallow village tale. Great nations deserve great history. And that needs to be much more inclusive than a lot of the things that certainly I grew up reading, and read last week.

Philip Deloria:  So one of the things I think that's interesting about the work that both of you do is that you're both engaged with sort of the revision or the complication or the telling of new stories relative to some of the stories that are familiar. And I wonder if each of you might take a moment, and, Julie, maybe we should start with you, and tell us about sort of the classic narrative and about the ways that your work actually sort of transforms this. So some of your really interesting archeological work in Virginia feels, to me, has the potential to completely change around some of the narratives that we think we know about the Powhatan Confederacy and other things. I wonder if you might reflect with us about that a bit.

Julia King:  Sure, I'd love to do that. And I want to say, to your point about the Colonial history, is that Colonial history is Native American history. And it took me a long time to get there through graduate school. It just wasn't taught; it was just sort of this void that was not filled until I started to really work in Maryland and Virginia. And of course, I met a lot of Native or Indigenous people. And the Native story is often missing in museums, or it's segregated in this museum or that museum. It's not integrated. And there's real problems with that. 

At the same time, even as we're adding the Native American component to the Colonial history component, which we should do – and not just add, but integrate – my work with Native Americans has revealed– and I'm not Native either so I always feel– I don't want to be presumptuous, but what I've heard repeatedly is, We did not start, our history did not start in 1492 or 1565 or 1607 or 1620, or wherever you happen to be. And it started thousands of years before. And that's where archeology can come in and play a role.

And archeology, most people who train in archeology are trained in departments of anthropology. My background is both in anthropology, history, and – not both – and also American studies or American civilization. And very cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary way to think about the world. 

And one of the things I've learned about working with Native histories is how local you often have to really be. You know, Native Americans, we sort of put them all together as Native Americans, but they're highly variable and very different and it varies across counties, not just across regions. 

And some of the work that we've been doing in Maryland and Virginia, because we're archeologists and we're very concerned with objects and context and the materiality of life, we've been working with things like geographical information systems, GIS. And I have people on my staff who can do that a lot better than I can. But together, we can put that information– we can download what we call big data; you've maybe heard that phrase, big data. And we can put that information, along with oral history, documentary information, modern day lifeways information and put it in there. A lot of people use GIS to store data, but you can also put it through its paces. 

And some of the things that we have found in working in Virginia with the Powhatans is that– and I realize this is a long way to get to answer your question. The Powhatans occupy a huge place in our national narrative. And Powhatan or Wahunsenacah. Almost every child knows the story of Pocahontas. And if you look at Captain John Smith's map from the early 17th century that mapped the Chesapeake, you'll see that he puts Powhatan way up into Maryland. And people began to realize early on that that was not the case. But they put Powhatan to about the Potomac River.

And part of this is you would see these towns, these nations on the north side of a river, for example, the Rappahannock River, in particular, and the notion was that they had put space between– put the river between themselves and Powhatan because of the long, powerful arm of Powhatan. And really created this narrative that we now realize has just got to be relooked at. The reason that people are on the north side of the river, in many of these cases, is that's where the good soils, the marshlands, the access to the waterways, where those ecological variables occur together. They tend not to occur together on the south side. So it's actually an ecological and not a political reason that the people are on the north side.

And if you really start to drill down into it, you find out that the Virginians especially are talking about Powhatan because they're right there in his country. And so, he's going to loom very large in their view. But in fact, I'm beginning to– GIS is helping me understand that we really don't know as much as we think we do because we have invested so much in these early writings. And I'm not suggesting that these early writings are worthless; not at all. It's just that there are other pieces of evidence that we can bring to bear on looking at these questions.

Philip Deloria:  I mean, as a historian, it's always nice to work with archeologists and find the ways that archeologists can complicate our engagements with sources. And particularly the interesting methods that archeologists bring to bear. So what I'm hearing you say is, we might imagine, there's a familiar story about Pocahontas – oh, she falls in love with John Smith – the kind of Disney version. And then there's the more complicated historical version that we all might have engaged, which says, no, no, no, this was a diplomatic ritual, this was a ceremony. But even that story is premised on the notion that the Powhatan Confederacy is this massive looming political entity that's sort of out there. 

And it feels to me like one of the things that you're suggesting with your work is perhaps that might be shrunk a little bit, and perhaps the Rappahannocks might be increased, and what would it mean for us to change the political geography of that portion of the Eastern seaboard. And that feels applicable, perhaps, then, to other sorts of things. Am I reading you right?

Julia King:  Exactly, yeah. And in fact, the Rappahannock do not loom large. But if you look at some of the– this opens up these other questions or these other historical facts and archeological facts as you start to realize, wow, they do seem that there is a big story there that's just been, for over 100 years, you know, kept under wraps.

Philip Deloria:  So Colin, I wonder if we might turn to you. I'm going to hold the book up and encourage you all to go to the bookstore. It's got a lovely cover, which we were just talking about. I'm a fan of it, and Colin's quite proud of it. You know, in some ways, Colin, this book might be read in the genre of the Founding Fathers biography, the great Founding Fathers' biographies in a Ron Chernow/David McCullough/Joe Ellis kind of mode. These may be works that some of you may be familiar with. But as I worked through the book, it feels to me like it's not that. And I'm wondering if you might talk, then, a little bit about what is your central claim here? How does putting Indians in American history change the nature of our understanding of the genre of Founding Fathers biography, and of the story that we tell about the early Republic?

Colin Calloway:  So, I've written a lot of books, I suppose, and usually when I publish a book people go, Hmm, okay; it started out slow and fizzled out altogether. But this was Washington, right? And as soon as people knew I was writing a book about George Washington, suddenly I had offers of contracts and all kinds of attention, et cetera. Which was a bit of a surprise, but not entirely unexpected because my thinking in writing this book was quite strategic. I did have an agenda. Actually, it hadn't been out long when I got an email from a gentleman who said, "I've been reading your book and I stopped reading it. Why would you want to make George Washington look bad?" [laughter] And I assured him, and assure you, that was not the purpose. But I did have an agenda, and I did have a– this was quite tactical. 

I think I've been doing this a long time and people like Phil and myself and our colleagues have been doing this an awful long time. And part of what you hope is that you'll change, if you like, the popular narratives a little bit and see your work filtering down. But I think we still find that has limited effect.

And so, my thinking was – I've been saying this for a long time – that we need to include Indian people in American history to understand American history. What better way to do that than to take, if you like, the most famous American, icon of American history, and show how Native America and Native American people shaped the life of the man who shaped the nation. 

And so, it's sometimes called a biography. I never thought of it as a biography, although Washington's life gives it a natural structure. And as Julia was talking and as I've been reading Julia over the last few days, the work she's doing is fascinating. And I'm thinking, it's far more fascinating than what I do; I'm just a historian; I read documents. But I think that's the point – you can do this.

I grew up when reading Indian history, when Indian history was, it was out West, it was Calvary and Indians. And then when it started to become serious, it was United States policy for Indian people. And then it became what we call ethnohistory, which sounded more complicated than it was; it was basically, if you're going to study people's history, you should try and study the history in the terms they would have experienced and understood that history. That to me is history. Why would you do any other than that?

But I don't think I'm doing anything very complicated. A lot of times I've read historians who said, You actually can't really do Indian history because they didn't produce any records. Well, that's nonsense to begin; there's all kinds of ways in which Native people recorded their history and preserved their history with care. But even in great written records, there's tons of stuff there. Part of the reason I was able to do this book was because of the tremendous work that people on the papers of George Washington and other Founding Fathers have done in collecting all those papers, digitizing them, et cetera. I challenge anybody to read through the papers of George Washington and not come away with the impression that Indians mattered, and really mattered. 

He spends a lot of time talking about them and thinking about them, meeting in his Cabinet about them. And his life is shaped in important ways. Phil mentioned that little book I wrote called Victory With No Name. It's called that because it's called St. Clair's defeat; an American general lost this battle. He lost this battle because an Indian confederacy won this battle. And in doing so, they destroyed the only army the United States had in 1791 when the United States is 15 minutes old and nobody's sure if it's going to survive. 

And the reason I wrote that book was because nobody had written that book. Hundreds of books on the Battle of Little Big Horn and General Custer, but why nothing on this? Not just because it matters as an important event in Indian history, but it surely matters to give us a better understanding of what the young republic was like. And everywhere I looked in Washington's life, there were examples like that – things like the first invocation of what we might now call executive privilege happens first in the wake of St. Clair's defeat when the first Congressional investigation committee says, "We're going to find out what happened. This defeat happened because of contractor fraud." – as American as apple pie – "and we're going to follow the money."

Where will the money lead? We know where it's going to lead; it's going to go to the Secretary of the Treasury. Who's that? Alexander Hamilton; who, unlike now, everybody hated back then. And so, that was the investigation. And they asked, "We want the documents, we want the papers." Washington huddled with his Cabinet because as first President he knew he was setting precedent. And they said, "Yeah, you've got to give up the papers. But you can withhold, you should withhold those that might be seen as detrimental to public interest." Because of Indians.

So it's not simply about injecting new players into the story, although it surely is that, but looking at ways in which Native American presence and power, because we know how the story ends, or it hasn't ended, but we know where we've gotten to, and we think of Native American people as defeated and powerless. Not in Washington's lifetime. Indian people controlled most of the continent, and Indian power was something that George Washington had to reckon with.

So in my answer to my email correspondent I said, If you regard Washington as the greatest President ever, isn't one attribute of his greatness his dealing with this reality of Native power that threatened the young Republic? And nobody's talking about it.

And I think people are not talking about it not because it's generations of historians have been lazy and not gone through the records, but I think they've been going through the records interested in other subjects and asking different questions. So I think really all that I've done is spend my life going through written documents where Indian people are not supposed to be and finding Indian people everywhere.

My first experience of this was as a graduate student in England where my supervisor, who knew nothing about Native Americans, said, "Go to London. Come back when you've found something." So I started working through the records of the Britain Indian department and the National Archives, as it is now, Public Record Office then, and British Library. And I thought I was never going to get out of there because those guys took down verbatim every speech that Indian spokesmen, leaders said. And I was just there months. I was sleeping on my brother's floor in Wimbledon, so I was conscious of how long I was going to be there. And it seemed like I would be there forever. And actually, I think I could have been. 

Native Americans are everywhere in the written records. And that's where I'm trying to work, that's where I work. And all you have to do, I think, is look for them. 

Philip Deloria:  As historians, we know that it's not just the British Colonial archives, but the United States. Record Group 75, the National Archives, is a massive trove of documents, bureaucratic documents that just goes on forever. And you actually have to have a lot of expertise; you can't do this by yourself. You need an archivist to kind of walk you through it. A pitch for the National Archives, by the way. [applause] [laughter] I mean that though, actually. I mean, I will shout out Mary Frances Morrow, who's the archivist, who I have worked with there, and has been the most wonderful and helpful person. Because these are very, very complicated and copious sorts of records.

Colin, I wonder if you might– so, you've mentioned Washington in terms of being shaped by, sort of, the existence of this Indian power that sits out there. And it's worth us remembering, right? It takes 400 years, lots of epidemic disease, lots of violent military conflict to actually bring Indian people under the control of Europeans. It doesn't happen easily, at all. So that power is there. It's constituted and reconstituted in all kinds of different ways. And it's persistent.

So you mentioned Washington's awareness of this power and the ways in which he governs relative to its existence. And one of the things that's striking about the book is the many occasions on which Washington actually has direct contact with Indian people. Here's a dinner with Little Turtle, and then, oops, three days later there's another dinner with the Creeks, and all of a sudden here's Alexander McGillivray, and here's, you know– and some part of this is him as a President and an administrator; some part of it is him as a young person, as a surveyor; some part of it is him as a military officer. 

I'm wondering if you might pick one episode of Washington's life that you think bears repeating or us thinking about in relation to the character of him and who he becomes and how he becomes things. Is it his experience as a surveyor out there on the edge? Is it his experience with Braddock? Is it his failures in the early going? Is it his experience as a Town Destroyer, a name that's actually in his family – an interesting tidbit I did not know – during the Revolutionary War? Is there a particular moment that jumps out at you in Washington's life?

Colin Calloway:  Well, one of the moments that did jump out at me, I'm not sure that it's a pivotal moment where you're referring to dinners. I think it's the last week of November 1796, I think. George Washington is President. Has dinner on four different days – because he used to have dinner in the afternoon – has dinner on four different days with four different Indian delegations to Philadelphia.

So, if you visit Philadelphia and go to the old city, it's not that huge. You couldn't walk down the street without bumping into a Native American delegation. And that was not, I think, because George Washington necessarily liked having dinner with Native Americans, but he recognized the importance of it. 

And in fact, on one of those occasions he said to Henry Knox, "Tell the interpreters don't talk about land." Because he knew that they knew that he was interested in land. And Washington, rather than a single moment, if I look for a single thread running through Washington's life, I'd say it was land. As a young man, he started out as a surveyor. He constantly looked at land, as a surveyor would. He recognized Western land as the key and the path to his own fortune, as the key and the path to Virginia's future and fortune, and as the key and the path towards building this new nation. And so, it's a life, in some ways that almost seems obsessed with land. And he never calls it Indian land; he calls it land, Western land. 

But before I started doing this project, I read a lot of biographies of George Washington, most of which said very little about Indians or Native America. But what I started doing was mentally going through and every time they said "Western land" or "land," and either adding or inserting Indian land, I said, oh, the whole book's about Indians. Because Washington– I said this is a nation built on Indian land. That might sound sort of radical to some people. Washington said that; Washington knew that. That was Washington's plan for the nation. He understood that without expanding onto Indian land, the United States would amount to nothing. If it remained stifled east of the Appalachians, it would never achieve its power.

So there's that combination, which I think, I suppose, is not unique in American history, where someone's own economic interests and the national interests seem to come happily together. And Washington, I think by the time he dies, I think he has 45,000 acres of land, which wasn't the apex of his land, but he's one of the richest landowners in America. His will goes on for page after page after page about this land. And of course, it's land acquired from Native Americans. 

And I don't single Washington out, although he was, at a time– he's a man of his times. Everybody's speculating in Indian land because that's what you did in 18th century America. It's just that Washington was better than most, more aggressive than most.

But he understood this as the path to the future. So even without Indian people in the story, this is a story about Native America. And fundamental, I believe, in the history of this country is the story in which tribal homelands become converted to American real estate. 

I'm not Native American, but I am from a tribal background – the Highland Scots. The same thing happened there. You take people's homelands that have been permanent, where people live and die and are tied to the land through stories and ancestors, and you dispossess them of the land, but then you do something more with it – you turn it into property. It can be measured, it can be bounded, it can be commodified, and it can be bought and sold. That's a fundamentally different relationship, I think, with the land than tribal peoples, and let's face it, I suppose for most of history people who have been tribal peoples have had with the land. And that's, of course, a huge part of the American story.

And Washington– Virginia's at the forefront of west Colonial expansion, and Washington's at the forefront of Virginian expansion.

Philip Deloria:  So this sort of sense about Indian land being the object of Washington I think maybe points us back, Julie, to something that you said earlier which concerned periodization. And I think it's always nice when archeologists and historians can start to wrangle a little bit about periodization. But it struck me when you said 1492, 1607, 1620, the Revolutionary War; these markers are not necessarily as fixed. They feel fixed to us in the same way that a decade seems like it has meaning. But in fact if we really interrogate it, it kind of doesn't, right?

I wonder if you might say a little bit about the ways that archeology and historical archeology is able to press back against these boundaries. I'm thinking of an article published in William and Mary Quarterly, I believe, by Juliana Barr who says, Let's get rid of the 1492 thing altogether. Let's imagine the same sort of histories on this continent that we imagine in Europe. I wonder if you might reflect with us a bit more about that kind of approach as a way of, like Colin, sort of calling our histories into question a bit.

Julia King:  Well, archeologists love to come up with periods, too. So the historians don't have the corner on that market. I do want to mention about the Town Destroyer. And in fact, that event– I don't know that they've actually found the record where John Washington, who was the great-grandfather of George, came into Maryland and actually put a Susquehannock town under siege and then dealt with the Susquehannock leaders very unfairly, called them out for a parley and then executed them. And supposedly that's where the name comes from.

To go back to the idea of periodization, I mean, in some ways I think to create periods is human; that's how we catalog, we classify, that's what we do. It's that, as you said, that these are not the final absolute, you know, if you move the bar or talk about different periods. And I think that's the challenge, is to try to conceive of different periods.

For example, the Colonial period, when you hear people talk about Colonial history, we often think, you know,  it's up until the Revolution. But we really live and we still suffer through the structures of Colonialism and live in what I would say is not a post-Colonial society, even if we sometimes call it that.

I do think that what archeology can bring to the table, and this is– archeology can't go out and find– I mean, maybe we can go dig at Mount Vernon or dig at Valley Forge and find some of these places, but we bring the power that exists between Native America and the Colonies to bear through everyday objects in the archeological record. 

There was, I think it was an anthropologist, Ian Quimby, back in the '40s and '50s, and he had noticed how in some of these archeological sites that these sites were supposedly occupied by Native Americans, but they were all European materials. And so, this question became like you are what you wear, you are what you eat, and that these individuals had become European, that somehow Indianness was gone. And this plays into that trope of Indian disappearance, which we are always fighting against as a country, I think, trying to figure out where– and that trope starts very early; it wasn't just invented in the 20th century. I mean, it's used to dispossess Natives of land all the time.

And so, the more we looked at some of these materials, because there are definitely Piscataway sites, Rappahannock sites, the ones that I've mostly worked on, that are completely– they look European. If you didn't know where you were and the documents weren't there, they look very European. And of course, that's all part of the dispossession. Once you are forced off your land, that Native knowledge that you have for good clay sources, good food sources, that's interrupted, that's disrupted, that's the way that you start to break things up. And we see people use breaking knowledge as a way of getting people to do what they want. 

And so, we're now able to look at the more subtle patterns and see how there is examples of resistance in what seem like these European archeological assemblages. They could be through beads, the colors of beads. As you drill into the documents, you start to realize that color– and again, this is recorded by Europeans. Your colleagues are right, that there's not a lot that has been recorded by Native people. But as I tell my students, if we wait for the perfect data set to come along, we're going to be covered in dust. The perfect data set will never come along. But you'll find references to colors, and we can see what may be evidence of Indian attitudes, at least in the Middle Atlantic, towards the dispossession changing in the color of bead assemblages that are recovered from these sites. 

Now, we've recovered things that survive. So we've recovered things that preserve, I should say, in the archeological record. But embedded in these everyday objects are the forms of power that Washington was probably working against on an everyday basis. 

Colin Calloway:  One of the reasons why I think the work that Julia does is so important and Native histories are so important is that it lengthens what's a very short history in this country. So where East St. Louis is today, there was an Indigenous city from somewhere between, probably had its beginning around 700 AD and it was gone before Columbus. But at its height, it had a population of maybe 20,000 people, and maybe 30,000 people if you counted the suburbs. It was a trade center.

So I always say to my students, Do you think those people didn't think it was going to last forever? Did you think that people in Rome didn't think the Empire was going to last forever? 

There's a movie, Patton: Lust for Glory, George C. Scott, and he's in North Africa. And he's musing about Hannibal and the wars against Carthage, and all of this kind of thing. And, he says, or his mind tells him that an imperial Rome, when a victorious general returned to the city and had a victory parade, they put a slave in the chariot behind him. So he's walking through the streets, getting all of these accolades and the slave's whispering in his ear, "Don't let this go to your head, this is all temporary, this will pass." And I've used that in one of my book – good example talking about depth of research – because I think nations need that, too; that if you're top dog – having come from a nation that used to think it was top dog – if you're top dog, it's not going to last forever. And maybe the signs are there that the wheel is going full around.

And I think that, in a nation which has, from a European perspective, a very short history, if we only begin in 1776 or 1609, or even 1492, that's a blink. And there's human experience in this continent going back tens of thousands of years. And if we don't think that we've got anything to learn from that, today when we're looking at the impending crises we're dealing with, I think we ignore that at our peril.

Philip Deloria:  There's a sort of disciplinary thing I think that's interesting here. Historians like to write books; archeologists tend to write more articles. This may be a gross generalization, but you're sort of nodding, Julie, so I’m going to take it. Is it the case, I mean– The book requires a longform argument. It lives in narrative. It likes to tell stories; it can tell grand stories. The article tends to be your research report on very specific kinds of things. And I'm just wondering, it does feel to me if we say let's throw 1492 out and let's imagine, as Colin has said, there is a deep history of this continent, that it's very much like the deep history of Europe, right? It's completely analogous and we shouldn't pretend that it's not. 

How close are we? Is there an archeologist? Is this Charles Mann? How close are we to having a kind of narrative? Is it possible, given the state of archeological knowledge, to narrate a deep history of the continent, of empires and civilizations rising and falling and different kinds of things. Because I think the way the story is so often told is before 1492, everyone is kind of a nomadic person and, yeah, there's the Aztecs and the Incas and maybe Cahokia, and that's kind of it. Everybody else is sort of– but that's clearly not the case. I think we know this.

So how close are we to having a synthetic narrative of this? Is somebody doing this?

Julia King:  I'm sure people plan it as their life work, to do it. And I would say we do have those in archeology; we call them textbooks. [laughter] And they're not always written as engagingly as, say, some of the other books. But you make a great point about Cahokia and about what to do. It's been years since I read it, but it was the Joseph Nicolar – do you know? – where he writes, I believe I recall, he writes the history of his tribe and the colonization is this teeny blip that's not even– if you're not paying attention, you might miss it.

But the history of Native people on this continent is, as you said, thousands of years. And at one point it was 12,000 years. It's being pushed back with sites on the East Coast and Pennsylvania, and in Virginia, as well as more and more archeology is getting done. And there's a lot of disciplinary structures that I won't go into here for why maybe those grand narrative syntheses haven't yet appeared.

But when they do appear, archeologists love to step up and say they're wrong. [laughter] Nobody listens to us archeologists sometimes. I mean, I'm guilty of saying that as well, too. 

But I do think that– When I was working on the book I did about southern Maryland, I was trying to figure out how to reimagine– and invited the Piscataway people to reimagine in St. Mary's City, which was the place where the Calvert family first arrived, and which my Piscataway colleagues would say invaded, in that space, I gave them some exhibit space in a new building that we had, and to reimagine the telling of that tale. And they did it in ways that I don't know, with my disciplinary structure, I would have told it the same way. But it was very interesting.

And it actually was really, they want to make the point, "we're still here, we're still here, we're still here." I mean, the legacy of racism in our country,and  implying that Native people disappeared a long time ago or that they have a very little bit of Native blood, whatever that means, in them, has done such damage that I think, at least in the Middle Atlantic, I find that the 19th and 20th century history becomes really important. And yet, at the same time, they will remind you "we were here 12, 13, 14, 15,000 years ago." I realize that– just get a textbook. [laughter] 

Philip Deloria:  I wonder if before we leave the subject of archeology and maybe turn a little bit back to George Washington and Indian policy, Julia, I wonder if you might say a couple of words. One of the things Native communities and archeologist have not always had the happiest relationship. And in many ways because American archeology and anthropology has sort of been based on excavations, which to Native people oftentimes looks like grave– and in fact is grave-robbing. 

So, I’m wondering if you think some of the– I've been fascinated by the new scientific kinds of technologies that seem to be perhaps interestingly applied. And I wonder if you feel like these things have the possibility to sort of step aside from that tension, if they tend to be more productive in that sense. And I'm thinking of things like, there was a recent thing, I don't know if folks read about DNA studies in relation to the clay tobacco pipes, which are everywhere, actually tracking populations that way. LiDAR kinds of things. The sort of float thing that they do, they just toss dirt into a thing and they centrifuge it and all of a sudden they can do these incredible ethno-botanical pollen studies. Applying big data methods to limited data sources and building algorithms to extrapolate out from that.

I mean, this feels like a new set of possibilities, a new set of tools. And I'm just wondering if you might reflect with us a little bit on the possibilities of those things, perhaps some of the perils of those things, if there are perils, how it looks to you.

Julia King:  Well, I do think that archeologists have had a troubled relationship with Native people. And I think it came to a head with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, what's known as NAGPRA, I think it was in 1990 or 1991. And archeologists were really up in arms about that. And it was the greatest boon to archeologists. It forced archeologists to come to the table, to work with Native people. I think there might still be some old-school embedded attitudes, but I think that the more recent generations and people working today – because you can tell I'm not a recent generation – but that working with Naive people has actually enhanced, you know, what we've learned. And it becomes this collaborative exchange back and forth.

The DNA is very interesting. In fact, a colleague of mine– that came out of the Maryland State Highway Administration. So archeology occurs in interesting places. And I forwarded that link to some of the Native people that I work with, and some were not sure, and others were like, "Let's get on it!" So it all depends.

I mean, I do think that DNA– it's a mystery to me and I worry about how it might get interpreted because you don't want to see it weaponized in the wrong ways. 

But there are all sorts– like I mentioned earlier, GIS, LiDAR, DNA. Blood residue analysis. Ethno-botanical analysis is when you recover preserved plant remains, and you can get some sense of domestication of plants or the use of wild plants. I mean, these things are, they're moving forward by leaps and bounds. And we can bring them to bear. And I think because of the trusting relationships that are starting to emerge between not just Native people but all communities who have the scientists come in to tell them they're history, I think that we're going to see history transformed.

And we are seeing history transform in different ways. So I think it's really very exciting, and I think NAGPRA, even though so many of my colleagues feared it, is one of the better things that has happened to us in the last 20 years.

Philip Deloria:  I was on an early NAGPRA consultation and the fear was, Oh, the Indians are backing up semi-trucks to the institution and they're going to unload all of our stuff and take all of our good things. A delegation came from, a tribal nation came, the museum sort of reluctantly pulled out maybe 200 objects, laid them on tables. The consultation went on all day. At the end of the day, the conversation was, "What do we need to have a further conversation about in terms of repatriation?" And it was four objects. And this was interesting in relation to what had happened over the course of the day, which is that the delegation would pick up these objects and they would talk about them, and the museum, realizing that there was this incredible treasure trove of information, pulled out their pads and their pencils and they walked around behind and, "What is this? And what is this? And what is this?"

The utility and the value of that Native knowledge, right? Which had not gone away, which was completely there, was completely evoked by the objects, was far more– it was always transcendent, how much information was exchanged. And that ended up being quite a good partnership. I think you're exactly right to think about and point to that.

Colin, I wonder if we might come back around to George Washington in terms of thinking about the ways that, you know, Native people live and are in relation to the world. Some big part of that has to do with the ways in which federal Indian policy and state Indian policies – for example, with Virginia – was actually formed. And one of the things that was so striking to me about the book is the section you have about Washington as an early policymaker. And I wonder if you might think with us. You mentioned, for example, the gridding and the commodification of land, which comes out of the Land Ordinance of 1785, or the Northwest Ordinance which lays out a road map for territories to become states. I mean, these are the foundational imperial and colonial sort of policies that make the United States go. 

So, I wonder if you might think with us a bit more, speak a bit more about Washington as a person who develops and is part of the development of Indian policy, which has longer-lasting kinds of consequence.

Colin Calloway:  Of course, because Washington's first President so he has a unique opportunity to set the nation, if you like, on its course in dealing with Native Americans. And Washington is concerned about that. I don't want to paint a picture of him as this mindless land-grabber. He's a land-grabber; he's certainly not mindless. Because one of the things that he's concerned about is, how is this all going to look? We're a new nation, we're a republic and a democracy on a stage full of monarchies. People are looking at us. Our own citizens will be looking at us. Posterity will look at us.

He spends a lot of ink and a lot of time worrying about this, especially writing back and forth with Henry Knox, who's the Secretary of War because Indian Affairs at the time was in the War Department. Far too much ink for me to dismiss that as mere hypocrisy.

But the bottom line for Washington and for the United States is, we must have this land. So when the United States wins its independence in 1783, Great Britain transfers to it everything south of the Great Lakes, north of Florida, east of the Mississippi. And they can do that because Europeans acquire land by right of discovery. You arrive somewhere, you claim it by discovery, and then you can give it to somebody else; you don't need to have Indian people at these treaties.

But that's basically all the United States has. It has nothing of an army. Its currency, we all know about its currency, not worth a nickel. No infrastructure. It's broke at the end of this war. What does it have? All it has is its claim to land and this land is inhabited by Indian people. So you have to acquire that land from them. How are you going to do that? Well, the British had had a system. And that was basically that you did this through formal treaties, open and above board to the extent that you could do that, so that there was a legitimacy to it. And that was the preferred mode – we're going to take this land, but we should do it fairly and honorably.

And so, the Northwest Ordinance that Phil mentioned in 1787 not only sets out the territorial system in the United States, basically it sets out a blueprint for national expansion because American citizens are going to move West, a territory will form as the population increases; eventually a state will form and this will be an orderly kind of procession across the country. So that's committing the nation and envisaging a future built on Indian land. Which requires dispossessing Indian people of their homeland.

But the same ordinance says, "But we will always deal justly and fairly or honorably and fairly with American Indians and we will never invade them, except in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress," was the phrase. So right from that beginning, even before Washington's President, the new nation has committed itself to national expansion, and also committed itself to this almost inescapable contradiction: We're going to take your land from you, but we're going to deal fairly and honorably with you. How's that going to work? Because it didn't work so well. But it remains a constant in American Indian policy. Whether it's land or resources, it continues right through the history of the country.

And Washington's preference was that we will do the right thing. So we will offer Indian people a fair price for their land, and we will offer them peace. And in some ways I think he's perhaps even naive and optimistic. He kind of envisages this as something that can almost happen naturally, that as Americans move into Indian territory, that they'll drive the game away so those hunting territories become less valuable and Indian people will gladly give them up to hungry American farmers. 

It wasn't that simple. And so, when Indian people, as they did, said, "Thanks but no thanks," then Washington and the United States had a problem because you still have to have the land. 

And so, when Washington's writing about Indian people, when confronted with those Indian people who were not willing to give up their land, who resist American expansion, then these people are recalcitrant. These are the people he refers to as savages, and these are the people who he says must be extirpated, rooted out. 

So you've got, as Jeff Osler describes it, Plan A, which is a benevolent American Indian policy, which you should accept because if you don't we've got Plan B. And Plan B will be what some people might call genocidal. 

But there is another piece to it, and that is, how could you possibly take Indian people's land and deal fairly and honorably with them? And Washington gave this some thought and Jefferson gave it some thought and articulated, Yeah, you can do this. Because if you believe that Indian people are doomed to extinction, unless they adapt and adjust to this new way of life, and live like Americans – in other words, become civilized – then the best thing that you can do for Indian people is to help them become civilized or, if necessary, force them to become civilized. And they're not going to become civilized – which in a late 18th or early 19th century American view means being sedentary and farming – they're not going to do that if they've got all this hunting territory where they can go hunting. Who would not rather spend their time hunting deer than working from dawn to dusk behind a plow?

So now it comes into line. Because by depriving Indian man of hunting territory, you're actually causing or even compelling them to become farmers and farming requires far less land. And so, they can sell off the excess surplus land to American farmers. 

So in that, what we might think as almost a warped way of thinking, it actually worked. You can civilize Indian people out of their land. And that civilization component becomes an element of American Indian policy from that day onwards. And of course, it leaves the United States open to charges of incredible hypocrisy. And of course, Jefferson and Knox and Washington are all hypocritical, like humans; we all are this. 

But I think at the time, Washington, I see Washington as really wrestling with this as a national issue. And I think Joe Ellis is right on this; that there's two things that the Founding Fathers, the Revolutionary generation, dropped the ball. One was Indians and one was slavery. And the Northwest Ordinance, as Phil mentioned, does the same thing. We banned slavery; slavery is prohibited in the Northwest Territory, but it's permitted south of the Ohio. Well, that maybe looked like it might be a compromise to buy time in 1787, but, what is it, six years later, the cotton gin's invented and cotton is on the march across the South. 

So these are issues that I see these guys really wrestling with. And of course, failing to come up with a solution because what would that solution be? What could that look like in a nation that's predicated on a future built on acquiring Indian land?

Philip Deloria:  There are these interesting moments. I'll just make one little thing and then we'll open it up to questions. But there are these interesting moments where there does seem to be a possibility within the American political infrastructure to imagine an Indian polity existing within. So there's the Delaware Treaty which sort of says– and I think this is probably the cynical treaty, but it sort of says, "Oh, the Delawares, you will have your own state and you get to be the head of the state and other Indians will be subservient to you." And then of course, all the way up into the early 20th century, there is the possibility of an Indian state in that place called Indian territory that Indian people at least continue to take seriously, up until 1906-ish or so, right?

So there is a sense, I think you're right, that there is a real moral wrestling with this. And I think it's part of the legacy of the British who also had a certain kind of moral wrestling with this. At the same time, it's balanced by incredible sense of expediency that oftentimes descends into cynicism, I think. But to sort of say it's totally cynical, I agree with you, I think that would be wrong.

Colin Calloway:  And I would just interject. Think about the importance of treaties. I teach a seminar on treaties. And as I look at the history of this country and think about documents, foundational documents, so you've got the Declaration of Independence that declares independence. You've got the Constitution, which establishes the government. And then you've got Indian treaties that deliver the land. And without the land, the independence, and the government – part of your freedom is the freedom to get this land – you have no nation.

And so, as I look at it from the outside, there should be three documents or sets of documents that are held in national reverence – Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Indian treaties. But as Phil knows only too well, Indian treaties are not only not accorded that deference, they're often not even observed. But it's a fundamental part.

There's a neat website that our colleague Claudio Saunt has, which is called the Invasion of America. I teach a class called the Invasion of America because it makes students think, "Did I miss something?" But you can look on there and you can pick your location and you'll find which treaty delivered the land. And you watch this, it's interactive, you can follow this all the way across the country. 

Philip Deloria:  You know and I would say, Colin, in relation to these three, if we go to Article Six of the Constitution, we find three bodies of law – the Constitution itself, those laws which will be passed by Congress, and the treaties which will be made. So this is actually embedded; Indian people are embedded in the Constitution, in the Three-Fifths Clause, in the Commerce Clause and, I think by implication, in Article Six. I sound like I'm a constitutional person; I'm really not. 

Let us open it up to questions. Please, when you do, we want to move through as many as we possibly can. Try to make sure you're asking a question, rather than making a statement. Don't ask a question that's already been asked. We all know how this works; let's do it right. Deal? Okay. There's microphones here and here, if folks would like to step up and ask our guests.

Q:  Excuse me. Hi, thank you very much for this. It's very interesting. So President Jackson, when he moved the Indians west, he made a statement, I believe I've read, that he knew that all treaties were nonsense, that they were never going to be honored. And certainly he was in the middle of an awful lot of Indian conflict. But he wanted to move them west of the Mississippi. Was it disingenuous of him to think that if we move them out there, and of course they're going to have all the land they need, et cetera, et cetera, to live independently. Because he was concerned that they were going to become extinct. Was it disingenuous because, did he really think American expansion was going to stop at the Mississippi? Do you have any historical understanding of what his thinking was in relation to that?

Colin Calloway:  So, I would say that's a question, I think disingenuous was a kind word. [laughter] I think, well Thomas Jefferson had said at one point that – do you remember the quotation? – there was enough land between the Atlantic and the Mississippi to keep America going for 100 generations or something. Obviously, that didn't happen. 

Jackson, I think, was a different kettle of fish, although the seeds of removal are with Jefferson, that you are going to move Indian people from the land. But it's only really with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 where you've actually got somewhere to remove them to. So now you've got an alternative; if the options as I’ve laid them out were either you go to war to destroy Indian people or you civilize them so that they're kind of absorbed into the society. Because that's the goal, is to assimilate them so that ultimately they will disappear. That takes time. And Americans are impatient, and people like Andrew Jackson are even more impatient.

So I think the idea of moving people west of the Mississippi is not a permanent solution, although they often talked about the area west of the Mississippi for a couple decades as being a permanent Indian barrier, because from the Canadian border down to the Gulf of Mexico, this was all Indian territory. But Indian people didn't buy that for a minute. In my treaty class, we do a reenactment of a debate at Red Clay within the Cherokee Nation, where the Cherokees are debating, "What are we going to do? We've got this nut case in the White House." This is 1835. [laughter] "We've got this nut case in the White House who's going to remove us. And we've got the offer of a treaty. Do we take it or not?"

And it's really interesting to get people into that because most people assume, whether Native or not, "Well, we would have said no." But of course, historical reality is much more complicated – "We'll say no, but if it means my wife and children being killed, I'm going to go. And if staying in Georgia means annihilation, then we'll move west and rebuild." Which is ultimately what the Cherokees doing.

But those Cherokees at that time, and again, getting back to what I was talking about as a historian using documents, this is a great thing to do because by most of the Cherokee leadership are literate, they're educated, they're elite. And they're debating this not only among themselves, but in the Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper written in Cherokee and in English, they're debating it by sending memorials to Congress, they're giving lectures in New England churches. This is part of the debate. But a fundamental part of that question that they wrestle with – "Okay, so we've had 17 treaties with the United States and they've broken every one. So now we make this treaty with the promise that we can go to Oklahoma or Arkansas and be there forever undisturbed. Do we really think that this is what's going to happen?" 

And so, I think this is a question not just for historians, but it was one that Indian people at the time were wrestling with. And pretty much the answer, of course, looking particularly at Jackson, was, we know that's not likely to be the case. And of course, given the realities of national growth and expansion, it wasn't going to be the case either. 

And Jackson's not my favorite person. I don't see him wrestling with a national dilemma in the way that I see Washington doing it. If that answers your question.

Philip Deloria: Let’s go over here

Q:  This is a question. It's a tendentious question, maybe, but the land acknowledgement that you started with I think is a very admirable gesture. But it strikes me as a bit timid. I’m interested in– I know you're historians and not policy people, but I'm interested in the connection between that spirit of land acknowledgement and immigration policy. And I'm interested in what to me is the illegitimate racial nationalist basis of Build The Wall. And so, I also read Russell Shorto's book, and so I understand that the name Town Destroyer came down to George Washington through his great-grandfather because John Washington was a practitioner of murder and genocide 120 years before George Washington. And that actually was passed on by the Natives through oral history, so the Natives in Ohio were aware of that when they met George Washington. 

And so, if the foundation of our country is in genocide, and if that's illegitimate by modern standards of morality, does it follow that European racial nationalism and immigration policy is not legitimate, and that a legitimate immigration policy would be the opposite of Build The Wall; for instance, open borders with immigrants. Open borders, let's say, for immigrants with Native American blood, like Mexicans, maybe. 

Colin Calloway:  A couple of years ago, Phil, the National Congress of the American Indian, I think it was, didn't they offer an amnesty for two billion illegal immigrants who'd invaded the country? Native societies, I think as an historian looking at them, have been embracive and inclusive, and many of them– if you look at Iroquois or Haudenosaunee or Comanche, they're often the true melting pots in that many of the people who were citizens, if you like, of those nations began life somewhere else as someone else. I know that's not the core of your question, but it does suggest that.

Philip Deloria:  Yeah, I mean, I think I'll just say the point of a land acknowledgement I think is to have a moment of memory and a moment of reverence and to ask everyone to think of that collectively. I understand there are consequences that unfold from this, but whether one takes that as the occasion to sort of then launch into a full consideration of those consequences in a polemical way, I think is actually wrong. And I think it's against the spirit of the land acknowledgement.

But I agree with you in the sense that there are real consequences in the here and now to the histories that we were talking about in the past. And I think these histories, it's really important to understand the ways that these histories actually do continue to reflect through into the present and take us into the moment and into the crisis that you're talking about.

So there are ways in which these things do speak. And I think if we had many hours, we could really get into it. But let's go to the next question.

Q:  First of all, I wanted to thank you very much for providing us this framework to look back on our history with more of a Native American slant. And you've almost given me a perfect segue for my question that has to do with– it seems like the British and the others coming here, the whole Colonial effort, the idea is that we know better, we have a better way of living and we're going to sort of impose that on you. And it strikes me that even today we live with that same thing except now we invade with McDonald's and Taco Bells and our commercial efforts. We don't take your land, but we're going to come to your country and we're going to show you a better way to live economically. 

I was wondering if you could talk a little more about what you touched on, about how our history informs how things operate today.

Colin Calloway:  I think a part of the kind of work that I do and one of the reasons why I think that it's important to teach this to students and try and do it in a careful way that does not fall into stereotyping, because you can have very positive stereotypes, as well as negative, and sometimes romantic. To look back at early America at a time when there were societies that were functioning, and had functioned for thousands of years on different philosophies and different principles that were not all about accumulation and consumption and conquest of nature, and those kinds of things. 

I'm sure Phil's heard the joke – make America great again; give it back to the Indians. And that's somewhat what that's getting at. That for so long, our history was informed by those early Brits who came to this continent and were actually, I think, more like blind men feeling the elephant than really seeing what was here. But they understood it and wrote about it in terms of civilization and savagery. And it's taken us a long time to get away from that and to recognize the qualities and the essential philosophies that Indigenous societies possessed and possess.

And so, I think when you're talking about McDonald's, et cetera, this is more than just– I'm being facetious because that is part of this invasion, that Europeans arrive here with not only plans with what to do with the land, but also plans with how to live a life and structure a society, et cetera. With the result, of course, that's devastating for Native Americans long after the Washington's gone. You have a United States Indian educational policy which involves wrenching thousands of Indian children from their homes, taking them to places like Carlyle, Pennsylvania, and educating them, which actually, of course, means de-educating them. Perhaps with good intentions, but with, in many cases, horrendous consequences and legacies that are still playing out. 

And I know that's not a direct answer to your question, but I'm a Dartmouth professor, so we can take anything and just sort of talk around it.

Q:  No, that’s– it's more really just a platform for thought. It occurred to me that we continue to live history. And a lot of the way we behave today is very much informed by the way we behaved 200, 300 years ago.

Colin Calloway:  Well, exactly, because the things I'm talking about – the assault on Indian land – look at Standing Rock last year. And look at the plans to establish this huge copper mine up in Alaska. Native people are still confronted with assaults on their resources. We may not want the land, but we want what's under the land, or the water, or something. And that, of course, is going on globally as well, as we're well aware.

Philip Deloria:  Thank you. Let’s go over here.

Q:  My question has to do with the early days of the Massachusetts colony in the 17th century. It's my understanding that Native people were enslaved. Is that true? Could you comment on that? I read somewhere that some prominent Puritan leader owned a couple of Native slaves. And I was just wondering if you could comment on that. How did that happen?

Philip Deloria:  Some of the most interesting scholarship going on today concerns both Indigenous enslavement of African and African-descended peoples, and the enslavement of Indigenous peoples. So I would recommend a book called, The Other Slavery, which sort of details this. And one of the really interesting– he breaks down a chart, a demographic chart. And one of the things that shows up is between 1650 and 1700, this large blip that is basically accounted for by King Philip's War and by other kinds of Colonial wars, which were essentially slave-raiding wars, the Yamasee War, these other wars. 

And the enslaving of Indigenous people is quite interesting because it's different from African slavery in the sense that women and children end up being the sort of primary focus. But Indian enslavement throughout the Caribbean and through flows of slave trade from the center of the continent, up through the French, down along the seaboard. There's a massive trade. Andres Resendez has said, Look, this is somewhere between three and five million Indigenous people who are slaves in relation to the 12 million that we usually use hemispherically to talk about African slavery. So this is a quite significant and quite substantial number. 

And there is slaving that goes on among and by and for and engaged with Indigenous people all across the continent for a long, long period of time. And in fact, one of the most important moments is the moment in the middle of the 19th century during the settlement of California, where basically Californians engaged in what we can truly call a death slavery as it was in the early days of the Caribbean – taking slaves and literally working them to death. Capture your slaves in April; work them and don't feed them through the summer; let them die. And then capture a whole 'nother bunch of people.

So this is a story that is really, really important. I want to thank you for raising the question.

Colin Calloway:  And in answer to the question about Massachusetts and New England, absolutely. There are Indians slaves taken captive after the Pequot War, King Philip's War, and they're shipped to the Caribbean. There are some who stay here. And there are Indian slaves who come here from elsewhere. In Quebec you get Indian slaves; they're all called panis, meaning Pawnee; that doesn't mean they're all Pawnees, but that was such a– the Eastern Plains was a place where other Indians raided for slaves and they found their way to Quebec, to Charleston, to Boston. 

And this is, as Phil said, this is something we're only really just beginning to unravel it. And there's a book by Margaret Newell, it's called Brethren in the title; I forget it. But it's specifically about Indian slavery in New England, out in the last few years. 

And sometimes it may not be slaves, but they're indentured children and they're in a household. But they're essentially domestic slaves. 

Philip Deloria:  [simultaneous conversation] the most enslaved continent in the history of the world. So many different forms of slavery, including Indigenous slavery, Colonial forms of slavery, Colonial/Indigenous hybrid forms of slavery, a slave trade that is everywhere. And we're really just beginning to understand this. 

Let's go to the next question.

Q:  One of the first things that Washington does is to bring Vermont into the Union. And that story's always told as, the Allen brothers and Governor Chittenden, they have land titles under New Hampshire, they want to get the New York land titles vacated, so they're able to manipulate Washington to doing that, and then they agree to come into the Union; Vermont comes in as the 14th state. And they're dangling joining British Canada to get that to happen. So that's always the story that's told. Washington doesn't want the British to have Lake Champlain, et cetera, so he agrees to this. But how much also is that they felt, the Allens and Chittenden felt that the US would uphold the dispossession of the Abenaki, whereas that might have been more difficult under the British. And that was also part of the story. I was thinking about the early part of the comments that you were making. We always see that as power politics between the new United States and Great Britain. But the Abenaki story is not told in that aspect.

Colin Calloway:  So, this is an interesting story for me because I'm British. I live in Vermont. And I've written a book on the Abenaki. [laughter] So looking at Vermont, there was a moment when it almost saw sense and came back. But it didn't happen. And Vermont, the Allen brothers, Ethan Allen, these are folk heroes. So if you've done Abenaki history, you have to be a little careful. 

But I think, it's a very complicated thing. The Haldimand Papers, where I worked finding a lot of these records, are full of this stuff. It's a very complicated thing. And I think Allen brothers are actually what my Scottish uncles refer to as chancers, they were opportunists. But Abenaki land is clearly there, and the Allen brothers, one of the people– there's different ways of dispossessing people. You can go to war with them, you can make treaties with them, you can make deeds that steal their land. Or you can actually say, "You were never there in the first place." It's much easier to dispossess people who were never there. And that, I think, as I see it, is very often what the Allen brothers do.

So they're up on Lake Champlain and there are Abenaki people watching them surveying, saying, "What are you doing? This is our land." And when the Allen brothers talk about it, they refer to these Abenakis as St. Francis Indians. Which was the term of choice, I think, to refer to all Abenakis because many Abenakis from Vermont had migrated north into the St. Lawrence and taken up residence at what is now Odanak, originally a French mission village called St. Francis. And so, by referring to these Abenaki people who are, as I see it, standing on their own land, trying to defend their own land, as St. Francis, the Allen brothers are saying, "You don't even belong here. You belong in Canada with the British." Right?

So it's a complicated question. But if the core of your question is, were the Allen brothers really after Abenaki land, it's a very short answer: Absolutely. 

Philip Deloria:  So, we have about five minutes left. And I'm saying apologies in advance to folks who are at the back of the line. So I think we can maybe take a couple more questions. We'll go here, and then– is that Maria over there?

Q:  So this question actually comes from our online audience. This comes from a woman named Marsha, whose family settled in central Pennsylvania in 1737. She says her family has many stories that have been passed down about meeting Native Americans, but she would like to know what that atmosphere of those meetings would be like in the early 1700s.

Colin Calloway:  It's actually the kind of thing I'm really interested in because for all of the brutality of the history of this continent and Colonialism, people spend a lot of time getting along and producing children. And so, there are lots of areas and arenas where violence is not the go-to response. And in particular, I'm thinking of Pennsylvania and Delaware country. This tradition in Delaware society about these people are peacemakers, they are intermediaries, they are diplomats. 

And so, the initial response to a stranger is not necessarily to kill them. And depending on different societies, your response can be– so there are two kinds of people in the world: there's us and other people. And other people who are not kin and family are dangerous and potentially hostile. So okay, you could kill them, but more often I think an initial response is, Okay, so if these people are dangerous strangers, how can we make them less dangerous? By making them human, by bringing them into our society. And that can be done through ritual, it can be done through ceremony, it can be done through adoption, it can be done through sexual intercourse.

And so, I think one of the things we often miss – by we, I mean me; as historians, looking back over history – the light is so good on the bloodshed and the wars, et cetera, et cetera, but there's lots and lots of places and times where people are not doing that, and they're actually intermarrying and welcoming each other and trying to reach across these cultural gulfs. And sometimes failing. And that's a huge part of the tragedy, when people are actually trying to do, if you like, the right thing, and getting it wrong.

So I've done a lot of work looking at captives. So if you walk into an Indian– I remember years ago at the Newberry Library Helen Turner saying to me, "Colin, you will never find an Indian village with members of only one tribe in it." And what she was talking about was how Indian societies embraced, adopted and welcomed other people. And by the 18th century, those other people often included white people. And this is not just me making this up. Benjamin Franklin worried about this, other people worried about it. Benjamin Franklin said, "Wait a minute, we're supposed to be building a city on a hill and we're the model of civilization. But a lot of our own citizens, given half a chance, are going off to live with Indians." And a lot of people that had been taken captive, given the chance to go home, say they'd rather not. And I don't think you do that in societies that are just violent.  

So there have got to be these mechanisms for adoption. And part of captive-taking, when I look at captives that were taken on the Connecticut River and taken up to Abenaki country, you have the incredible violence of a raid in which parents might be killed, and then the children will be given little moccasins and carried on the shoulder or pulled along on toboggans and treated with kindness as part of the process, getting them ready for adoption, for them to then become Abenaki. 

So you've got a cultural tussle here that's going both ways. And sometimes what Indian people are doing, I think, is meeting outsiders and Europeans with kindness rather than violence.

Philip Deloria:  We'll do one last question. Go quick and we'll try to wrap things up.

Q:  Absolutely, I'll try and keep this really brief. I just wanted to express a lot of gratitude for the conversation here today. It's so important. I'm speaking as a history professor here at UMass-Boston. Some of my students are here. And my question actually is in part inspired by them, but also inspired by I think the very careful attention you've all brought to the importance of doing work to change the dominant narratives that are pervasive in so many different ways, passed down through the generations, pervasive in our cultural institutions, pervasive in our education system. 

And my question really comes from an experience I have in the classroom semester after semester where my students tell me that they never got any of this at earlier points in their education. And so, we always have to start class with a process of unlearning. And so, my question is really, I'd love to hear your thoughts about opportunities or points for intervention that we might be able to pursue to kind of start changing that narrative at earlier points in the education system.

Julia King:  I think that's the $64,000 question. There's a lot of parts that are involved in doing that, beginning with the educational system. And the way I see the groups, the tribes that I work with do it is a constant raising awareness. They're going out. And then I do my part as an archeologist. They ask me to do certain things or provide information and I try to do that. But I almost feel like it's one school child at a time. And so, I do think it is very challenging. 

I will tell you, in Virginia I have a colleague, Martin Gallivan, who's written about what's called strategic essentialism. And he talks in this essay he writes about how the Virginia groups, the Virginia tribes, which are actually now federally recognized, or many of them are, how they sort of take those dominant narratives and try to derive authority from them and then flip the narrative. So they get in that way. 

I know we don't have much time, but that may be a way to try. Because you can get people's attention with that.

Colin Calloway:  I think it is the $64,000 question. And I get that question or that concern not only from white students from Connecticut, but from Native American students from Oklahoma. They've got Indian symbols on their license plates, but they're not teaching this in schools apparently. And I agree with all of these strategies, but at some point it's political. Because I've done a lot of workshop with teachers over the years, high school, middle school, et cetera, from all over the country. And they're hungry for this information because their students are hungry for the information. But very often, people have said, "Yeah, this is all great, Professor, but you're not setting the tests by which we are judged on how our students are performing."

And so, I think this is something where there has to come some leadership from the top as well so that those teachers that I see, if you like, struggling in the trenches, coming hungry for stuff that they can use in a unit in class, but always, if you like, looking over their shoulder. I can talk about the Iroquois Confederacy and the Trail of Tears, et cetera, but I know that my students are going to be tested, and I don't want them to be found wanting on these other things that educational policymakers, if you like, say we have to have. 

So I don't have a quick answer for it; obviously, I don't have a quick answer for it. I haven't been able to do it in 25 years. But I think this is what we're dealing with.

Philip Deloria:  As a former K-12 educator, I can say I was handed a curriculum, I was given that curriculum to teach. So many curricula have been developed over the years, so many teacher training kinds of things. I think the pressure– my sympathies are always with classroom teachers on the very real challenges that they face in the classroom around this stuff. At the same time, I also recognize the ways in watching my own children pass through 3rd grade when you got it, 6th grade when you kind of got it, is that teachers also tend to teach to their own memories. And that the 3rd-grade teacher tends to teach what that teacher actually remembered being taught as a 3rd-grader. It's amazing to me the sort of reproduction that happens there, the power of cultural reproduction.

And intervening in that is a really hard thing to do, particularly, as Colin has said, and Julie has said, around the restrictions that actually appear in the classroom. This is a major, major challenge to us. 

If I might just say a few things by way of wrapping up, I began by saying, look, Indian people make up 1.5%; we deserve more of the narrative. I think this is really true. But we struggle to get 1.5% of the narrative. And until we can get up to 10% or 15% or 20% and realize that the United States is fundamentally about not just slavery, because that is the important place where schools actually have intervened, but also about Native American history and the ways that this country's built on a continent's worth of Native land. I think this is a struggle we have to continue to do. We do it, of course, from a certain perspective. As academics, we find ourselves caught up in mission creep as we try to get into public schools. So this is hard, it's a hard challenge and a hard problem.

Colin Calloway:  And it is hard for teachers because if you're teaching American history with due attention to, say, Native American history and slavery, in a country where that dominant narrative that you're talking about is so strong and so compelling and so satisfying for so many people, that can be very uncomfortable. This can be un-American. With people like me, that's not a particular worry [laughter], but for a lot of people, this is a hard thing.

Philip Deloria:  So I think what we can agree upon is that the work that's happening here with our guests is contributing to the ongoing questioning of these narratives. And I hope you'll join me in thanking them. [applause] 

END