From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made this past November, when PBS premiered the new Ken Burns documentary series on the American Revolution.

Within the first few minutes of the series, a kind of culture war erupted online, with conservative publications claiming that Ken Burns had gone too woke.

The reason they were angry that Burns documentary highlighted The Houdini show, and noted that it might have served as a kind of model for what the founders created in the colonies.

National review said that claim revealed the bias in the series and called it a lie.

Others piled on.

But let's pull back for a moment.

What do we actually know about how the birth of this country affected the communities who had already lived here?

This week, the United States is marking 250 years.

What do native communities think about all that?

Over the next several weeks, we'll have conversations about what modern patriotism means.

And if are there another 250 years to come in this country?

Do you believe that?

Well, today we're going to focus on the story that indigenous peoples tell, and Suny Geneseo is planning a public discussion on this issue.

Today, we get a chance to preview that event will tell you all about it.

And let me welcome our guest.

In fact, the person most responsible for putting it together is the director of the Livingston County Historical Society Museum.

That's Ana Kowalczyk, who is with us.

Thank you for being with us here.

Thanks for having me.

And across the table, Doctor Michael Oberg, distinguished professor in the Department of history at Suny Geneseo.

Nice to have you back.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you.

And Grandall Bird Hallett Logan is a member of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation Snipe clan, a spokesperson for the Tonawanda Seneca Nation on the stamp issue.

We've talked about that on this program.

Nice to have you in studio.

Thank you for being here.

Happy to be here.

So I was, you know, I was musing with Doctor Oberg before the program that, you know, I that is Michael Oberg going to side with National Review against Ken Burns here.

But I want to ask you, when when this American Revolution series, you know, gets seen by millions of people, and the first few minutes, they're talking about the holding of Shoni, and you've got this, this blow up, this argument about that.

I'm curious to know briefly, what you make of this claim that the birth of this country owes something to the holding of Shoni.

The American founders didn't have the capacity to recognize anything of value in Haudenosaunee culture.

In my view.

They were.

If you've read the documents, there's a lot of documents.

And you get to know what Shawnee people said about the Americans or what other indigenous peoples across the continent said.

They didn't refer to them as patriots or founding fathers, or because they call them killers.

They called them Mad Men.

And most often they referred to them as long knives, a name that cuts to the heart of the violence with which they were associated.

That's that's the heart of the story.

Now, to be honest.

You know, I had an uncle a long time ago who was a baker, and he never liked to eat cake.

I didn't watch the documentary because I'm a historian and I don't do history documentaries.

I mean, I didn't watch it.

I've got other people in the house and they've got things to watch.

I haven't, I haven't sat through and watched the documentary, so I, I'm, I can't say too much about what Ken Burns did, but that argument's there.

But look.

But you've heard the argument.

I've heard the argument.

This is not a new argument.

You know, it's not a new argument.

Goes back a long way.

It goes back quite a ways.

And in my view, it just gives far too much credit to the Founding fathers who wanted nothing the best of them thought that they could transform indigenous people into white people with darker skin.

They talked in our part of the state in 1779 when when the Sullivan Clinton campaign and they did the Finger Lakes, George Washington wrote letters and orders talking about the, the, the extermination.

The extirpation was an antiquated version of that word that he used, but the extermination of the savages.

Right.

Soldiers drank toasts.

Soldiers drank toast.

Civilization or death to the Indians.

And so what they said, And you can just march through history.

Even like that.

You can start at the beginning.

The revolution.

Paxton Boys.

Right.

And Paxton Boys massacre in in in Pennsylvania, where white frontiersmen broke into a jail where peaceful Christian Indians were being housed and slaughtered them with hatchets.

Four year olds, three year olds, two year olds.

And I, I when I teach this in class, I ask my students, put yourself just physically think about the space involved.

How close you have to stand to a four year old to hit them with a hatchet.

20 years later at Gannon in Houston, in in in in eastern Ohio, frontiersman swooped into this chapel, a moravian chapel where these indigenous Christians who spoke German because that's what the Moravians preached and they didn't know what the German was.

They thought they were bragging about their violent death.

They weren't.

They were singing psalms in German.

They have these these hundred people prisoner in this chapel, right?

About 33 men, about 33 women, about 33 children, about 30 of each.

And they voted what to do?

That, that that's that's the democracy that came with this revolution.

They voted to slaughter them with knives and hatchets.

All of them.

One child supposedly survived by hiding under the church.

That's what the revolution is.

And look, man, if you if you if you are a landowner in this state, as I am, you are the beneficiary of a systematic program of indigenous dispossession that at times in places just in black and white, violated the laws of the United States.

And even when it confirmed to conform to what's legal, it violated every standard of justice, morality, equality, truth that you'd like to think that this country might stand for.

So I thought we'd open the hour just with real subtlety.

Look, listeners, you want to weigh in as we go throughout the hour.

You can do that multiple ways.

At 844295 talk.

It's toll free.

8442958255263 WXXI for call from Rochester.

2639994.

Email the program connections at wxxi.org.

If you're watching on YouTube, you can join the chat there.

I want to get back.

We're going to get back to the question of land in a moment.

But let me ask, the other guests, and, and certainly I'm grateful that Greendell is here and we're going to talk about, I mean, he didn't speak for every indigenous person, but it's important to have indigenous voices in every conversation we possibly can.

But on a why did you want to put this, this event together that's coming up in September.

September 12th is what I have.

Is that correct?

That's right.

Okay.

September 12th, 3:00.

It's a Saturday.

Students said that would be a good time to attend.

It's always.

Good to have.

Students, right?

And so, of course, everybody's been talking about the 250th anniversary, since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

It also is the 150th anniversary of the Livingston County Historical Society, which is interesting, right?

Because 1776, 100 years later, lots of historical societies, you know, started.

So we we have our own, you know, commemoration.

But, you know, celebration is not the word.

I'm using it's a commemoration we're talking about.

What 250th conversations can look like, particularly from an indigenous, perspective.

So, we've put together a panel of three Native American scholars, from University, Albany, Cornell, Lafayette College, and then, three representatives of representatives, excuse me, from the indigenous community, including the Tonawanda Seneca Nation and the Seneca Nation of Indians.

And I actually, sat in on doctor class a few years ago, which was very informative.

And so we have a relationship over time.

And I asked him if he would be willing to, help me find the panelists for a discussion about, you know, what?

The revolution, who excluded, and what the perspectives, from the indigenous community looks like when we talk about 250 years since the signing of declaration of Independence.

So he was I'm really grateful he helped to put together the panelists, and he will moderate that discussion.

I also want to give a shout out to Suny Geneseo.

They have a new president.

Linda Treadwell and I connected with her, about how we can combine, town and gown.

So I represent the Livingston County Museum in Geneseo, walking distance from the college.

And, we want to create that, continue that relationship.

And so we're able to do this on the Suny Geneseo campus.

That in the Doty Recital Hall, which allows for 250 people, seating wise, which we expect to fill.

And then, we'll work together on this panel.

Yeah.

So we're excited.

So if you want to, part of that is 3:03 p.m.

on September 12th.

The event that we're going to be talking about this hour.

And can I ask, can I ask Randall just for some opening thoughts?

When you think about 250 years of the United States of America, what comes to mind first for you?

Honestly, it, right away, first thing I think of is just like, it's it's just another year.

You know, it's another year.

Just has a prettier, I guess, year divisible by ten, right?

I mean, 250 years.

But it's it's still just a commemoration of a lot of the same stuff that has really been, quite frankly, a detriment for our communities all throughout this continent, all throughout this, country.

The coming of the United States really led to that, you know, further push and that that change in like, Indian policy throughout time.

Right?

Like just before the conversation started, Oberg and I were talking and saying that like, oh, well, the revolution really didn't really finish for you guys until 1857 when we got our territory back there in Tonawanda.

That is kind of more or less when things had begun to settle for us, you know, but there is a lot of difficulties that came from the revolution, that came from the unification of those original 13 colonies.

And really, it's just like I said, it's just another year of us doing the same work, trying to pick everything back up.

So let's talk a little bit about land here because I already have an email from a listener named Charles who says, he says anyone who calls in today and uses the phrase stolen land ought to be forced to relinquish all of their property to the nearest American Indian if they are unsure of how to accomplish that.

The series finale of Yellowstone should provide should prove instructive.

Okay, so, Doctor Robert, you brought up land here.

Yeah.

What do you say to Charles?

Well, Charles, I didn't watch Yellowstone either, because, again.

I got a bunch of tweets.

Y'all can't get to the TV, can't get to the TV.

But, look, land back is a movement that's going on across this continent.

When I started in this field in graduate school in 1990, the idea that indigenous people would get their land back was unheard of.

Right?

It was that that that the American states, the United States, would return land was just it was completely inconceivable.

But it's happening across the country now in dribs and drabs, in bits and pieces.

But it's happening, right?

States are recognizing in some places that they stole a lot of land.

And they did.

And I would tell.

Was it Charles?

Read the documents, man.

Just read the documents.

1788 treaty with 70 1788 treaty with the Oneida.

Charles.

Go read it.

Franklin B Hough.

You can read the treaty.

Treaty proceedings.

It's available.

You can Google the documents on, on, on on all kinds of sources.

The on the Oneida said we'll lease you our lands.

The treaty was written to say we sold you sold the lands.

It's it's openly fraudulent.

The 1838 Buffalo Creek Treaty, the the most fraudulent treaty in the history of the United States.

I say that because it was so well documented, Quaker missionaries took depositions where people were coerced to sign the treaty.

They were forced to sign treaty people, signed other people, treaty and treaties name so I could sign this housing deed and say, yeah, I'm Evan Dawson, I just sold your house.

There's no question this was a stolen continent.

And to go back and bring this up and say, well, give give your land back if you don't like it, no, that's not how it works.

This is a national debt, a state debt.

And let's start talking about it.

And look, it's happened.

It's not up to individuals.

You're saying no, it's that was the same thing that they tried to when when Billie Eilish at the Grammys said, we're on stolen land and and the old dudes in the Washington Post or whatever, they, they reminded me of the two guys in The Muppet Show that the two old hecklers, they're just giving her a hard time, right?

And she's saying, we live on stolen land.

We do.

So let's figure out what we can do about it.

It's a bigger problem than me giving my land back.

It's a huge problem.

And.

And so Onondaga County returns some land to the Onondaga Nation.

Thousand acres.

It's great.

It's a start.

And there's a huge difference between, getting better and good enough.

Right.

We're at the getting better stage of things.

Things are going back.

And I would urge Charles to say, join us in this.

Right.

Learn about the learn about the the things he's denouncing.

Read the documents, and then maybe he'll come at it in a little more enlightened manner.

Well, let me ask Bert about this.

So here's another story I saw last week that, you know, someone is going to email me right now and just say, oh, connections is going to work again.

And I just want to, like, get in front of that and say, this.

I'm not afraid to have conversations that are hard.

The, the, the modern notion of woke that's used as a slur is describing when people do it to posture or to try to give themselves some sort of virtue because they say the right thing or they've got the right bumper sticker or they don't do hard things, they're trying to look virtuous.

The harder thing is to actually, I think the patriotic thing is to talk honestly about who you are and what you can improve.

I mean, an act of love is an act of honesty.

Honesty is love.

So I would reject I mean, go ahead and email me.

That's fine.

Pick someone one.

Get angry with me.

That's fine.

But here's where I think maybe the wokeness allegation does come into play.

So the the new Obama library gets designated and they do a land acknowledgment at the beginning of it.

Now, I've spoken to a lot of people from indigenous communities, and there's different, differing views on land acknowledgment.

But in recent years, most of them have not been very favorable because most of the people I've talked to from indigenous communities tell me, yes, a land acknowledgment is a good way to to make it look like you care.

It's like the least you could do.

I wonder how you see it.

And when there's a land acknowledgment on the front of the Obama library dedication do you say hey good or do you think to accomplish nothing.

Where are you at on that.

Yeah.

I mean I would much argue the same.

Like what does it accomplish?

You know, I mean, so immediately my first thought is there is an important side to land acknowledgment in getting those folks who are looking to just say, oh, that's woke.

Oh, that's this, oh, that's that who are really receptive to going out and seeking out that knowledge about what the history of the land has been up to this point, you know, to really seek for themselves who has been here since time immemorial.

Right.

So land acknowledgments do serve that purpose of at least educating the public on whose land these places are at.

But it does, in my opinion, fall to institutions to then have further commitments to those peoples who they're making this acknowledgment to.

Right.

So it's almost like, a yes.

And, you know, like it's it's it.

Right?

It can come off as performative if you don't do anything else.

Right.

And so, like when I see, say, there's a conference and I'm paraphrasing, but this is close to what I actually saw at a conference.

The conference some gentleman gets up, he says, and he just reading a script, we'd like to acknowledge that we are standing on land that has historically belonged to X, Y, Z. And then it gets through 30s and then he pauses and says, okay, today's conference is sponsored by ExxonMobil.

I, you know, like, whoa.

Yeah.

The dissonance.

But that's that's what feels performative.

Yeah.

So what would go beyond performative and what would look like it actually has meaning to you.

So a little shout out to my old workplace.

I used to work at the Union Against a Historic site, and part of our job there, asks that institutions would have for us would be to have, like some, I guess, help on finding the right language and literature for land acknowledgments.

And typically, you know what?

And with the, I guess, like the pushing from the, the, cultural liaison there in the Jemison, through his like, I guess suggestion would say like, oh, well, yeah, we'll do this for you, but what can you do for the indigenous people who you're saying whose land?

Your own?

Right.

What can you do for the Shawnee.

You know, and they would kind of make that push towards that to them, you know, so having that extra action tied behind that land acknowledgment, you know say there's a conference on the environment right.

Say there's a conference on the environment.

And you're bringing all these academics together, these scientists these researchers and they're talking about how to benefit a river right in this region.

And then they say, oh, well, this is the land of the, you know, insert nation here, right?

Then they had to from that conference, think of decent ways that they could benefit those peoples there.

So I mean, thinking about my own river, our own creek there in Tonawanda, you know, for a long time growing up, I was always told, you can fish, but you should only eat one fish, one fish a week, one fish a month.

Sorry, out of this river because it was so contaminated from upstream, like Batavia and like from farms and so on from runoff.

So growing up, that was what I had always heard was, you know, you can you can be on the water, you can fish the water, but you really can't, like, strengthen yourself from it.

You know, you probably shouldn't drink it.

You know, you probably shouldn't eat anything out of that water, you know?

So I think about my own stream when I use this example.

Whereas if there was going to be like a water conference like in the area, well then they should be thinking, how can we, you know, like just have a case study, like just think about it in the moment.

How can we help the people of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation clean their stream, their waterways and have cleaner access to their waterway?

You know, I think so.

Just to kind of sum up that entire statement, to say that land acknowledgments are performative if you don't do anything about it.

You know, that's I think that's the most I can really say about that.

Anything you want to add over there, Hannah?

Yeah.

Thank you.

One of the things about this panel that will be putting together, is we can have conversations like this, we can have discussions.

We can do the land acknowledgment, raise awareness.

I mean, I think there are people that still don't realize that, you know, Geneseo is on Seneca land, right?

So, and so we we have been part of a project in the village that also, work towards what action items you can also do in addition to that.

But the other thing I wanted to mention about the panel discussion, is that we're going to be recording it, we're going to be videotaping it.

We're going to be documenting these conversations.

For future generations as well.

And I think that's an important part of the process, so that the discussion, is not lost over time.

Well, so let me, let me read another piece of feedback here.

Art sends this note, says listening to the First America Podcast and says, it is exactly what you're all talking about today.

Highly recommended.

He says the words merciless savage are in the Declaration of Independence.

That's right.

That's a good point.

Yeah, I'm glad Art raised it.

That's.

Please.

Podcast.

Right.

I think, No, you're thinking of the original peoples.

Okay.

Which is which also should be recommended.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And I think that's important point, right?

I mean, people talk a lot about the declaration and they, they celebrate the, the preamble, right?

That these we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by their creator and so on and so forth.

But the meat of the declaration at the time the declaration was written, where were the grievances?

And those grievances were designed to bring 13 colonies together in a resistance movement.

And one way to bring the colonies together was to generate fear.

And colonists hated slaves, enslave people, because that's in the line before that, in that last grievance.

Right?

That that George the third of stirred up domestic insurrections and brought upon the inhabitants of the frontier, the merciless Indian savages, its only known rule of war is the indiscriminate slaughter of all peoples, ages and conditions, something along that line.

And I think that's if you read through the newspapers and stuff at the time of the revolution, that, that, that, that fear of indigenous peoples was, was stirred up and nurtured by, by the founding fathers.

There's a great historian at Binghamton University and Rob Parkinson, and he wrote a book where he made just this point, and he used the example, right, that if, you know, if you ask us, like we all got agree who our favorite athlete is and we might have an argument over that, we'd have a hard time agreeing, some might say TJ Thompson of the of the sabers or the a basketball player or whatever.

But we say who do we hate?

And everyone in this room would say we we, we hate Mahomes, right.

In this region.

Yeah.

That's right.

Right.

So you know, and it's easier to bring people together around a hatred than it is to get resources.

And so Parkinson, Rob Parker, Professor Parkinson made this really fantastic book, The Common Cause, where he explored this, and it was old school historical research where he just read every newspaper, every newspaper in the colonies from 1765 to 1785 or whatever.

And then that theme that if if this revolution doesn't exceed the, the, the, the savages are going to descend upon the frontiers and kill us all, or slaves are going to take us to attack us in the night that was there.

And that's so that that racism, that white supremacy is, is hard wired into the nation's founding documents.

And we, you know, the Constitution, of course, has a 3/5 clause and all that.

It's it's fundamental to what this country is.

And, you know, you were being I thought you're being very charitable to people who use the word wokeness to denounce a lot of the talk here.

I mean, I think when people are talking about denouncing wokeness, what they're denouncing is a type of history that that challenges white, straight, male supremacy.

I think sometimes they're denouncing what looks silly and performative and low effort sometimes.

Yeah, I think they use performative that way.

But wokeness, too often, when I get it and I get it sort of daily, like I give it talks like you guys for at, you know, it's like this is woke.

Well, you know, Launchbury called my work woke.

But he's not talking about it being performative.

He's calling because I'm talking about indigenous people owning, having a right to the land in the state.

So.

But what I, I will never, ever try to speak for him.

But let me embody what some of my emails would say.

And I'll ask all of all of our guests this.

We're talking about the perspective of indigenous communities, about what, 250 years of the United States of America means of what the founding meant and what the experience was, and what those communities would want non-Indigenous communities to think about.

That's part of the event that's coming up on September 12th, and I'm sure the panelists will go a lot deeper than we can go in an hour today.

That's why they're doing it at Suny Geneseo coming up here.

But part of what I think the dissenters would say, let me let me start with you, Bert, on this, they would say, okay, even if we're going to grant that it's been 250 years, we have to live together now.

You know, we all weren't around when all that happened.

What do we do now?

You know, we can't just say stolen land forever.

It's 250 years later.

What do we do about it?

So what's the answer?

Yeah.

I mean, I think Doctor Ober put it pretty well, perfectly right in the beginning.

Like, there's a lot of people in this state who are benefiting, I should say the country who are benefiting from this, these systems of oppression that had begun 250 years ago.

You know, there's a lot of people who benefit from these things today.

And I think that we all need to be cognizant of that.

And and, yeah, find a way to go forward with it.

So the one thing that I did basically on the daily when I was working at good and again, was talk about and and granted, going on against history was was a century before, you know, 1687 the good underground village was attacked by the market data.

Danville, you know, and burnt and totally destroyed.

So what I tell would tell people at that time is like like, yes, it's true.

We weren't there.

We weren't there, I wasn't there, you weren't there.

It's true.

That's a fact.

But we're still feeling the effects of these actions today.

They have long lasting effects.

And what I would challenge for the people who would visit and have the time and the patience to have this conversation with me again and again.

I would tell them that, well, we need to go forward together, like, and find a way to remedy these things, to fix these things that have really disparaged us for so long.

You know, like, it's really hard for I would think, of most Americans to really see the effects that linger on our peoples from the revolution.

Right?

So, I mean, think of the numbers game.

How many of our people were killed due to disease, due to warfare just within Sullivan Clinton campaign alone?

You know, I haven't heard too many stories about Sullivan Clinton campaign from 1779 growing up, except for the few that basically sound very much akin to Nazi Germany.

Right.

And so you think of the numbers game.

Our people are matrilineal, right?

So I'm Snipe clan.

We said at the top of the hour, I'm Snipe Clan because my mother's snipe clan and her mother and back and back and back.

And so if we just play the numbers game, if you look far enough back to the women and the children and everybody who was killed in, in this, in this colonial period, which I would say still continues on to today, then our population would be a lot better than it is now.

We would have a lot more of our own people than we would know.

There's people who may have been really excellent with our language, people who may have been really excellent leadership, you know, people who may have really done a lot of important work who were cut off, you know, 250 plus years ago, you know, so I think, like, yeah, it's true we weren't there, but we still have that responsibility from our ancestors to do different.

And I think people need to use 250 in that sense to think like, yeah, like this country has a rough history.

People need to be recognizing that.

People need to be accepting that.

And people need to say, how can we do better for the next 250?

Right.

Are you hearing more of that question or not enough?

Which question exactly is it?

What can we do better?

Right.

You're asking people to to be introspective about the history of this country and say, even if I wasn't there, I benefit from those actions.

So what do I do about are you hearing more introspection these days about that?

I'm hearing more and more.

Yeah, it's true.

I'm hearing more and more.

When I was working at going and again, of course, like I was just in the right places to hear these things, though I should say that I was in the right places to hear these things, that the type of people who are willing to think like this.

If they're going to, then you're kind of self-selecting.

Exactly.

They're exactly.

They're seeking these things out on their own, basically.

So in my own life, like I do, I do hear more, you know, I do see more because of course, algorithms and whatnot online, I do see more.

But whether or not it's enough isn't really up for me to say, but what I will say is that, like, there is a lot more pushes, as we were talking about earlier, about land back and even just like land stewardship and including indigenous voices and things, you know, so, so conversations like what are going to be happening on this, on this panel on September 12th are much the same, right?

We're seeing a lot more of this these days.

Doctor Oberg, to that question of two.

It was 250 years ago.

So what do we do now?

That's an awfully self-serving way to respond to an argument, right?

You know, I mean, it's just.

Try that in a domestic argument with your girlfriend.

Your wife is a long time ago.

Get over it.

Right.

How's that going to fly?

Right?

It's just that's such a self-serving argument.

And look, I would emphasize Grand been leading the fight against the stamp project, right?

One of the reason the stamp project is that thing, it's not just a general hostility to data centers, but it's the damage that it will do to the environment, the environment at the tournament, the Seneca nation.

I'm working on a project with Onondaga Creek.

Right.

Where where assault brine, extraction of brine from, central New York has damaged Onondaga Creek in ways that transformed a body of water that used to be clear and cold and filled with trout is now looks like chocolate milk.

And as a result, there have been environmental changes.

Some medicinal plants that were once harvested along the creek are no longer available, so the consequences remain.

Right.

And it's, you know, and it's look, you know, in, in in the Cheryl decision, this is about 2320, 20.

Some years ago, a Supreme Court decision written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, arguably the most racist, a senior decision of the Supreme Court in the last 50 years, Ginsburg trotted out the doctrine of discovery, right?

That that Europeans get to do this stuff with the land because basically they found it.

They own it.

These old ideas are still there.

We're still dealing with the damage of it.

Across the country, you're seeing this push, whether it's Oak flat in Arizona or at Tonawanda's Seneca Nation, or through the Onondaga Nation, where the lands of indigenous peoples are viewed as less than right, that that that they, they, they ought to give way to the development of corporate power or corporate wealth.

And and it continues to happen, this exploitation of indigenous lands.

It's as a historian, in some ways, it's exhausting.

And look, again, I make this point that that New York became the Empire State through a process of dispossession.

It wasn't it wasn't inevitable.

It wasn't natural.

It wasn't God's manifest destiny.

It was in black and white, a crime against the laws of the United States, which stated at 1790, Indian trade and Intercourse Act said, for example, if you want to buy land from an indigenous nation, you need to have the agreement overseen by a federal agent and have this resulting agreement ratified by the United States Senate.

Lots of indigenous land was was acquired through that admittedly messed up law.

But New York said now we don't need to.

We don't need to bother with it.

In fact, one New York governor thumped an official with from the Defense Department, which was in charge of Indian affairs back then, said, this is ours.

We're going to do what we want to do.

They knew they were violating federal law and they did it.

So it's not just there's nothing natural about this.

And look what what the indigenous people I speak with and Randall and many others have said this to me too, is that indigenous people, they aren't asking for any special treatment.

They're asking that the United States or the state and you just follow your own rules.

You know, just follow your own rules that many of those rules go back to the Constitution, 1777 state constitution or the revisions to the federal Constitution.

Just follow your own rules.

And we don't.

Do anything to adhere.

Well, I will have to give us a shout out to New York State, though, because we got funding, from public historians and, and, the, the New York historian, so and involved with the State Museum.

So they put out a commemorative field guide, of interpretive themes and, and so when, when the museum or the historical society applied for funding for Livingston County and, and our county historian Polly Watson was also involved with that.

You know, they supported funding this project.

So I have to give a shout out for that.

And that as an institution, a museum wise.

Right.

What do museums do?

They have stuff, artifacts, and they use their stuff to tell stories.

Right.

So what do those stories look like?

Right.

And so at the Livingston County Museum, we have an exhibit called The Big Tree of the Genesee.

And it took a long time to get the right interpretations that we wanted in the right perspectives.

And telling the story honestly.

And, you know, we're proud of the story.

Not proud of the story.

Sorry, proud of how the exhibit played out.

And there's, responses also from the indigenous community saying, well, what about this?

Do you maybe need to add it this way, or can you make the treaty of the Big Tree 1797?

Can you enlarge it so we can, you know, really see what this is saying?

So we're also a living organism, right?

That we're we're trying to do the work, in, in, in what we do in exhibits.

And I my first job, I was an educator by trade.

So museums are just big places for education.

And and I think including the indigenous perspectives is vital.

In conversations moving forward, we're about to do an exhibit on salt mining, right?

Is it my exhibit to do or don't you think I should talk to?

You know, the salt miners, right?

You know, to understand the process.

So I think having this conversation, supporting, perspectives and having this panel, I think is really important.

And, I encourage people to come.

They won't be able to come to the big tree of the Genesee exhibit, though, because we are closed temporarily.

A shout out for the museum.

We're doing a, $1.4 million building project right now, to improve our gallery spaces and preservation of collections and all that good stuff.

So, September 12th, 3 p.m.. I hope people will be able to join us.

You're talking.

You're hearing from Anna Kowalczyk, who's director of the Livingston County Historical Society Museum.

Doctor Michael Oberg is here, distinguished professor in the Department of History at Suny Geneseo.

Grendel Bird Hallett Logan is a member of the Tonawanda, Tonawanda, Seneca Nation Snipe plan.

And after we take this only break, we've got a bunch of your feedback to read on.

Connections.

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This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson okay, bunch of comments here from different perspectives and different sources here on YouTube.

One of the listeners says, the song Ain't You Proud by Sawyer Fredericks is an uncommon perspective on our history.

It is worth a listen.

So there's a shout out to Sawyer Fredericks work there, Theresa, says Wester.

Ronda, it's the only school I know in Monroe County to do a land acknowledgment before sporting events.

It would be great to connect with them, to make efforts to do more.

I'm not affiliated, except I have relevant relatives who attend there, but it's a cool idea.

That is from Theresa.

That's one I don't know about, but that's maybe something to kind of explore separately, Charlie says.

Charlie says I travel through the Finger Lakes quite a bit, and route five and 20.

As you enter Canandaigua, there's a historical marker celebrating how Sullivan burned down a Native American village.

As you enter Lakeshore Boulevard and Kennedy there, there's another marker referring to Native Americans as savages.

It is still there.

I check each time I go into Canandaigua.

I won't even bring up the treaty of 1764 or how Squaw Island got its name.

It's all there, and anyone can read it.

People who wish to whitewash American history have their heads in the sand and ought to be embarrassed.

That's from Charlie.

Does that refer to some of what you talk about?

The historical markers?

Yeah.

In fact, Andrea, Andrea Smith from Lafayette College, who's one of our panelists, has written an amazing book that looks at how Sullivan Clinton has been remembered over the, you know, the period since 1779.

And she really writes about these monuments.

She's cataloged them.

There are more monuments to the Sullivan Clinton campaign across Pennsylvania in New York than there are to any other single event of the American Revolution.

And as for the history behind some of those words and I mean ideas.

So as an example, I did not know the history of the term Squaw Island, which is, on Canandaigua Lake until it was described to me recently.

I appreciate Charlie bringing that up because, frankly, there's probably a lot that we don't know, or that we're not taught.

David and Ovid kind of talks about that.

He says, as a community college instructor, I can't help but notice that by the time I get my students, most of them have a very hard time criticizing our country's history.

Many things are excused with all kinds of reactions like, well, we're a young country, or we didn't really mean to be evil or anything, we just made a mistake or something like that.

It's ingrained by the time people graduate high school, they're socialized to hyper patriotism and criticism is viewed as disloyalty.

That's from David.

That's a very interesting way to describe it.

And that's kind of what I was talking about earlier, David, when I said that criticism, you know, honesty is an act of love.

But but there is a division in our society where people think any criticism is an act of betrayal or disloyalty.

Yeah, I what do you make of that, Randall?

What do you think?

I would say that, like, even in our own system.

So in Tonawanda, where I'm from, it's very special to me because it's one of three indigenous communities that only have their original chief system Tonawanda Seneca Nation on a Dog Nation and Tuscarora Nation.

So a lot of other nations have like, just like I guess some like BIA governments imposed upon them that get funding and basically because of that funding have more power than the traditional leadership.

And that can be said the same, you know, situation for even some communities as well.

So my opinion is that and this is as a hooded Shawnee person, you know, that we have the responsibility to be critical of our leadership.

We have the responsibility to have opinions on decisions made for our benefit or our detriment.

You know, we we need to do that even within our own system.

Like, you know, people need to be doing that.

We need to be critical of those who are put in places to represent us.

You know, and I would say that's that's very human, you know, that we should have the ability to be critical of, like, our leadership.

And I would and again, most of my work again and again, has been challenging people to have that kind of critical thinking and to think like, okay, so what are we benefiting from?

What are we perpetuating?

What can we do different?

You know, that's that that's very important for even just an individual, let alone probably a whole country.

Again, a different David writing to us from Vancouver, said that this is such an important conversation.

He's going to be sharing widely when it is over.

David, I appreciate that.

And then I got a separate note from someone pointing me to a story from, turns out from Vancouver.

So David from Vancouver, tell me if you're familiar with this story, a Canadian court ruled that part of Vancouver still belonged to the Squamish.

The Canadian government settled with the tribe by giving them ten acres that used to belong to a branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The Squamish are now building high rises in their village, putting the rest of the city to shame, says this writer.

Vancouver is mostly single family housing.

The new buildings tower over their neighbors, and a Vancouver city councilman has complained that the high rises from the tribe don't reflect an indigenous way of building.

But there's nothing they can do, and it's up to the tribe how they want to use the land.

So this this listener's pointing to this story in Vancouver saying, look, when we talk about land back, which, as Doctor Oberg said, it's dribs and drabs.

It's not widespread, but when it happens, when you give it back, it is up to the tribe.

And when the tribe says, great, here's what we're going to do.

We need density.

We need population density.

We're gonna do high rise buildings.

And then, councilman, I love this councilman saying, hey, that's not in your indigenous tradition.

Isn't that is that funny to you?

If I were to try to tell you, you know, bird, that's not in your tradition, I need you to.

You can use this land, but as long as I tell you how it's okay to use here.

I don't know if you're familiar with the story, but I'm curious to know what you make of the idea that land back means land back, and some tribes are going to do different things with it.

And you know who gets to decide what's appropriate?

Yeah, I think at the end of the day, like if if land back is a position that people want to take and actually want to give land back to nations, they do have to have the understanding that it is it is up to them.

And also like I want I what I can say is that it is it is funny to me, the concept that they're upset that folks have are upset that they have this like there's these high rises and it sounds like it's living arrangements.

Correct?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's residential.

Yeah, it sounds residential.

It's kind of funny to me almost, because there's times where our own people we think about like, oh man, how nice it would have been to in 2026 to be able to live in a longhouse to where our ancestors did in clan housing.

Right.

In housing where?

Excuse me.

You have like these these apartments set aside for like the snipe clan and people from the state clan can live here.

People from the Barry clan can live here.

And, you know, kind of having this modern take on how our people used to live.

But that also does come back to the fact that, like my people, Tonawanda is very small community, you know, and very little room like to build stuff like that.

So there's there's a lot of we have our own little housing crisis going on, not getting too much into our own issues.

So I think that's an important thing to to realize and understand, though, too, is that people need to understand it is going to be up to those nations, and each nation is going to do with land.

Give them back to them, like how they see fit.

You know, different nations might have different things that are important to them here in in 2026.

And then you want to add their doctor over.

Yeah.

I think probably that Squamish development is going to be real estate.

That's for investment and revenue.

And I think that's an important point, is that indigenous communities in Canada, as well as the United States are are generally poorer than the surrounding areas.

And there's reasons, historic reasons why why that poverty in places exists.

And historically, before Europeans arrived, poverty was not something the characterized indigenous life they lived.

Indigenous people live pretty well.

I think if you could have lived in Geneseo in 1762, before 1763 or before 1779, it'd be a pretty perfect place to live.

You know, material needs, met, food, shelter, clothing, everything.

You live a life free from what?

And so when indigenous tribes try to to do these kind of things with their lands, you get these reactions.

But these reactions don't address the fact that tribes historically weren't poor, and that this is that they have every right to try to look towards the future of their people.

Right?

And holding Shawnee culture, so to speak, of seven generations.

Right?

So that's what informs decision making.

And more power to them, right?

I mean, that's fantastic that they're building a development.

And if they can rent it out to and a guy knows I have friends who live in Vancouver, housing costs are through the roof there.

If this increases the supply of housing, fantastic.

So I'm all for it.

As we wind toward the end here, I'll grab a couple other comments.

I just want to ask, on a, when you look ahead to September 12th here and you think about 250 years of this country, what are you hoping the audience will emerge from your event with?

Well, I think, it's important, any conversation, any discussion, that, people have maybe new awareness shows that they didn't have before.

What have people think?

Like, about, histories that they may not even know about?

So, for instance, when you were talking about commemorative markers or the Sullivan campaign, what people maybe learned in school about the Sullivan campaign.

And then we look at it again, with a new lens and, and talk about it.

So I had the opportunity to go through with Andrea Smith, who's going to be on our panel, the county historian, and some folks, Peter Jamieson, his son, and we Terry Abrams, and we went to that Boyden Parker torture tree, exhibit, basically.

And it's an outdoor interpretive panel.

And we went to the arcade and we're there's conversations right now that say, how could we maybe also put another perspective, the indigenous perspective in these sites that have looked the same way for, you know, hundreds of years or decades?

Maybe, maybe there's a, an interpretive sculpture that's, erected from an indigenous artist.

I mean, these are conversations we're having right now.

I don't we don't have all the answers.

But I think most importantly is having an awareness and having the conversations continued and documented.

On YouTube, one of our viewers says our founders, the Dutch, the French and the English took a lot of the ideas of democracy from the Iroquois nation.

Again, we started with that idea.

It keeps coming up.

Would you describe Doctor Oberg?

That is a kind of, bedtime story that is comforting, that is not really rooted in reality or what.

It's just giving the Dutch, the French and English way too much credit.

These were they were not interested.

Again, the best they could see when they looked at an indigenous person was, hey, maybe we can turn them into a Christian, or maybe we can turn them into a producer of pelts.

There's there's nothing there.

The settlement of America was remarkably un intellectual, and the people doing the settling generally wanted what indigenous people had to give them in terms of material goods.

And when those goods weren't any longer available, they wanted the land.

Maureen in Canisius says, I was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, near the First Nation Reserve.

I grew up calling Six Nations, and I live now on Seneca land in Livingston County.

That the Sullivan campaign, devastated in the 18th century.

Are your panelists familiar with the recent success of the Chippewa Saugeen First Nation people near Sauble Beach, Ontario?

Sauble beach is an affluent resort community on Lake Huron.

I mean, I don't know that story.

No.

Okay.

So I mean, again, there's all kinds of stories out there.

It's not all a straight line of history here, but what I hope we've done this hour is at least, allow some of the voices that don't always get a chance to be heard.

To be heard.

So.

But 30s apiece here.

What do you want to leave with the audience?

As we think about 250 years of the United States of America.

I kind of want to quickly touch on the about the, the the topic of the founders taking inspiration from us, and say that we will one thing we've always said is like, well, if they did well, they left quite a bit out, right?

We left out the women's voices, left all the animals voices.

They left out the thought of the land.

There's a lot that got left out.

So, you know, I really do.

I really do like Goldberg's perspective on this.

As well as, so, like, our people had a huge part in the American Revolution.

It was very devastating for us.

There was one resource I had read that alleged there was a conversation where somebody had said the console fire of the hood in a Shawnee has gone out, because we had people on both sides of this conflict, and we're still feeling the effects of this, right?

This was a huge hit to our great of peace.

And so we have a huge history within the area.

Many towns are named after still, I guess like a anglicized version of what we had said, you know, Geneseo.

Geneseo.

Can I dig one way?

You know, there's a lot of places like that in the region.

So we have history here.

We have we have legacy here still up to this point.

And my final point is to really think about those peoples who were left out of the revolution, who are left out of the education around it.

You know, a lot of us had a hand in it.

And so we ask you just look a little deeper.

I think that's an appropriate place to leave it because we're out of time.

But I there's going to be more talk coming up on September 12th.

So if you want to attend on September 12th on wall check, how do people find you and what's going on on September 12th?

Well, they can go to our website, Livingston County Historical society.com.

I believe we'll probably end up having a registration.

The event will be free, but that'll help us in our planning.

Yeah.

And so look for that.

We'll get it live pretty soon.

Thank you for being here and helping put this together for us today.

Good luck on the event on September 12th.

It's been great having you come back.

Talk history any time with us.

All right.

That's Tim from Doctor Ober.

You're always bringing in the historians for us here.

I know, I know, you're very proud of the work they do.

Michael Oberg is a distinguished professor in the Department of History at Suny Geneseo.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

And been an honor and a half grand.

Albert Hallett Logan, a member of the Tonawanda Tonawanda Seneca Nation Snipe Clan.

He's also a spokesperson for Tonawanda Seneca Nation.

On the issue of stamp that we've talked about.

Great having you back here.

Thank you for being here.

You know, I appreciate it.

We've got more connections coming up.

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