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Public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black, fond of greater Cleveland, Inc.. Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, September 27th.

And I'm Carrie Carpenter, senior vice president of Community Philanthropy and Engagement at Huntington and a proud member of the Cleveland Foundation's board of Directors.

It is my privilege today to introduce today's forum honoring Ned Blackhawk, author of The Rediscovery of America Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, which is this year's Innisfail Wolff Book Award winner in nonfiction.

In 1935, in 1935, poet and philanthropist Edith A.L.

Wolf established the Book Awards to reflect her family's commitment to social justice.

Endowed by the Cleveland Foundation today, the Innisfil Wolff Book Awards remains the only juried American Book Prize that recognizes books that have made a significant contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity.

The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans.

Yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants.

Now, this long practice of ignoring indigenous history is changing.

Also awarded the 2023 National Book Award in nonfiction Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America expertly interweaves five centuries of native and non-native histories and is part of the next generation of scholarship that outlines the critical importance of native history, not only to U.S. history, but also and urgently to Native Americans themselves.

Blackhawk is an enrolled member of the Tamarack Tribe of the Western Shoshone and the Howard, our Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University.

Prior to this, he spent ten years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a graduate of McGill University.

He holds graduate degrees in history from UCLA and the University of Washington and is also the author of Violence Over the Land Indians and Empires in the Early American West.

Muttering The conversation today is the City Club's director of programing, Cynthia Connolly.

And for those of you who may not know, Cynthia is also a proud citizen of the little Traverse Bay and Odawa Indians.

Serves on the board of the Lake Erie Native American Council and taught the Native American Studies Course at Kent State University for eight years.

If you have a question.

Yes, this is.

If you have a question for Ned Blackhawk, you can text it to 3305415794.

Again, that's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming Ned Blackhawk and Cynthia Connolly.

Cynthia McKinney and Anibal Shoe.

You made it to Cleveland.

I'm here.

Oh, so.

Glad to have you.

I'm so glad to be here.

Oh, so, I mean, we could really easily spend this entire half hour getting into the nitty gritty of this book.

I read the footnotes like everything.

It's such an amazing, incredible book.

We got 12 chapters spanning 500 years.

It is a spectacularly written book.

Can we start maybe this whole conversation talking about why you felt compelled to write this book?

I dedicate or recognize a generation of academics and historians and tribal community members and projects that in the early parts of this book, and I take the title The Rediscovery of America from really a generation and a half or so of scholars and others and tribal community members making visible something that we all know has been hidden for too long.

And I'm lived through much of this transformation, and I guess I'm kind of the bearer of some perhaps interesting news that there has been a radical reorientation to the study of American history that has occurred in the last 25 years or so because of these types of studies.

But no one has that I think sufficiently well brought this all together in kind of a singular form or overview.

And in part because I've been teaching Native American history since I was in Madison 25 years ago.

I've seen the need for this type of infrastructure for our field.

Yeah.

And you know, this the scholarship that we're seeing come out from historians, particularly indigenous historians, indigenous anthropologists, we're seeing a pretty big shift in our ability to tell our own story.

You know, we're kind of reclaiming that that agency.

So this is a history book, right?

I mean, as I mentioned, there's there's footnotes, right?

And they're good.

But but this book isn't just for historians.

Like this isn't like a dense text that you would read in like an academic course.

This is definitely approachable for folks to read and really understand the history of our nation.

That's true.

So it is a kind of an attempt to bring together.

I think there might be a in roughly a thousand different titles that I cited in those lengthy footnotes that you've mentioned, you know.

But it it really is intended for a kind of broad audience of interested readers, a concerned citizens, as well as tribal members, many of whom, myself included, really never have were given opportunities to understand the kind of deep, deep and powerful history of so many Native peoples across America.

And you mentioned to intentionally use the word rediscovery, right?

And you also mentioned in your book to the word encounter.

Right.

These are very intentional choices in the words for your title or correct?

That's right.

I do feel that American history is finally at a point where it has been or is in the process of being rediscovered.

We've been told and taught and informed and certain perspectives for so long that they've kind of hardened into these kind of sediment and forms of what I referred to in the introduction is calcified knowledge, particularly around the origins of our republic in the earliest centuries of European arrival upon the Western Hemisphere.

So we've kind of broken that paradigm.

We've moved away from just Puritans and presidents and patriots and the early American narrative we've brought in to out of New England, which used to be the exclusive Center for the Study of Early America.

We now see what some scholars call an Atlantic world that, you know, is at the center of the formation of the American early American past.

I'm a scholar in what's called Borderlands History, which is a history of or a study of of particularly Spanish colonial imperial zones.

And you.

Started your book in the.

South.

That's right.

The book was opened in yeah, in this.

And I found that very fascinating because usually when you read Native History, it starts in Jamestown or Plymouth Rock.

Or earlier with some mythical beginning of.

Yeah, a Bering Strait kind of migration.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now.

Yeah, but, but, but this is important though, because you started in the Southwest, because that's actually where a lot of stuff really took hold.

And a lot of people aren't familiar with that story.

And I think that's just important.

You would be hard pressed to find any US history textbook that has the following short declarative sentence that the oldest permanently inhabited places on the American continent are the Pueblo Indian nations of New Mexico.

Right.

We've got some Pueblo.

We have some Pueblo Taos in him as he remembers here.

Absolutely.

And so one of the important parts also of this book is that I put maps in the front and back pages of the hardback in particular, they're in the paperback as well.

But the hardback kind of, I think, because of the form, shows more kind of clearly these important dimensions of our national geography, essentially.

And so all the Pueblo nations currently in New Mexico are recognized there, as are the federally and state recognized tribes of of the Great Lakes.

So there's a kind of argumentation that the maps themselves make.

But why is it's too hard for us to see these communities as foundational components of our national past.

I mean, they've been here longer in the same space than anyone else and have some in their intellectual or interpretive powers.

There's scholarship coming out about that, too.

In fact, a 2018 study by Reclaiming Native Truth, which is now known as Illuminated, it's a national native nonprofit that's native led, and they found that nearly half of Americans believed what they were taught in schools about Native Americans was inaccurate.

Another 72% thought it was necessary to make significant changes to curriculum on Native American history.

And that same study, they cited another paper that said 87% of schools do not mention Native Americans.

After the year 1900.

We're just gone from the history books, even though we were here the entire time.

And your book is an answer to this.

Your book answers that.

In part, I don't want to create some misunderstanding that this is a comprehensive I definitive work, but it's really more of a as it says in the introduction, a kind of beginning to hopefully a larger conversation and process, because there are many, many communities that are not included and their histories are not recognized.

There are 560 plus federally recognized tribes in the United States.

Not all of them can possibly find their way into a single study.

So I don't want to say that there are no firm answers in here, but there are lots of potential answers or paths to potentially well.

As instructors.

And, you know, I taught the course at Kent State and, you know, we'd have students from, you know, undergraduates of freshman to even graduate students.

And so my course is more on native studies, right?

So more like, you know, theory of blood, quantum and identity.

But I had to spend the first four weeks the course just giving basic information about history because nobody understood it or even knew it.

And I've had students even say that, like, I never knew any of this.

Why was I not taught this?

So my question is like, how do you think that this book will change the game for those students?

And pushing a little further, how does this book change the game for Indigenous students having to not shoulder that burden of educating everyone and particularly scholars?

You know, it is one of the really incumbent challenges of being a native person in America, in the sense that you have so much educational labor in your life.

You know, it can even be like family members, non-Native family members, or even neighbors, let alone school classmates or peers or instructors, citizens around us.

And this is kind of a larger question about the nature of American identity more broadly.

Why is it that the most familiar essentially peoples of America are also the most forgotten?

Why do we know?

So I kind of graphically the presence of Indians, you know, place names across the American landscape, national imagery, dare I say sports mascots.

So, you know, why can why can these be the most visible kind of components essentially, of the American national story in certain ways.

But we know nothing often about their experiential histories or legal and political relationships or changing demographic and like migratory practices or new economies, or their sustainable efforts to store or regain lost customs practices and resources.

You know, there's a kind of incredible universe of engagement that this field in many ways presents.

And so we're really depriving ourselves as national citizens of this republic, an opportunity to see ourselves kind of collectively more robustly.

Yeah.

And I think one of the main things your book does is chip away at some of the false narratives and the tropes that we're all very tired tropes to in some cases, particularly the, the quote unquote discovery of America, how it's been painted as this like empty void land ready for the taking in.

We know that's not true in North and South America collectively was one of the most populous places in the globe.

And yet you would argue that it was justified to make peace with what was to come, that that mentality of this was an empty void space.

And you touched on that a little bit in the book of the beginning, really breaking down that founding narrative, the discovery narrative.

And that's why the first chapter opens across what is called the Spanish borderlands, in part because the first European powers to North America came not from Northern Europe, but from Iberia or particularly from Spain.

And you really can't understand the history and the evolution of North America outside of this century long process of Spanish colonization that begins roughly in 1493 and leads to the subsequent conquest of Mexico, the settlement of the northern Spanish frontier, and eventually even Spanish explorations into the Southeast in the Southwest, and then the settlement of New Mexico in 1598 as the oldest permanent colony in North America.

That's not those are all kind of you know, those are those are those are not debated historical subjects.

It's just we're not really often brought attention to them.

So I do kind of try to chip away, as you say, the kind of mythology of of wilderness or virgin lands.

And I highlight, for example, how so many of the settlements of North America that did survive the British in New England and the Chesapeake, the French along the St Lawrence, the Spanish in the Southwest and Southeast really were able to gain stronger footholds following waves of demographic diseases that were introduced or various forms of violent slave trafficking that occurred.

This kind of harrowing history of colonization is really inseparable from the formation of all the earliest settlements.

The slave trafficking was just completely eye opening.

A lot of folks don't realize how extensive and pervasive it was.

I think you said between the 16th and 17th centuries, it was about 1 million indigenous peoples either trafficked or enslaved, which is a lot.

Across the hemisphere and largely by the Spanish Empire.

And there's a great new book that just came out with the Yale University Press about the first or most famous, at least native settler at the Plymouth Ptolemy in New England named Squanto or Squanto, where more for a kind of he's more familiar in American history.

His biography has essentially been excavated by a small number of scholars recently, one of whom Andrew Lippman just published this kind of interesting biography of him.

He he'd reverse the Atlantic four times before the Puritans arrived.

So how have we kind of been given this narrative that this is a, you know, an unsettled world and incorporated into European spheres of influence when the people who are literally helping the Puritans figure out what North America looked like had themselves been trafficked across the Atlantic, we're not talking about a lot of people, but, you know, several dozen people from New England had were in London essentially at the time of the Puritan departure.

So these are the kind of histories essentially that provide insights into these larger subjects that we're discussing.

Why do you think that these tropes persist so strongly today in the American psyche?

Why do you think this is still a thing?

If I had an answer to that, I'd probably be.

But we know content in my demeanor because the kind of intellectual curiosity.

Yeah, exactly.

Like you'd mentioned in your book to kind of this immediate shift of the American psyche around like the closing of the frontier, quote unquote, of, you know, the West was won and now, oh my gosh, look at these.

You know, during the good old days of of, you know, cowboys and Indians.

And there was a distinct shift in mentality of justifying what everyone had seen or read about or heard about and almost forgotten immediately to build this American identity, this idea of American exceptionalism.

And do you want to elaborate a little bit on that?

There is a kind of longstanding it's largely actually at least in the scholarly world, a Cold War kind of ideological framework that was developed to kind of highlight in particular the distinctiveness of the American experience from other nations.

And in that distinctiveness, the kind of myth of rugged individualism, of frontier settlement, of kind of a democratizing kind of popular cultural institutions became much more kind of prevalent than had been during the Depression era, even though many of the biggest proponents of this vision of American history were working throughout the early 20th century.

And so it's not coincidental that the Western was such a ubiquitous television and genre throughout the Cold War era.

And like 1959, apparently seven out of the top ten TV shows in America were Westerns.

Many of us may have grown up seeing reruns of them.

Some of you may have seen them in the air on cereal for the next week on Bonanza.

But so these are not inconsequential, though They seem kind of incidental or anecdotal.

The image of Indians and like as embodiments of nature as kind of antithesis of of the Western settlers or cowboys is kind of doomed victims, even if we're nostalgic about their lifestyles.

You know, those are all essentially form arms of this larger vision of American national identity that is essentially struggling to make sense of inherently, in some form, the violent displacement of other people.

You mentioned doomed victims, but a lot of tribes were actually quite successful at maintaining sovereignty, maintaining self-governance for a very long period of time.

I know my tribe is still in northern Michigan.

My husband's tribe is still in Ontario, in parts of New York.

We're still here and we are in Ohio.

So I do if if everyone doesn't mind, dig a little deep into the history about the Great Lakes region, which is a very like you have multiple chapters on the importance of the Great Lakes area in the formation of the United States as we know it today.

Do you want to talk about how the revolution, for example, we were part like a cause of the revolution?

There are three chapters three, four, five, six until a certain sense, seven are all about what we would call kind of the founding era.

And so this book has been kind of recognized as a kind of significant contribution to the what we call the historiography of the American Revolutionary period, which I'm really grateful for, because that was a really strong intent.

And anyone here who's sat through graduate training in American history might recognize some of those interventions that these chapters are trying to make.

So there is this kind of deep seated we're talking about American exceptionalism with the kind of vision of American history that is kind of rooted in a certain form of celebratory visions of the American republic.

There's this very deep seated kind of understanding that the American republic has its origins in certain kind of classically in certain classical and enlightenment ideals and principles handed down throughout the ages and is really the embodiment or the culmination of certain renaissance enlightenment kind of philosophical ideals come to be around human nature and liberty and virtue, all of which you can find written into the meaning of the founding documents of the United States itself.

But you can also find these other words that Indian people are often very familiar with.

But also we sometimes don't have the language or understanding to make sense of Why does the Declaration of Independence conclude with a grievance against the King of England?

One scholar calls it the kind of climactic crescendo of the declaration.

Is it?

The King of England has incited merciless Indian savages who attack our frontier inhabitants.

Those phrases come out of the history that these chapters are telling, and they come out of the history of the Great Lakes in ways that very few people have really sufficiently articulated.

Frontier inhabitants at the time refers not to the Oregon Trail, or it refers or to kind of conventional like pioneers in carts heading across, you know, the prairies.

It's not the vision that the founders had when they use the term interior and frontier inhabitants.

They're talking about places like Western Pennsylvania, Western New York.

To a lesser extent Western Virginia.

To even lesser extent Western Carolinas.

It's particularly along the Ohio River, where the crisis of empire between France and England essentially has its its kind of climactic crescendo.

It's called the Seven Years War, and it's fought from 1754 to roughly 1763 globally.

It ends in North America in 1760.

And in many ways, in the years after this global conflict are the least understood years in American history.

That's kind of a new book that I'm trying to work on a little bit, in part because this book didn't have time to delve deeply into this period in such form.

So we would be shocked to hear that this discourse of essentially anti-Indian ideology or some some scholars have called it the metaphysics of Indian hating originates in the backcountry regions of western Pennsylvania and New York, across essentially the eastern Great Lakes.

Why and how?

It's a lot of history to explain.

It's partly rooted in the differential forms of imperial relations that the French and English had established throughout the 17th, 18th centuries.

So by the time the French Empire and British empires go to war, literally both in North America and across the globe, there are theaters of the Seven Years War in Europe, in the Mediterranean, in the Caribbean, the Spanish join the French and a Catholic alliance and are defeated in Manila and Havana.

This war is fought literally all around the world.

It's the world's first world war, the largest battle in North American history is the fall in the fall of Quebec in 17 5960.

So this is a large battle into the civil war.

Know the large battle this time, large battles of the American Civil War.

These kind of imperial dimensions and conflicts have differential indigenous relations in them.

And the French, as we were discussing, and many may know, were intermarried with the native peoples of the Great Lakes.

They traded with them for over a century.

They often the missionaries, indigenous peoples all across, particularly upper Great Lakes.

And they did things like adjudicate disputes between tribal communities.

Over time, the French became kind of a colonial adjudicating body for indigenous peoples who had great grievances among themselves.

That's not the same experience the tribes were seeing like in Ohio, Pennsylvania.

We're seeing a lot of influx of kind of backcountry settlers that were not like the French.

They were not the Jesuit priests that were right.

This is the 7050.

Yeah.

But pre 1750, this is a world that less so in Ohio, but more so in like northern Great Lakes is really heavily tied to the Saint Lawrence Seaway and that kind of fur trade traffic.

Ohio actually is a kind of autonomous zone in part that is being settled by initially interior Indian communities like the Shawnee and the Delaware or Lenape who are migrating.

But where it's getting detailed in the way that histories are often very kind of specific.

But the French essentially built a fort at the mouth of the Ohio River to keep these backcountry traders from coming into the region.

They built the fort not to keep the traders out, but to keep essentially the Indians in, because the Indians are bringing all their trading goods now, not to the French, but to their British allies who are giving them a lower terms of exchange and better rates and so forth.

And so they built this fort education, which I think you can see from Ohio and from Cleveland.

But, you know, from further east.

And they built this for it.

And that's the scene of the first battle of the first and second.

In Pittsburgh, right this.

Pittsburgh or Duquesne.

And Pittsburgh is named after the British parliamentary leader, William Pitt, who oversees the Seven Years War, which is at the time is the most expensive and expensive war in human history.

And so it's not coincidental that after the Seven Years War, the King and Parliament of England decide to pass on some of that cost to the colonists.

Now, they've been pretty sufficient over here.

Let's make them pay a little more taxes and stamps and things like that.

And the colonists are getting concerned about their lack of representation.

And so that's what I call the indigenous origins of the American Revolution after five.

Yes.

Yes.

So, you know, you talked a little bit about the merciless Indian savages.

And your book also really heavily focuses on the rise of American democracies, Native peoples exercising, retaining or even regaining in later chapters their sovereignty.

And it is split in two parts.

And it's worth noting the dividing line is the US Constitution.

And just a second to explain why you chose that particular moment to split your book.

Right.

And so in the two most important documents in American history, the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, Indians are mentioned in both.

They're not taught in most Ivy League history departments, let alone your school books.

But they're certainly in the documents and they're certainly in the histories and they're certainly in the periods of examination.

And so the Constitution is the most important document in American.

Some scholars say after the Bible and human history.

Well, let's just think about the United States.

The Constitution is formed in 1787 after three years of independence following the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the first government United States called the Articles of Confederation is incredibly weak, it's divided, it's cantankerous.

It doesn't even send.

Most states don't even send delegates to its legislative meetings, so they can't even have a quorum.

So it's very, very unlikely that this initial experiment in democracy and Republican government is going to work until the United States reconstitutes itself and the states finally begin ceding certain powers to the federal government.

Okay.

We have to create a stronger federal government rather than keep liberty to ourselves.

We have to balance powers between small versus big states.

We have to deal with certain cantankerous issues.

One of the main reasons, too, is that there were states ceding taking land from tribal nations, and the federal government was like, Whoa, that's what we want to do.

Well, it's if the states were left to handle interior expansion on their own and in the in their fears on their own, the republic would not have survived.

Yeah.

Big states, New York, Virginia would have just beat up taken.

They would have become monopolies, essentially, of various kinds.

And that's how we got the Commerce Clause.

That's how we get a part of the Commerce Clause.

So the federal government then, as its powers are ceded to it, to handle trade between the states with the foreign nation or and between the states, among the foreign nations and with the Indian tribes in those five words and with the Indian tribes which are written into the US Constitution are the most important words in American Indian history, because it says any relationship the federal government has between itself and tribes will be conducted through the federalist system, not the states.

At the time, it's unclear what this means, but over time it becomes a recognition that the US Supreme Court and chief justices and so forth will say is an inherent recognition that tribes have a certain form of political recognition that the federal government has always agreed to if they find they've written treaties with them before, even the Constitution, they've passed laws, they've welcomed delegates, they've given them national funds and various kind of annuities.

There is a kind of bilateral relationship here that's outside the jurisdiction of the states.

The states don't like it, and someone like Andrew Jackson in particular will fight it in the 1830s and pass the Indian Removal Act.

But eventually this doctrine forms that recognizes a limited but nonetheless inherent form of sovereignty that tribal communities control upon their lands and those upon it.

And that's the whole jurisdiction or domain of federal Indian law is at the heart of the second half of this book.

Yes.

And, you know, we're going to get to audience questions here in just a minute.

I have one more question for you before we turn to that.

You know, you you had every opportunity to end the book, you know, around 1900 that it seemed like a good like, you know, concluding point.

But you kept going well into the 21st century and, you know, right now things feel different in our communities, You know, looking at our, you know, very vibrant community.

We have represented here today in Cleveland, we have Deb Haaland, the secretary of the interior, Tommy Orange, came out with an incredible book, another in his field, Wolff Book Award winner The Rise of Indigenous Creatives.

I'm going be Yellowtail today.

Bethanie yellowtail.

She's a tour designer.

Things are seemingly going really well right now.

Do you think that Native Americans are gaining power?

And power is another like, you know, underlying theme throughout your book in the struggle for it, by colonizing entities and native people trying to retain that sovereignty and power.

Do you think we're at a turning point right now for our people?

And as a quick follow up to that, how and where would you start Chapter 13 if you were to continue it on in the 21st century?

Well, many big questions I'm happy to turn to as to them as best I can.

I did want to make a very deliberate effort to bring this narrative to the 21st century, in part because the vision of the frontier closing in 1890, the famous celebrated frontier thesis of the famous, the most famous American historian named Frederick Jackson Turner from 1890, bemoaning the essentially the closure of a period of U.S. expansion when the census in 1890 declared that there are no longer unincorporated lands in the American republic to which immigrants are.

So there's can settle.

And so after a century of continental expansion, which 13 former states become I in 1946 or 40, I can't exactly know, but eventually become 48 and then 50 states in the union.

That process of expansion fundamentally defined the American Republic throughout its first century of independence.

And so many scholars, academics, artists and other intellectuals were bemoaning and kind of worried about this, in part because so many non Anglophone immigrants were arriving on the shores of particularly Eastern cities, people who were, you know, Catholic, maybe from Eastern Europe or Southern Europe, people from Latin America and Asia.

How could they possibly participate in this American experience if they don't ever see themselves or have a propensity to own land on the frontier to settle?

The quintessential experience of being an American is a process of settlement across.

And so many thought, okay, we can bring the West or the frontier to them.

Let's create national parks.

And Ken Burns, his language was he call it the greatest American idea or the great America's greatest idea.

Let's let's bring worlds fairs that have exhibits of Indians staged within them.

Let's create the museums and let's have a schoolbooks and eventually let's have children's narratives.

And all of a sudden, you know, there's this kind of just generative world of activity around what I call the mythology of indigenous disappearance.

Because Indians had disappeared.

They were suffering tremendously, no doubt.

But that narrative of banishment, of either banishment or vanquished, meant kind of so ubiquitous.

And so the bestselling book in American Indian history is Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

It ends in 1890 with the massacre.

So I really wanted to break through that.

And so Chapter 11 is about Native American activists fighting against these not just visions of history, but also policies designed to assimilate native peoples by taking their children to boarding schools, by subdividing the reservations, by prosecuting their religious practices, by denying them political representation, all these onerous forms of American colonialism that we've never really been sufficiently introduced to.

It's happening not just to Indians, but to people in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, Hawaii and elsewhere.

And so there are a lot more native voices and forms of like political organization and agency throughout those chapters than you might find in the earlier chapters.

So I really wanted to break through that.

And we are now living in the late 20th century and early 21st century, no longer the early 21st century, the mid quarter of the 21st century.

We are living through a moment of tremendous political resurgence, cultural revitalization, social and educational attainment, and perhaps most visibly, for many tribes and regions, unprecedented economic activity.

And we have Ned Blackhawk, author of The Rediscovery of America, and it's Field Wolff, Book Award winner for 2024 in nonfiction.

We are about to begin the audience Q&A for our live stream and radio audience or those just joining.

I'm Cynthia Connelly, director of programing here at the City Club and moderator.

For today's conversation, we are joined by Ned Blackhawk, author of The Rediscovery of America and Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.

He's this year's Indisputable Book Award winner in nonfiction.

We welcome questions from everyone city club members, guests, students and those joining via a live stream at City Club Talk or Live radio broadcast at 89 seven WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our speaker, please text it to 3305415794.

Again, that's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

We have our first question.

Thank you, Cynthia.

Our first question is actually one of the questions that's been text in.

So I will read it.

It is interesting that you say American history is being rediscovered as we're in the midst of another era of book banning.

Can you talk more about this tension and how you envision truth winning out?

Is that question for me or I'm not as involved and or aware of these processes as some others might be?

And so I know in many states, particularly public libraries and school districts are undergoing tremendous pressures to either this this use and or reject certain kind of perspectives and forms of literary or scholarly engagement.

Personally, I think that's a disservice to ourselves.

I think our children and our families and communities, broadly speaking, across America, have the capacity to determine what is and what is not sufficient or useful kind of pedagogy.

Cool work and teachers are already understaffed and overworked.

My mom was a public high school teacher of Detroit for 40 plus years.

She often says to me that you don't teach.

I say, Yeah, I know.

You know, I'm in the classroom a few days a week, not six or 7 hours a day.

All right.

So.

So let's let's give our teachers a little bit of a break and understand that what they're trying to do.

So, first of all, Dr. Blackhawk, thank you for this book that filled in a huge gap of my ignorance.

I think the chapters you mentioned should be required reading for any high school student in Ohio, because it's a part of history that we were never taught.

When I was in school.

I am curious.

Recently there were eight sites in southern Ohio that were named UNESCO's sites and their attempt to preserve what's left of an amazing culture that had math, amazing mathematical, astronomical economic skills.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, that has been called the Hopewell group, named after the white farmer who first allowed so many to come in, dig up important artifacts, exhibit them at the Columbian Exposition, and then sell them to the Field Museum where they were locked away and still have not been archived.

Hmm.

The excuse I've been given when I talk to people in Ohio about this is well, this is what these people were called.

We don't know what their real names were.

We should just stick with that name for purposes of making scholarship easier for research, etc..

I'm curious, given that you are a scholar who can probably have problems researching things like this.

How how do you feel about that statement that it's okay to name this group after a white farmer for purposes of continuing the the identification that they were given 100 years ago by white scholars?

I'm not an archeologist by training, so I am less familiar with the debates around the rise and fall and evolution of the hopefully in societies as they are known in the academic world.

I mean, I actually wasn't familiar with the etymology of that term until you mentioned it.

So thank you.

There are systematic efforts to revise problematic paradigms from previous generations, and I believe there are now active, particularly Southeastern and Midwestern archeological studies communities that are involved in reinterpreting much of this work.

And one of the kind of distinctions of this book versus there are two other recent syntheses of Native American history that have occurred in the last couple of years as essentially, you know, scholars of a certain generation, myself included, are realizing we need to kind of bring this together.

And so those other works by Kathleen Duvall and Peck online and our two other historians who recently published on this, they venture much more deeply into the pre-Columbian past than I do.

And they examine in particular the Ohio and Mississippi Valley, pre-Columbian civilizations that dominated essentially the eastern North American landscape a thousand years before European rival.

I less familiar with the people who are working in those areas and might recommend or guide you to those studies.

But generally speaking, it takes work.

It takes individuals, scholars, institutions.

I don't need to say this in Cleveland.

It takes energy often generations long, to adopt new names for perhaps challenging.

Just eyeballing our community over there.

We know.

Next question.

I great book, by the way.

I was thinking as you were talking about the the question about the next chapter and also national parks.

There's already one precedent for Native Americans now managing a national park, I think, in Montana.

Do you think that trend should continue and make sense in terms of reparations, in terms of who controls the narrative?

Yes, there are a lot of very exciting what are called co-management relationships or agreements between various federal divisions, of the various divisions of the federal government and tribal communities.

And Secretary Haaland has made this a real priority of her administration.

And so there are initiatives at both old as well as new national parks to have tribal community members actively involved in the stewardship essentially, of them.

And I think you're referencing like Glacier National Park with the Blackfeet Nation.

There's this new park called Bears Ears that she's helped a herd administration has helped establish.

And the most interesting that I'm example, I'm familiar with is in the Canyon de Shay National Park of of the Navajo Nation.

So in the middle of the Navajo Nation is a national park called Canyon National Park.

And that the tribe essentially manages the tours and visits of of outsiders.

So there's essentially a whole division of Navajo people who work for the national Park in guiding and managing tribal members.

I think I said who guide and manage this very important cultural and historic site for, the tribe's community, which was the scene of the last essentially battle of the Navajo War between Christopher Carson and the Navajo Nation in 1864, where they were surrounded essentially, and eventually surrendered after several years of intense conflict.

And they were subsequently removed and New Mexico military installation called Fort Sumner.

So there's a tremendous amount of history and of loss, but also a revival as Navajo community members farm and graze, or they maintain their sheep herds and have farm fields and homes across this water way in the reservation.

So there are these examples that I think we should obviously all learn more about, but also see as potential guides for future practices, because there are intense challenges between tribal communities and their many neighbors.

And these challenges are rooted in longstanding histories, often of asymmetry of asymmetrical power, differential differences.

Tribes are trying to maintain practices, values and customs that are essential to their well-being and future, and might also help their neighbors as well.

I think.

We have a student.

I know you were talking about how in schools they didn't go past 1900.

What motivated you to write more about it?

You know, I'm really I'm shocked at the challenge of doing historical education more broadly.

And I think we've reached a point where we're so saturated with information and knowledge that sometimes we learn more and more about less and less and I'm sorry, and that's true of the academy in particular, where we're where we're trained to have like our silo and like you're in like this field.

It's called Native American history.

And within Native American history, you're going to do a certain thing and you're certain thing is going to have to do a certain insights.

And so I don't think of this book and I don't think in Native American history as well as an additive feature of America.

The book argues it's impossible to understand America without native peoples in it.

But we've been given the vision of American history without Native peoples in it.

So there's a kind of huge kind of paradox or tension there.

And there are lots of famous historians who write important books about American history that don't mention these things.

And so my job is almost like a professional, like review critic to say, you know, there's something not here that should be here.

And so the 20th century is that vision.

And so and we were talking earlier, and I know there's a lot of interest in the room about the kind of history of Cleveland's urban Indian community.

And the lot of the vast majority of American Indians live in urban environments now, not in reservations.

So it shouldn't be seen as abnormal or unique or somehow differential to be an urban Indian.

Talking about the relocation.

We're talking about the relocate because this is the goal the federal government throughout the postwar era.

It's covered in chapter 12.

I think each of you have some Canadian roots.

I think I heard McGill in your introduction, and I'm really curious to know if you see any difference or if you can compare and contrast the relationships between Native Americans and First Nation to their respective.

What do we call colonial governments.

And it appears to me that the Canadian that the relationship between Native Americans or First Nation and Canadian might be a little more advanced than us in their acknowledgment, for instance, of the boarding school abuses.

It seem I think we're both Detroiters.

I mean, we can see Canada, Racing Canada.

We can see.

Canada.

Yeah, we found out in the green and we're both from Detroit.

But yeah, like, do you think Canada is doing a little bit better?

Are they above the curve in terms of Native relations?

It's a really interesting question, in part because if you spend time in contemporary Canada, it's impossible to not encounter public discourse, national apologies and or commemorations or efforts, as well as particularly active Indigenous communities proclaiming and differential visions of the future from the normative kind of Canadian multicultural discourses.

And I was in Canada, and I was there during a very particularly historic period of indigenous activism in eastern Canada, known as the it's commonly known as the Mohawk crisis of 1990, which occurred outside of Montreal.

And I won't go into too much detail, but I was in Montreal in 1990 as a student and it really had a tremendous visual impact on me.

But on the other hand, so Canadian Canada, for example, soon after this military conflict, the longest in Canadian history since the Korean War, in which 5000 Canadian military service members were mobilized to surround two Mohawk communities outside of the city of Montreal in the summer of 1991, that lasted a standoff that lasted for 78 days.

And the aftermath of this, Canada began a process of parliamentary investigation, eventually truth and reconciliat kind of post.

I'm not quite sure genocidal is the right word, but post traumatic and global national commemoration efforts like in South Africa, like in Eastern Europe to move past historic traumas.

Nation states often form invested Native Truth and reconciliation commissions that do in-depth inquiries, then publish reports that hold information sessions that bring survivors and perpetrators together to work through the kind of injuries of the past.

Canada has done this.

They declared their national history residential school education, a cultural genocide which lasted until the 1990s, unlike in the United States, to certain extent.

So over 150,000 Canadian children were educated Native children from Canada.

They were brought into these facilities where they suffered all kinds of psychological and emotional and physical abuses and kind of essentially were severed essentially from their social communities.

And family was something, you know, I don't think anyone would ever want for them.

And themselves or their own children.

So that process is much more present in Canada, the history of it, than, say, the boarding school system in the United States.

And I would perhaps guess that most people in Pennsylvania and Ohio don't know that the first Indian boarding school was established in Carlisle Indian Industrial School of 1879.

So ah, which actually set the model for subsequent boarding schools in Canada as well.

So they're much more kind of involved in a kind of national discourse around these things in the United States.

But the United States has a certain kind of political practice of recognition that we were briefly discussing that doesn't exist in Canada in the same ways.

And so the treaty practices of the United States initiated the forms of policy, the kind of onerous impositions that the federal government has made over time upon tribal communities have been significantly reversed in the previous few generations, so that tribes now have autonomous, self-governing capacities in ways that they never have had historically within the United States.

That's happening every day across America.

Tribes issue, license plate station issue, ID cards that TSA officers have to accept.

You know, some tribes are trying to make passports as the Iroquois people in this room know well, the tribes are doing sovereign activities on a daily basis.

They're also fighting with their neighbors sometimes on these issues.

And the Supreme Court is sometimes befuddled by what to do in these spaces.

That's not happening in the same way as in Canada, where the land rights processes are still in many ways undetermined.

And so there's many provinces in Canada that never initiated treaty practices with tribal communities and thus have less demarcated kind of boundaries or kind of recognized land rights for tribes.

And so tribes are trying or tribes are going from first nations in Canada trying to push for often, you know, monumentally, understandably, but monumentally kind of grand reclamation of not just resources and language and culture, but also lands themselves.

So there's a much more kind of contested process.

We may know that a new Canadian province was established in the north in 1994 called Nunavut, which is almost an entirely in anyway province.

So there there is a process of of differentiation there happening that mirrors and parallels the United States, but is very distinct from it.

There's also native pubs in Canada which are super jealous about.

We have one more question time for one more.

Good afternoon.

We have a text question.

Do you have any thoughts on the origins of the Second Amendment?

Some authors state the Second Amendment specifically was passed to recapture runaway slaves and kill Native Americans on the push westward.

Is there any truth to that?

One minute the best book, the bestselling book recently in Native American history, it didn't.

It hasn't outpaced De Brown, but there's a book that many might know called A People's History and Indigenous People's History The United States by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz.

And she recently published a book about the Second Amendment that I would recommend that listener or listener listener to.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

Jimmy Gooch, thank you very much to Ned Blackhawk for joining.

Us at the city hall today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Forums like these ones are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you, You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club dot org.

Today's forum was presented in partnership with the A.V.

12 Book Awards and is part of the City Clubs authors in conversations series, presented in collaboration with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and Cuyahoga County Public Library.

The City Club would also like to welcome students joining us from the Cleveland School of the Arts, Lakewood High School, and the Garrison School.

We would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the Cleveland Foundation, the Cleveland Metroparks Cleveland State Honors College Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the Lake Erie Native American Council, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District and Ohio History Connection.

Thank you all for joining us today.

Up next at the City Club on Tuesday, October 1st, we will be at the Huntington Convention Center with Dr. Warren Morgan, CEO of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District for his second State of the Schools address.

And then on Friday, October 4th, Adrian Macklemore will join us to discuss how we can improve outcomes for youth aging out of our region's foster care system.

You can get tickets to each of these forums and learn more about others at City Club, Dawg.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Ned Blackhawk.

I'm Cynthia Connelly and this forum is now adjourned.

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