Frushkam.
Hey listeners, Rebecca Nagel here, I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of my new podcast, First America. I think you'll love it. This summer, our country is celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The way that history gets told often leaves Native Americans out, But without us,
you don't know what happened. First America tells the true story of how the United States came to be and how our current political moment is two hundred and fifty years in the making. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, find First America wherever you listen to your podcasts. Pushkin Plus subscribers can hear ad free episodes early before the release to the public. Sign up on the First America Show page on Apple or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus.
Where do you want to parks in park?
Greak?
I think you have to park in here.
The Fort is that way ye. On a cold day in January, I visited Fort Snelling in Minneapolis. I was there with my friend Nick Astis. He's a history professor at the University of Minnesota. And a citizen of the Lower Bural Sioux tribe.
This is the historic Fort Snelling. On a walk closer to it.
Can you just describe what the fort looks like.
Well, the fort has a guard tower and then there's a wall that surrounds the entire fort.
There's a series of Next to the historic buildings are modern day trash cans. To let you know, this is a tourist attraction. School kids come here on field trips.
This is a sacred site for Dakota people, which was later appropriated by the US military to build their fort. So look at that bald eagle. I told you were going to see one. Yeah, I wish the United States never appropriated the eagle. Do you hear? Look at it? He's coming right towards US. I mean, I don't know, man, I don't know how you can't believe in the power of this stuff because those things happened for a reason. I told you we were going.
To see one.
The history of what happened at Fort Snelling is significant to the Dakota people, and that history is acknowledged at the site, but you have to go and find it.
It was like a healing site right over here.
It's next to an underpass down a long set of stairs on the edge of the world. Any describe what the memorial looks like.
Yeah, so it's like a camp circle, but in the center it looks like there's prayer, tize, sage, tobacco, et cetera, wrapped in cloth. And they're also prioritize in the trees that surround us.
Who do you think left the preor chase in the trees?
I was assuming it's the descendants of those who experienced that genocide.
Over sixteen hundred Dakota people were held here during the winter of eighteen sixty two.
This is the area actually where the concentration camp was actually at duckho to people, people who dared to stand up to the United States were put into a concentration camp and all kinds of atrocities happened.
The concentration camp was just one part of a broad campaign to expel all Dakota people from the state of Minnesota. The campaign also included death marches, massacres, bounties placed on Indigenous heads, open air prisons, and mass executions.
There was a lot of malnutrition purposeful starvation. There were reports of women being raped and violated. You know, it's a sight of horrors.
Do you think most people who come to the spot, do you think that they come here to honor the atrocity that happened here.
No, they're doing winter sports recreation. I mean you can see right here. You can see these parallel tracks people cross country ski through this area.
While we were standing there, some hikers walked by. Hi walking around for it. Snelling with Nick. It felt like this perfect metaphor for our country, all our terrible history. It's there. We just don't know how to talk about it. This all started as a conversation between Nick and me about four years ago. We were frustrated, well, I was pissed at how Native people are erased from the story of America. We wanted to tell the history of the
United States with Native people written back in. I wanted to correct the record.
Go up here.
Oh, oh okay, I need a burge. When we are in the car, Nick's phone rang.
I'm gonna called got shot.
He pulled up the news on his phone.
Breaking witnesses report a woman was shot in the face by ice while trying to flee in central Minneapolis.
Earlier that day, a woman named Renee Nicole Good had tried to block ICE agents with her car. An agent had just shot and killed her.
Damn, the photos are really bad. Oh god, it looks like a deployed in airbag is just covered out of blood.
We parked and watched the video. Wow.
Wow, that's awful. That's awful.
When I was in Minneapolis last January, thousands of ICE agents were on the ground.
It's in like a residential neighborhood.
Federal agents had been rounding people up, including children, and sending them to detention facilities. People were afraid to leave their homes. Parents stopped sending their kids to school. It's interesting, given what we were talking about this morning, of the history of the code of people being rounded up and violently forced out of Minnesota. When I started this project, I thought I was making a history podcast. I read books, I interviewed historians, I went to important sites, I traveled
across the country. But then this thing kept happening. I would be in a place learning about America's past, and then the same thing would happen right here in our present. You're listening to First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how our current political moment is two hundred and fifty years in the making from Pushkin Industries and Critical Frequency. I'm your host, Rebecca egele Gohein Daodan ge Lecayette gain In, La, citizen
of Cherokee Nation. I didn't go to Minneapolis to report on ICE. I had come to interview Nick. We just happened to be at Fort Snelling the day ICE shot and killed Renee Good. I don't know about you, but I don't believe in coincidences. I canceled my flight home and stayed to report on what was happening. The next morning, there was a protest back at Fort Snelling.
I know.
Because Fort Snelling is also the site of ICE's headquarters in Minneapolis.
I was curious why you guys came today, because I mean, you know, someone was literally held yesterday for standing up to eyes. So is it scary to be here today knowing you.
Yes, it's scary, and I'm angry, and the anger overcomes the fear. I have a good friend, and she lived in Denmark during the German occupation, and she has told me over and over again, you cannot be quiet. You must end up, because silence is what allowed this to happen in the Second World War.
How far are we from the historic Fort Snelling.
I'm just right across Highway sixty two here, And do you.
Know what happened there?
Oh?
No, no, don't ask you those kinds of questions. I'm not good with history.
It's a historic court, it's.
The spot.
I mean, the reason this is not happening here.
Is because of the ice offices that are there, not because of the historic fort, but.
The fourth in the eighteen sixty there's actually a concentration camp for Dakota people. I'm just curious if any of that history feels relevant to what's happening now.
Yes, clearly, you know, but I mean our state. I mean just yeah, I mean what I mean? You watch that video. Thank god that person was there taking the video on their cell phone yesterday so everyone can see what happened.
You know. After leaving the protests, I went back to see Nick Gustus at his office.
The murder of Renee Good and the history of Fort Snelling are actually inseparable. First of all, is is headquartered on the Fort Snelling Area campus.
Do you know if that's because it's federal land.
Yeah, it's headquartered there because it's federal land.
And why is it federal land.
It's federal land because it was once a military reservation from the Zebulent Pike Treaty of eighteen o five, and the was a treaty signed between some Dakota leaders and the United States government to create a military outpost.
It's not just the same place. The same thing is happening.
People are being hunted in their neighborhoods and their schools. Places that were considered sanctuary sites such as hospitals and churches, are no longer off limits. One hundred and fifty years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us, and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them.
While I was out reporting this project, a lot happened. Ice killed people in the streets. I watched a kid in bunny ears get detained. Our government abducted the leader of Venezuela and started a war with Iran. Analysts kept talking about the stages of authoritarianism, and I found myself asking this question. I think a lot of people are asking, how is this happening? How is all this happening in the United States. The answers I kept hearing YouTube Lonely
white men, the economy didn't feel like enough. I started to wonder if maybe the explanation was deeper than all that, deeper than anything going on right now. I'm still trying to figure it out. But the more time I spend in the past, the more the present makes sense. Maybe the answer is in that history we don't know how to talk about. The first place I went on my quest to put Native people back in the story of
America was the Declaration of Independence. This year is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the signing of that famous doctor, and it made sense to me as a starting place. I mean, it's the most popular origin story of our country, right. But it turns out what I thought I knew about the Declaration was wrong. Native people aren't missing. We're there. We're one of the most important lines in the document, but somehow no one knows about it.
When in the courts of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them within other.
A couple of summers ago, on a hot July day, this man in a large coat and a feathered hat walked up a small set of stairs surrounded by revolutionary war re enactors, Bayonets and the Twins speakers of the Park Services PA system. He began reading the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are in down by their creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
At the time of the document's creation, a lot of people were illiterate. Imprinting stuff was slow and expensive, so word spread through public readings like this one.
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries.
And usur paine.
I think of the Declaration of Independence like a breakup letter. Our founders are breaking up with George, the third King of England, and the Declaration is that part of every breakup, or at least every bad breakup, where you tell the other person everything they did wrong. If Thomas Jefferson and King George were having a out on the front lawn, Jefferson would have his finger in Georgia's face yelling and another thing for.
Imposing taxes on us without our consent.
And so the Declaration is basically this long list of complaints he.
Has plundered our scene.
A lot of historians say that list has an.
Order rabbits our coasts.
It starts with smaller grievances our teal and ends with the biggest ones.
And destroying the lives of our people.
We've been told the American Revolution was fought over taxes and representation. But the last complaint, the thing our founders were most angry about, goes like this.
He has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of.
Our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages.
There's a racial slur in the Declaration of Independence of people are called savages. Alongside those lofty ideals, our founders included their deep hatred for indigenous people, the.
Marciless Indian savages, whose noble of warfare is an undistinguished dystrunction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
In case you need a refresher, the popular story of the American Revolution goes like this. Britain unjustly imposed taxes on the colonists, and they got mad. But every time they protested, like when they threw tea into the Boston Harbor, the king just imposed harsher laws. The colonists started to see their king as a tyrant, some started talking about independence continental conferenceation. Late one night, Paul Revere rode his horse to warn militias waiting outside Boston that the British
were coming. The next morning, the militia squared off against the Brits, and the Revolutionary War began. A year later, our founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia to write the Declaration of Independence. But for two and a half centuries, that document has been telling a different story. According to our founders in their own words, what they were most angry about was Indians. How did we all miss that? Can you please introduce yourself?
Hi?
I'm Ned Blackhawk.
I went to Connecticut to find out And what's your tribal affiliation?
I'm Western Shoshoni. And what do you do?
Ned?
I teach history where Yo University. I was the first tenured American Indian to teach at Yo Wait.
I just kind of want to back up, like in the entire history of yil you're the first native person to get tenure.
Here, Yes, and I'm still the first, so the only tenure faculty member?
Yes?
Is it ever?
Lonely? Ned wears a long ponytail and the kind of sweater you imagine a professor would wear Ned and I have been talking about this history for years. He, along with Nick Estes and some other indigenous scholars, help shape the idea for this podcast. I wanted Ned to tell me the story of why the founders hated indigenous people so much they put it in the Declaration of Independence. Ned says that story starts a couple decades earlier with this big, big war. Is it kind of like World War Zero?
No, it is the First World War.
It started as a fight over who would control North America, and it eventually covered the globe Great Britain one, and they got a bunch of land from France. This land spans from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and from present day New York to Minnesota. The colonists are thrilled all.
Across British North America. Columnists are rejoicing. Sermons are being offered in Sundays, Pamphlets and almanacs are being written about land possibilities in the interior. And there's this kind of growing sense of shared kind of euphoria that the British government and the British Empire are not just the largest in world history, but also the most virtuous in or free.
Those celebrations come to a halt in the summer of seventeen sixty three when news spreads of an indigenous uprising. The land England took over from France is ill controlled by Indigenous nations. What England actually wins in the war in real terms, is forts about thirteen forts stationed around the Great Lakes as a new fort Boston Town. England thinks it can push Native nations around.
They don't listen to the Native people, so they don't trade with them adequately.
And that angers indigenous leaders. An Odawa chief named Pontiac forms a multi national Indigenous military alliance to push back. Rick, could you just tell me a little bit more about who Pontiac is.
Pontiac is an Adawa leader, and he's fallen into close affinity with the preacher who's Delaware or Lenape named Neolan Niolan is the Delaware prophet. Pontiac is the political leader, and together they start articulating a vision for the future that is transformative. They decide that they no longer want
their followers to rely upon the goods of Europeans. And it's a process kind of similar to what the colonists are going through because once they start reimagining themselves in these ways, they decide that they're going to drive the English out.
Pontiac and the soldiers go around and attack British forts. One of those attacks was particularly brilliant. Some Honi Shanabi warriors go to this fort in northern Michigan, as they often did to trade. But while they're there, they pretend to play a game of lacrosse right outside the fort.
And one ball makes it over the fence, and so they ask if they could kind of get their ball returned, And so the fort officials are opening the doors to return the ball that's been taken, and flood of warriors come in and destroy the fort.
Pontiac's military alliance attacks forts all over the Great Lakes region. Remember, England took over about thirteen forts, while Pontiac and his alliance destroy eight.
They signal to the English that peace is going to be more costly than war has been for.
You, and another costly war for the crown is a big problem. England is broke, like Broke broke that Global war. England spent almost a decade fighting. It was expensive. The Crown doesn't want to pay for another one.
And they decide, Okay, we'll make peace with Pontiac.
And why would the king do that? Because, like England is a global empire, so why wouldn't the King of England want more land in North Okay?
Yeah? Have you ever been to India? No? Have you heard of the Caribbean?
Yes?
Okay?
The English Crown governs millions of people around the world. The British colonists in North America are some whole percentage of that. The overwhelming economic priorities that the British Empire has and Western Hemisphere revolve around places like Jamaica and Barbados, not Virginia or Massachusetts.
Is that because Barbados makes the crown more money?
Correct, because Barbados produces large quantities of slave produced alcohol and sugar that can be consumed across the British Empire.
So in the interests of Britain this global empire, peace with indigenous nations makes the most sense. It saves the crown money, It serves the Crown's interests to preserve peace. The King of England gives Pontiac and his confederacy what they want.
The Proclamation line of October seventeen sixty three draws this perimeter along the crests of the Appalachian Mountains.
The Crown promises to keep settlers off their land.
So everything east is British North America. Everything to the west is to be reserved for the Indians.
While peace with indigenous nations serves the rounds global interests, it angers the colonists because it takes from them what they want most more land.
Land mania, we might say, overwhelms the colonial system. Gentry leaders people like George Washington, understood that their lands were becoming increasingly less valuable. People like Washington and commanding their enslaved populations to help bring nutrient rich soils from the bottom of river beds because the fields are so Because the fields have become so depleted.
People like George Washington made money from this thing called land speculation. They'd buy up land that still belonged to indigenous nations to self for profit. Once Indigenous people were pushed out the King's new boundary, it messed up their whole scheme. The boundary line angered regular and poor people too. People who couldn't afford to buy private property often squatted on indigenous land. Pioneers, frontiersmen settlers, whatever you want to
call them. We're already living west of the King's line.
And there are numbers of settlers who are forced back east and they.
Don't like it.
And there's this other thing about the King's concession to Pontiac. The colonists don't like peace. You have to understand that the colonists have been at war with indigenous nations for most of their lives, and now the king wants to make peace with their enemies.
And in fact, the British are going to give them ammunition, they're going to trade with them, they're going to recognize them. Hey wait a minute, didn't we just fight with you to control this world.
To help cement peace with Pontiac, England arranges to bring gifts and supplies. This was how diplomacy between indigenous nations and European powers worked back then.
Eighty supply. The mule trains are coming massive. Actually, the logistical undertaking, if you think about it, at Pittsburgh, awaits these traders who are going to take these goods to confederate.
The colonists organize a militia basically a band of angry white men with guns, and attack the convoy.
The first shots of the American Revolution are fired in March of seventeen sixty five, when one of these backcountry militia groups known as the Black Boys attacks a British force escorting trade goods to Pontiac.
They're not attacking Indigenous people. The Black Boys are attacking British troops.
They say things like, we are willing to die to disrupt and destroy these relationships.
So before the colonists are willing to die for lofty ideals like freedom and liberty and independence, they are willing to die to stop the Crown from making peace with indigenous nations. And we know why they are willing to die for this cause because they wrote a song about it.
The Black Boys create an anthem, and that anthem calls Native peoples the enemies of mankind.
I asked ned to read part of it for me.
In March the fifth and sixty five, their Indian presence did arrive. But when this property is designed to serve the enemy of mankind, it's high treason in the amount. What does that line mean? It means that the British trading policies of supplying Native peoples are supporting the enemies of not just southern society, but mankind. More broadly, the Briton is committing treason not to the crown, but to
humanity as a whole. And so this vision of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for mankind, the first time mankind is being articulated that I'm aware of, is in deeply anti indigenous settings.
Hating indigenous people, seeing us as less than human helps the colonists come together and form a unified identity. It helped them come together to fight for independence.
I do believe the start of the fall of the British Empire North America began on the Pennsylvania frontier. The sense of lawlessness, or essentially fashioning one's own self governing principles and practices. This is happening before in Pennsylvania, before it's happening in Massachusetts.
We teach the origins of the American Revolution as this drumbeat of violence and protest happening in Boston over taxes, But years before any of that, colonists are firing guns at British troops over Native land.
And to my knowledge, that Black Boy's history that we've been discussing has yet to appear in any US history textbook. Why we can't tell that story is a.
Mystery to me.
Before I left Yale, I gave ned a present.
You want me to open this?
Yeah, you may or may not want it?
A Declaration of Independence?
Shot class. Thank you so much. What does it say we the people?
What to you does that shotglass represent?
If we think about how Americans think about their history.
I wanted to say something that's easily digestible, goes down Smith. I think we as a country are losing a real sense of understanding about our nation's past. The Declaration, which is full of these beautiful, beautifully rendered, you know, sentences and paragraphs about enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker.
History to it.
Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence in the American Revolution? Why is it important that Americans.
Know about it? Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.
I'm mad that Native people have been written out of the story of the Revolution, but I'm also baffled by it. I mean, it's kind of wild, right, It's not like you have to dig through the archives to find out that hunger for indigenous land drove the revolution. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence, in one of our country's most famous documents, in one of the most famous documents in all of human history, but somehow no one knows about it. It feels like a magic trick, like
making a rabbit disappear into a hat. And when I started this project, that's what I thought. I was up against the pervasive and systemic erasure of Native people from US history. I thought the thing people couldn't see was me, my community. And then I started to realize what's missing from the story of America. It's bigger than that. After I left Minneapolis, I kept hearing politicians say the same thing.
What's happening right now in America is fundamentally on America.
In there, this is just so an American.
I understand where this comes from. It comes from the part of the Declaration of Independence. We were taught the all men or created, equal life, liberty, and happiness part. But when we tell the whole story, the truth of how and why our country was founded, the present moment doesn't feel like a contradiction. Violently rounding people up putting people in detention, even shooting anyone who gets in the way. Our government has done this before, not once, not twice,
many times. We just don't talk about that history because it happened to indigenous people. I keep hearing people go to Nazi Germany or Putin's Russia to try and understand the rise of fascism. We don't need to leave the United States to understand the horrors of authoritarianism. It's right here in our own history. And if we want to root that authoritarianism out, we have to know where and how it started. If we think we can win by defeating one leader, it will be like pruning a weed.
It will only come back stronger. I thought what was missing from the story of America was Native people, but then I realized without us, that story is wrong. What's missing from the story of America is the truth. I want us to know how we got here, because without that we will never find our way out. Coming up on this season of First America, are you guys big chiefs fans?
Hell?
Yeah, yes, chiefs on three three je.
I feel like that's going to happen a lot.
Do Native Americans still exist?
Maybe I don't let me think so the entire plan for funding the federal government was acquiring indigenous land and selling it.
You were running for your lives and you saw behind you everything you knew being burned down.
What democracy rounds an entire ethnic group up at gunpoint and puts them into a concentration camp? Like, not a strong democracy, not a durable democracy. I would say, not even a democracy. It's not Is that a new thing?
Is this what we've done?
We're good at this.
If you like what you're hearing, please leave a review. It's one of the best ways to help listeners find this show. You can also support First America by subscribing or sharing episodes with your friends. First America was made possible by the generous support of the Henry Loose Foundation
in the NYU Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project. Additional support came from Indian Collective, First Nations Development Institute, Jajavio Tom of San Menuel Nation, Borealist Philanthropy, and Black Liberation Indigenous Sovereignty Collective. Our fiscal sponsor is Red Media. I dreamed this project into the world and collect Oberation with an amazing group of Indigenous scholars, including Maggie Blackhawk Fond de Lac Ojibwe Ned Blackhawk, citizen of the tm Ok Tribe
of Western Shoshone. Phil Deloria, descendant of the Standing Rock and Yankton Sioux tribes, and Nick Estes, citizen of the Lower Burual Sioux Tribe. I Rebecca Nagel, citizen of Cherokee Nation, also reported, wrote, hosted, and executive produced. The show First America is produced by Critical Frequency and distributed by Pushkin Industries. Our managing producer is Amy Westervelt. Senior producer and sound designer is Brendan Baker. Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.
Jules Bradley, Kim Nettervi Petersa and Jordan gas Pore are our producers. Our editorial consultant is Connie Walker, citizen of the Okineese First Nation. Fact checking by Naomi bar Our partnership's director is Lindsay Crowder. Our development consultant is Jenny Lawton. Our theme song is by Raven Chikhan, who is Diney. Scoring by Laura Ortman, citizen of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and Raven Chacon. Artwork by Kelly Gonzalez, citizen of Cherokee Nation.
The team at pushkin Is Greta Cone CEO, Eric Sandler, Chief Strategy Officer, Grace Ross VP of Business Development, Morgan Ratner, Director of Marketing, Owen Miller Content Delivery Associate, Keira Posey Creative Partnerships Manager, Jordan McMillan Social Media Manager, Brian Strabinick, Senior Analytics manager, and Jake Flanagan Production Council