♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm here today in conversation with Phil Deloria, who is professor of Native American history at Harvard University, and one of the nation's leading scholars on Native American history.

Thank you very much for joining us Professor Deloria.

DELORIA: It's my pleasure to be here.

RUBENSTEIN: So your father and your grandfather were very prominent, uh, in the American Indian Movement.

Uh, did you know when you were growing up that you were gonna devote your life to the history of American Indians in this country, or did you want to do something different?

DELORIA: I did not know.

Um, I was a musician for, um, you know, most of my life growing up.

I majored in music, I was a middle school band and orchestra teacher.

Um, I did a master's degree in broadcast journalism.

Um, at that point I started to come back around to think about Native American issues and, in particular, land claims, um, in the Black Hills and that was a point where my dad and I actually managed to interface, um, you know, a bit.

Um, so it-it was a circuitous route for me to come back around to thinking about these, uh, these kinds of issues.

RUBENSTEIN: So, you are now the professor of Native American history at Harvard, a university where, uh, it's been around for almost 400 years.

And 400 years, there's never been a tenured professor of American Indian history at Harvard.

Was that a surprise to you?

DELORIA: Um, not really a surprise, you know, um, it's part of, I think, Harvard's efforts and the efforts of many, uh, institutions of higher education to actually take seriously Native American histories, not simply as something that sits within American history per se, but as valid and just separate and distinct histories of their own, which intersect with American history, but which are quite distinct.

RUBENSTEIN: So when I was in elementary school, or-or junior high school, we learned a little bit about the founding of the United States, and we were told that Christopher Columbus came over.

He was trying to get to India.

He didn't quite get there.

Where did he actually wind up, and how many times did he come over?

DELORIA: Well, he ended up in the Caribbean.

Um, he did a number of-of voyages.

And, well, it's really interesting when we think about Columbus.

We think about his first voyage and we think about discovery.

But what's really interesting, I think, is to, um, go back and consider his relationships with the indigenous people of the Caribbean.

Um, one of the first things he did in his first voyage was to capture several native people and take them back to Spain.

Um, his second voyage was quite explicitly a slaving voyage.

He planned to capture as many native people as he could, which he did, and bring them, uh, brought them back to-to Spain to be sold in the slave markets.

So, one of the things that is quite interesting and, I think, important about Columbus is when we think about, um, slavery in America, we tend to think about that as a story of chattel slavery, of African slavery.

Um, but slavery actually begins in the New World with Columbus and with the enslavement of indigenous peoples.

And what's also quite interesting, I think, is that slavery in many ways, when we think about North America and American history, ends with native people, um, the enslavement of native people in California, um, Utah in the west, in the later part of the 19th century, which continues on almost to the 20th century, um, forms of native, um, enslavement.

RUBENSTEIN: So when he came over in 1492, and he made a number of other additional trips... What was the case in North America then?

How many Native Americans were there, actually, in the continent of North America, the time that, around Columbus came over?

DELORIA: Well, you know, these numbers are-are debated, um, a lot, because as-as we know, um, one of the things that Europeans brought was, um, epidemic disease, which killed off many-many-many native people, from 70% to 90%, perhaps, of the populations in some, um, in some areas.

So those numbers have ranged from as high as-as 100 million people to, you know, something more in the order of 7.5 million people, um, you know, in North America.

So the spread, um, in numbers that people have thought about, um, is quite large.

And-and they derive those numbers from many different kinds of methods.

Thinking about carry, capacity of land, and social organization, um, you know, and these kinds of things.

One of the things we can say for certain is, that the number of native people that was here, um, was dramatically reduced, to the point where, um, environmental change actually ensued the-the growing of massive forests, the, uh, proliferation of certain kinds of animal species.

Um, many people have taken this as a marker of the anthropocene and, actually, a moment when, literally, the planet, um, actually changed because of human-caused kinds of, uh, kinds of effects.

RUBENSTEIN: Uh, as you say, some people have said there were, uh, roughly in the North American continent, about 100 million Native Americans, let's say, at the time when Columbus came over, or around that time.

Went down to, maybe, 10 million, um, some people would say.

But that was the combination of diseases that were brought from Europe that, um, Native Americans were not able to withstand, or the killing of them.

And which do you think was the greater cause of the population decline?

DELORIA: Well, it's pretty clear that epidemic disease is the major cause.

But I think it's been very-very easy for people to, sort of, say, "Oh, disease, uh, and what could we have done about that?"

Nothing, right?

And so there's a kind of way in which the-the language of disease, and the way that we teach and talk about disease is, uh, sort of, letting, um, off the hook of some of these other things.

One of the more interesting books of the last decade has been Andres Resendez' book, "The Other Slavery", in which he points out that when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, it took 25, almost 25 years before smallpox to arrive in the Caribbean.

And yet, the numbers of indigenous death, the amount of indigenous death in the Caribbean was extraordinary and tremendous.

So one of the things that Resendez has argued quite correctly, I think in my view, is that, um, it is slavery, and violence, and genocidal killing that actually destroys people before disease even arrives in the Caribbean.

And when disease then arrive, uh, does arrive in the Caribbean, what do the Spanish do?

They actually double down on the captivity, and the killing, and the violence of, uh, of native people.

So, I think we always have to see disease in the context of violence and of the taking of lands, um, sort of, from, you know, from the very beginning all the way up through the 19th century.

RUBENSTEIN: Now Native Americans were thought to have come over the bridge when, I guess, there was a land bridge between Russia and, uh, what's now Alaska.

Is that correct?

When-when-when... How long ago was it thought that they came before Columbus arrived?

DELORIA: Well, this has been one of the most interesting things that's been happening in, you know, in our field is, for a very-very long time we understood that around 13,000 years ago, um, uh, people crossed over the Bering land bridge, made their way through these ice-free corridors, through the glaciers, um, down into North America and then spread across both North and South American continents.

Um, what's been really interesting is, uh, the ways that those numbers have now been completely confounded by various forms of evidence, new evidence, archaeological and-and genetic DNA kinds of, kinds of evidence.

Um, Tom Dillehay, uh, at the Monte Verde site in South America has discovered, you know, evidence of inhabitation 14,500 years back.

Well that's a whole millennium of difference.

Other archaeological and other kinds of DNA evidence have pointed back to 20,000, perhaps even longer, um, time frames for the inhabitance of North and South America.

And so, what we'll be thinking about, uh, in the years to come, is how much further back, how much longer, um, were native people here?

How many more people were here?

What were the various routes of, uh, of-of immigration to the continent?

These things are gonna be much-much more complicated and more interesting in the years to come.

RUBENSTEIN: The, are the people that came over the land bridge, some, obviously, went to Latin American and some developed very sophisticated cultures in the 1500s and 1600s.

The Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas, and so forth.

Were as sophisticated cultures developed in North America at the same time?

DELORIA: Yeah.

Well, you know, we tend to love these cultures that build big stuff made of stone, right?

That last a really long time and is quite monumental.

Um, it is true, I think, that, um, you know, archeologists have basically argued that there is, sort of, six independent, kind of, vectors of-of civilization.

And then two of them are in the New World, and in what is basically Mexico, um, and Peru.

Um, but it's also the case through many-many other societies.

When we think about North America, we should always be thinking about Cohokia and the mound-building cultures.

We should be thinking about Chaco, the Chacoan, um, cultures in the southwest, all capable of amazing kinds of technological, uh, achievements.

The building of roads, of long straight, um, roads of monumental architecture, of hierarchical social organizations, of all kinds of things like that.

RUBENSTEIN: So the American Indians, or Native Americans, were living in the North America, uh, let's say after Columbus, uh, has finished his voyages in the early 1500s.

But in the latter part of the 1500s and the early part of the 1600s, when settlers from England are now coming to, uh, Plymouth Rock and to, uh, Jamestown, how many, uh, different tribes were there, uh, of Native Americans in North America?

DELORIA: Well, you know, there's-there's hundreds of, um, tribes and tribelets, and-and multiple forms of social organization.

I think one of the things that's really useful is to think about the ways that, um, political organization.

Um, we think about nation states, and we think about tribes, and we want to think about tribes as being, kind of, analogous to this.

But if we imagine instead, sort of, very dense and detailed kinds of kin relations that spread across, uh, across geographies, and which took the form of political kinds of, uh, kinds of entities.

Confederacies, chieftainships, theocracies, um, alliances.

Um, we can imagine both a village world, but also a village world that, sort of, um, is elevated in political form into larger kinds of, uh, kinds of structures.

So in a way it's interesting because we use the word tribe today.

Um, and, actually, we use tribal in a pejorative way that is, actually, I think, kind of, offensive to a lot of native people who see the positives in tribal and tribalism.

RUBENSTEIN: When the settlers are coming in North America, at that time they, uh, Native Americans are-are...

They're not one nation, they're several different tribes or different groups.

Did they have a common language?

DELORIA: There are interesting common kinds of languages.

If you go to the Plains, the Plains Indians sign language, functioned as a, kind of, lingua franca.

Um, native people developed those kinds of things.

They also had diplomats who were, um, quite capable of speaking, you know, five, six, seven, eight languages.

So the network of native people, even across language barriers, uh, in North America, and in the Americas was quite strong.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, in the United States we have a tradition, Thanksgiving.

And the tradition, sort of, is that the settlers in, uh, Plymouth, uh, had a Thanksgiving with the Indians.

And they came, the Indians had brought some turkeys or other gifts and so forth.

Is there any truth to that myth?

DELORIA: First of all, we should recognize that it's not just that the pilgrims and the Puritans land, and they're the first people that Indians have ever seen.

They, the Indian people on the coasts, uh, the Atlantic coast had been dealing with European raiders, and slavers, and traders for a very long time, so they knew what was happening, and knew what was, what was going on.

So we can celebrate Thanksgiving as this moment of, kind of, multi-cultural unity, but what-what we have to remember is these things very quickly devolved into warfare.

The early 1600s, um, throughout 1600s, basically, there's a whole series of wars up and down the Atlantic, as native people recognized what colonizers are coming, you know, to do, which is to take their land.

RUBENSTEIN: So the Native Americans, they, did they say, "Well, you know, we've been on this land for, you know, 13,000 years or so and by the way, what are you doing here?

We own this land, it's our land."

Did they have those kind of skirmishes, or they did trading and said, "You can stay here if you give us something?"

DELORIA: You know, I mean there's a whole range of things that happened in those encounters.

Um, many of the, of the land contracts, the treaties, the agreements that native people think they're making, um, with Europeans are situations which native people think they're just, uh, agreeing to share the use of the land, not that they're actually making a legal transfer, of ownership in a, in a European kind of sense.

So most of those early agreements break down upon the failure, actually, to share, um, you know, understandings about what exactly is being negotiated.

And then those things turn, tend to turn violent.

RUBENSTEIN: So, when the Revolutionary War was started, the Declaration of Independence is issued in July of 1776.

Uh, there's no mention of Native Americans or Indians in the Declaration of Independence.

Uh, what side did the Native Americans take during that war?

DELORIA: Well, native people mostly aligned with the British, but they also split.

So, when the Iroquois Confederacy for example, the Oneida's and the Tuscarora allied themselves with the Americans, everyone else went, you know, went with the British.

And these are mentioned in the Declaration, uh, of Independence.

There's an article down there near the end that says, you know, um, England has turned loose the merciless Indian savages who have, you know, ravaged our frontiers.

Um, so it is one of the Bill of Complaints against King George.

Um, and of course Indians show up in the Constitution in-in two places that are quite significant.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so the Revolutionary War is won by the colonies after a number of years.

And then, uh, the new government is set up under the Constitution.

At the Constitutional Convention, is there any discussion of how to handle, uh, Native Americans and what their rights might be?

DELORIA: You know what's really interesting is, um, so many of the legal histories of the writing of the Constitution pay not much attention to native people.

And, yet, they appear in the Commerce Clause, uh, where Congress is charged to regulate commerce, um, between the United States and foreign nations, among the several states, and between American Indian tribes.

The Commerce Clause has been a really important, kind of, legal underpinning for the relations of native people.

They also show up in the Three-Fifths Clause, um, where we're told citizenship for, sort of, the general, kind of, group of, kind of, white Americans.

Um, plus indentured servants, not including Indians not taxed, and three-fifths of all other persons, right?

And this is a clause that, of course, we all studied.

Um, you know, my students come in having learned this in high school.

What does that mean, "Indians not taxed"?

Um, I think it's quite an important part of the Constitution, and it suggests the ways in which Indians were, in fact, part of those-those discussions.

'Cause you can imagine an Indian not taxed, then you can imagine an Indian who was taxed.

That person presumably would have given up his or her citizenship in their tribal nation, and gone through a naturalization process to become an American citizen.

And that tells you that Indians are put into the Constitution in order to exclude them, basically, from the Constitution.

Um, and they're excluded because they are seen to be political entities in and of their own right, right?

This is why Congress is gonna regulate commerce with them, and is why treaties end up being the most important, kind of, uh, political, uh, relationship between American Indians and the United States.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, in the 13 colonies, I'm not sure if I understand.

Were, uh, Native Americans living in those colonies, but relatively a small part of the population?

Or were they more western than the colonies, since they were not really as part of the 13 colonies; they were not a big part of that population?

DELORIA: Well, native people are definitely still within the colonies.

There tends to be this, sort of, sense that after some of the 17th century wars Indian people disappear, but they don't.

They're still very much present in, you know, in the colonies.

Many-many native people make their way west.

Um, the Delaware, the Lenape for example, are a really good example.

Constantly bouncing to the west, um, and-and leaving their homelands, um, behind.

So, it's a little bit of a combination of both.

There are native people who still remain, there are native people who are pushed west, there are native people who-who move west at their own volition.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, in the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson is president, uh, completes the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubles the size of the country.

Um, did he actually get any permission from anybody in the Native American community to buy that land?

And who told the Native Americans they are now part of the United States in that sense?

DELORIA: Well this is a very-very familiar, kind of, story, right?

Is that European empires navigate and negotiate their own understandings of who owns what territory, and they never think that they actually, um, don't own that territory at all.

So this happens after the Revolution, um, and it certainly happens with the Louisiana Purchase.

What it means is, that the United States has to go out into this territory, which it now claims, relative to other European nations, and figure out what's gonna happen with the native people who are actually there, who very much own the land, who still own the land, um, and are quite willing and ready to defend it.

RUBENSTEIN: So, the, uh, first president of the United States who was seen as a westerner, and not part of the quote, establishment, was Andrew Jackson.

And Andrew Jackson was widely seen as being very anti, uh, Indian and, in fact, drove a lot of the Indians out of the, uh, 13 colonies, or out of the East Coast.

Is that a fair characterization of his perspective on Native Americans?

DELORIA: It is.

Uh, Andrew Jackson is part of a much longer, kind of, trajectory that actually might begin with Jefferson, of the idea of removing Indian people from the eastern part of the United States, exchanging their land, and getting them to go west of the Mississippi.

Jefferson starts thinking about this in the late 18th century.

Um, but Jackson is the person who really does, kind of, bring it to fruition through the Indian Removal Act of 1830, um, through military campaigns to move southern Indians, and also mid-western Indians, um, from their home territories west, uh, west of the Mississippi River.

And in doing that, by clearing these massive amounts of land, allowing American settlement, but also, really importantly, allowing the formation of American states.

This is one of the things that's super interesting about, um, this history.

The Northwest Ordinance sets out the terms, through which a colony will become a state, 60,000 people basically, 60,000 free people.

So what that means is, if you're a territory and you want to become a state, you need to get your Indian people out of there, so that you can bring in more settlers.

And what that leads to is either removal, leaving, making them leave the state, or a, kind of, form of compression onto reservation kinds of territories, right?

Where they're contained and compressed.

RUBENSTEIN: So as the, uh, U.S. is expanding under what some people would call manifest destiny, we're moving across the-the continent, we're building a transcontinental railroad, we're looking for gold, we're looking for new places for cattle to-to graze and so forth.

We're looking for new cities to build, with more new places where religion, uh, could be exercised the way people wanted to do it, let's say in the case of the Mormons.

Uh, very often you, sign, uh, see this on television westerns when you're growing up, at least when I was growing up, as, uh, the nice, eastern settlers are moving west and all of a sudden they're being raided in by Indians.

What was the real story?

Was it the Indians that were attacking all the time the westerners moving west, or was it the other way around?

DELORIA: Well I think it's pretty much the other way around, right?

I mean, uh, you know, these are people who are in their home territories, and they look up and all of a sudden they're seeing, uh, you know, a huge wagon train full of immigrants coming through their territory.

What happens a lot is they ride down and they say, "Okay, we're gonna, you're gonna cross our land, we're gonna charge you a toll, um, we're gonna charge you a fee."

And, of course, Americans don't want to be charged a fee, and-and, you know, you get in certain kinds of conflicts that go, you know, that go on there.

We haven't really told, um, is the story of what happens in the west during the Civil War.

And the Civil War is such an important watershed in American history.

And, of course, it-it-it, um, helps us to, um, think about things only in terms of the north and the south.

But if we imagine or we think about what happened in the west during the Civil War, um, uh, the Minnesota uprising, and the resulting, uh, sort of, uh-uh, military campaigns across North and South Dakota.

The Navajo, uh-uh, Long Walk, in which Navajo people were basically removed from their land and marched over to a, kind of, terrible place in-in New Mexico.

The Bear River Massacre, in which 300 people were killed by militia.

Sand Creek Massacre.

There's so much violence that is militia based and, also, military, state military based that happens in the 1860s during the Civil War.

And this leads to a large amount of, sort of, clearances of native people, and sets the stage for a really short burst, uh, after in the 1860s and '70s where the United States Army comes in and basically mops up the rest of the west.

RUBENSTEIN: So during this period of time, the 1860s, '70s, and '80s, a lot of treaties were entered into between, let's say, the U.S. government or, let's say, states and territories, and-and local, uh, tribes, or local Indian groups.

Uh, were they honored by the, um, the tribes, or were they honored by the, uh, U.S. government, or who broke those treaties typically?

DELORIA: Well, uh, you know, there-there's-there has not been a treaty made between the United States and-and American Indians that has not been broken by the United States.

Americans have a very cynical view, and politically have had a cynical view of their own treaties for a very-very long time.

One of the things Jefferson says to William Henry Harrison is, "Look, we can't let the Indians think about the future as we're thinking about it.

We need to get them... Make sure they're living in the present, so when we negotiate a treaty it feels like it's just gonna be a deal, and it's gonna actually, um, you know, hold water, when we know that in fact over time it's actually not."

RUBENSTEIN: I see.

So, let me ask you.

Uh, when was Custer's Last Stand?

This is a very famous thing in American mythology, that Custer is there to protect the rights of, uh, the United States, and he was slaughtered by Indians.

What was the reality in the situation there?

DELORIA: Well, you know, Custer just goes lookin' for a fight.

Um, you know, uh, there's a, there's a, uh, a big treaty in 1851 in the west in which the United States says, "If these tribes would just quit fighting each other, it wouldn't be so violent out there."

And, so, they tried to arrange everyone on their territories.

There's a series of fights between Lakota people, Sioux people, um, and the American government, in which results in the Treaty of 1868 in which Lakota land is codified.

Um, and it's a quite extensive portion of land, and it includes the Black Hills.

In 1874 Custer leads a whole expedition, uh, in, uh, into the Black Hills.

Uh, they discover gold, um, and before you know it, there's a huge land rush into the Black Hills.

The Army refuses to defend its own treaty, the 1868 Treaty.

Um, uh, in January of 1876, the government says, "Any Indian who's not, uh, at their agency is considered a hostile."

Well this has nothing to do with the treaty.

There's no reason why the United States should be able to make that, kind of, claim on native people.

But that's just the pretext for a war.

Um, the military goes out, um, Custer, uh, rides ahead, basically.

Uh, he wants the glory for himself.

Um, rides ahead and attacks the largest Indian village ever assembled, um, on the Great Plains to his, uh, to his peril.

RUBENSTEIN: So what happened at Wounded Knee?

What is Wounded Knee?

DELORIA: We could continue this story.

In 1877, the-the government wages a winter campaign, which basically breaks, um, native resistance.

Um, Sitting Bull flees to Canada, Crazy Horse is killed.

Then things, sort of, really, um, sort of, settle down, and people are forced onto reservations.

Um, but what happens is, native people on reservations end up becoming dependent upon the United States, um, which fails to exercise its obligations as a trustee.

So native people are starving, um, in 1889, 1890.

Um, and they begin, uh, on their, the Lakota reservations, um, beginning, doing a thing called the Ghost Dance.

It actually comes from a pioneer prophet, um, you know, in Nevada, in Wovoka.

Um, they start doing the Ghost Dance.

And this is a sort of dance of desperation.

It's not a violent dance though.

Um, but the agents who were there, um, completely, um, they just lose their minds about this.

And the agent, the Indians are uprising and they're gonna...

These are broken people at this point, right?

But the agents call in the military.

And what you have is the largest military mobilization since the Civil War.

Trainloads of troops are coming in here.

Um, and there is a, an attempt to disarm a Lakota band that has come down from Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservations, and Pine Ridge Reservation, and it goes awry.

And the Army just opens up with these Hotchkiss mountain cannons.

Um, you know, 300 some people, um, are killed.

And it is worth noting that this is Custer's 7th Calvary basically taking revenge for the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

RUBENSTEIN: At some point the US government says we're gonna take the Indians that are left and we'll, give 'em some territory.

We'll give 'em, let's say, Oklahoma, or some area out west.

And did the United States actually honor some of these commitments to give this land to Indians to settle on?

DELORIA: Well, what's interesting is, when we think about these reservations, um, the...

It's useful to make the distinction between, you know, was this land, sort of, given them as a place to go and, kind of, settle and be safe?

There's a dimension to that when we talk about removal to Indian territory, or what's now Oklahoma.

Um, but for most of these treaties the land that is there is retained rather than given.

In other words, native sovereignty on those reservations is continuous from before the United States until after the United States, and continues to be, um, you know, sovereign today.

RUBENSTEIN: So as you look back on your career, are you glad that you decided to specialize in this area?

And, uh, do you think you really, uh-uh, it was inevitable that you were gonna do so, given your family background?

DELORIA: You know, our family has a story in which, you know, my great-great-grandfather, um, had a vision in which our family was, uh, meant to be a mediating family between native and non-native, um, you know, peoples.

And, you know, and that was gonna carry on for four, or five, or six, or seven generations.

Um, uh, and, you know, so perhaps there's an inevitability, um, built into it.

My family has been very-very, um, interested and-and dedicated to this, kind of, work.

So maybe it was, uh, maybe it was inevitable.

Um, maybe I was just going through an adolescence, uh, you know, kind of, rebellion when I wanted to be a musician.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, Professor Deloria, thank you very much for this very interesting conversation.

I appreciate your being in conversation with us today.

DELORIA: David, it's been my pleasure, thank you.

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