Season 1 Episode 12
Ben Binversie:
Indigenous people have been resisting colonization for centuries. But what do these efforts look like today, and what are some of the most important issues facing Indian Country? (singing). [00:00:30] This is All Things Grinnell. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. On this week's show, we'll talk with some scholars of native studies who visited Grinnell back in the fall. Sebastian Braun is the director of American Indian Studies Program at Iowa State University. We'll talk to him about the impact of the oil boom on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.
Then we talk with Gina Caison, assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, who came to campus to talk about the story of the lost colony of Roanoke Island [00:01:00] and what that story and its pervasive presence in history tells us about the role of native people in this country's development. This week's show is coming up next after a word from Grinnell College. The information and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent the views of Grinnell College.
Sebastian Braun came upon the field of American Indian Studies through a series of accidents. He studied ethnology and anthropology in Switzerland, [00:01:30] where he took a seminar on the 500th anniversary of Columbus and took and interest in Mississippian and Hopewell mounds and platform pyramids. That's how he got hooked. He now teaches at Iowa State University as a professor of American Indian Studies and paid us a visit in Grinnell back in October to talk about the backend oil boom and the impact it's had on native and non-native communities and the environment based on his time at the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, where he's been researching since 2011.
Construction [00:02:00] of the pipeline has moved forward, despite concerns and protests over water quality and sacred burial grounds. I asked him about his first trip to Fort Berthold and how the oil boom has changed the reservation and surrounding areas.
Sebastian Braun:
So, Fort Berthold is, of course, the beginning of the pipeline, so it's the [inaudible 00:02:18] is all around Fort Berthold. So, when the boom first started, we were out there basically as tourists. We went camping out there in [00:02:30] 2005, 6, 7, 8. It was just like there was nobody around. It was really dark at night and you could see all the stars. I remember I was out there, we were out there in 2008 and we were camping. I took the dog out of the tent, a little bit up the hill to have her pee. I was looking around and I saw there were two drills, two well drills active. [00:03:00] They were like UFOs because they were all lit up.
You can see for miles, especially at night, right? So, I was thinking, "Wow." Then the next time I got out was in 2011. It was the first time that I truly understood, I think, what a gold boom looked like in the 19th century [00:03:30] because I think it must have been the same feeling, like hustle, everybody absolutely active. Traffic had increased, 10, 20 fold. The roads were collapsing under the weight of the trucks. There were accidents because everybody worked basically 24 hours a day and people fell asleep. Farmers still had to get to their fields for their tractors and they were in the [00:04:00] middle of North Dakota. There were 20 mile traffic jams now, when before, you would drive and you wouldn't see a car for an hour.
People moving in, of course, there were a lot of problems with just increasing population. It was very disorienting for locals because with all the rigs, you need the access [00:04:30] roads. So, people couldn't navigate anymore like they used to, because before that, you would say, "Oh, yeah. You go down, drive two miles, then you take the next right. Then remember, at Tom's old garage [inaudible 00:04:42] turn left." That didn't work anymore. Right? So, it's very disorienting. As I talked with people and went to events, what I started to understand was that [00:05:00] towns and city and county commissioners had no way of dealing with this and they were absolutely overwhelmed. For them, it was just chaos.
So, that was how things changed. I haven't been out there for a while, I have to say. Last time I was out there, I stopped at the new gas station across from the new hotel. I [00:05:30] went in and the guy in the gas station said, "How are you?" I said, "Fine. How are you doing?" He said to me, "Oh, I'm okay. It could be worse. I could be out of a job." I knew at that moment that the boom was over because that was the first time that anybody had even brought up the potential of being out of a job out there. For the previous [00:06:00] five, six years, nobody was out of a job.
So, now I think activity is picking back up. It's not profitable to drill unless oil is over 50, $60 a barrel. So, now that the oil is coming back up, I think people are starting to drill again. So, maybe activity will pick up again. [00:06:30] But it's not going to be like it was before in terms of this absolute boom. I think it's going more [inaudible 00:06:39] by now.
Ben Binversie:
Uh-huh (affirmative). Wow. Do you have a sense of how, maybe it's not going to be a lasting economic boon to the area, but how that economic maybe short term success has impacted the people that are actually living there and not the oil companies that are getting the profits?
Sebastian Braun:
Okay. So, that's [00:07:00] sort of two questions.
Ben Binversie:
I exceeded my limit.
Sebastian Braun:
The first one was is it going to be a lasting economic boom, and I have to say absolutely not. In the beginning, the state did everything they could to present it as such, that these people who moved in, they would stay there, and so West North Dakota would, for lack of better word, would become more civilized or communities could build on this, and so on, [00:07:30] and I was always skeptical because there are reasons why not that many people live in West North Dakota. Those people who moved in from the outside were mostly without families. There were some who brought their families with them. But once the jobs dry up in the oil fields, there's agriculture, and that's what is West North Dakota.
How did it impact people? In many different ways, I think. So, some [00:08:00] people got really rich overnight, basically. That was actually a problem because they didn't know what to do with the money. These were people who never had money. Even if you have a large farm or a large ranch, you don't have cash. You live on credit, right? So, with that influx in money, people just didn't know what to do with it. They didn't know how to invest money. So, some people [00:08:30] just put all their money under the mattress, literally. Some people just spent. But the other problem was that a lot of people didn't get money because if you had mineral rights, now you got rich. If you didn't own mineral rights, you didn't get anything. Right?
So, I think one of the largest impacts of the economic boom was that it ripped communities apart [00:09:00] because there were now poor people and rich people. In many communities, especially in the first few years, the people who got wealthy didn't want to admit it. So, there were people who bought a new pickup truck and put it in the garage-
Ben Binversie:
Wow.
Sebastian Braun:
... and didn't drive it for two years because they didn't want to be seen as the people who now had more than their neighbors with whom they went to church, with whom they shared a community. They saw the potential this was, rip [00:09:30] things apart. So, I think it instituted a different dynamic into communities economically. There were social problems, of course, insider, outsiders, things like that. Some communities have found a way to slowly now adapt to these new realities. But wealth is not always positive, right?
Ben Binversie:
[00:10:00] Yeah. Yeah. A lot of inequality. So, turning to a slightly different topic, although it's still national resource management, but perhaps a more sustainable version, one of your books, Buffalo Inc., detailed how the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation has turned to bison ranching in recent years. Can you talk about how bison ranching fits into their cultural ecological identity and also their economic prosperity?
Sebastian Braun:
So, this is actually a difficult subject because [00:10:30] that project no longer exists. All right? So, it was an effort to deal with resources as they are available in terms of living on the plains. Right? So, actually, the guy who founded the buffalo project Fred Dupree, he [00:11:00] went and did an analysis of the resources that the reservation had. Basically, what he came up with was, "Well, we have grass. Tons of grass. We have people, but fewer people [crosstalk 00:11:19]."
Ben Binversie:
Not tons of people. Yeah.
Sebastian Braun:
"But we have people, right? And we have a culture." So, his goal was, on one hand, to run buffalo [00:11:30] as a economic development project, but on the other hand, as an ecological restoration project because a lot of the pastures were overgrazed by that time. Third, as a cultural revitalization project. Right? All of that would be sustainable because, well, buffalo eat grass. There's a lot of grass. So, you didn't have to inject a lot [00:12:00] of capital. So, that wouldn't lead to dependency on outside forces. That was the idea.
I think it had a lot of merit. Parts of me, especially at that time, I was like, "This is how development should be done. So, I'm going to go out there and study that." Right? That was my dissertation topic. So, unfortunately, it broke apart. It broke apart for different reasons. One reason was that [00:12:30] most of the people on Cheyenne River are cowboys. If you talk about traditional native cultures today, for most people, that is cowboy culture out there on the plains. So, they ran cattle and they couldn't quite understand why 4,000 acres in the middle of the reservation of prime cattle pasture would be turned over to a few thousand, [00:13:00] to about 1,200 buffalo when they could raise cattle there. Right?
So, there was a lot of competition over the land and the resources, of course, which led eventually to the downfall of the buffalo project because it didn't turn enough profits. Right? It's a difficult subject because I had these long discussions [00:13:30] with people where we would sit in the kitchen and I would say, "It's not all about money. There are things that are much more important than money. Really, revitalization of the culture is so important." The people I was talking with would say, and they were Lakota, and they would say, "No, you don't understand. This really is all about money. [00:14:00] So, yeah. Culture's nice, but we need to have money."
I learned a lot in those conversations about the realities that people face and the about how an idealistic view of what people should be doing might not be worth too much for them because they live in a reality where, yeah, they do need some money. So, [00:14:30] I think I learned a lot about economic development and about sustainability. That sustainability cannot just be ecological, but it also has to be economic and also the sacrifices we probably will have to make sooner or later if we want to be sustainable because there's a level of quality of life that we have built [00:15:00] on an unstable trajectory. If we want to be sustainable, one of the things that we will have to do is we will have to give some of that up, and I think that became very clear.
Ben Binversie:
What are some the biggest issues facing Indian Country right now, as we talk before the midterm elections? I know there's been discussion about the voter ID laws and how they disproportionately impact native voters. But what other issues are on Indigenous people's radars?
Sebastian Braun:
Right now, one of the biggest issues that just came up is [00:15:30] that a court in Texas overturned and declared unconstitutional the Indian Child Welfare Act. That is unbelievably huge for Indian Country because the Indian Child Welfare Act is this law that was enacted to basically give sovereignty to tribes over their children so that tribes have preference into where [00:16:00] children are placed in foster care or in adoptions, and if tribes do not agree with the placement, that they can interfere with it and basically bring these children home. Right?
There have been a lot of national interests who have been trying to fight the Indian Child Welfare Act for maybe 20 years or so. But now, a federal judge in Texas [00:16:30] has declared the law to be unconstitutional. I think, well, people will appeal it and so on, but what many people fear is that this will go to Supreme Court now. Right now, people are not convinced that the Supreme Court of the United States will uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Ben Binversie:
That's a scary proposition.
Sebastian Braun:
[00:17:00] That would be devastating in terms of sovereignty for Indian Country, and for many other reasons, not just in terms of sovereignty, right? But potentially devastating in terms of children's welfare, obviously, right? But I think that's on everybody's radar right now.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah.
Sebastian Braun:
Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
So, Elizabeth Warren. That's also been on a lot of people's radar recently-
Sebastian Braun:
Yes. It has been. Yes.
Ben Binversie:
... because she, as some people may know, used a DNA test [00:17:30] to "prove", in quotations, her native ancestry, which received a lot of criticism and is part of a long history of contested ground in native communities about what it means to be native. What was your reaction to Warren's attempt to prove her native identity and what does it maybe reveal about the way we conceive of identity in terms of Native American heritage?
Sebastian Braun:
So, to be honest, my reaction was like, " [00:18:00] Eh." This story has been going on for a while, right? It's been going on at least for three or four years, I think, since somebody unearthed that ... Well, since Elizabeth Warren came to national prominence and specifically unearthed that she might have claimed native identity when many people dispute that. Let's start with the DNA test. No, DNA does [00:18:30] not prove your native identity. No. Because, and there's a very simple reason for that and it is that being, at least officially being American Indian or Native American is not dependent in any way or form on whatever you could test for a DNA test. It is a legal category. It is not a racial category. Right?
That is the case because basically, [00:19:00] what makes you an American Indian in the United States is that you're an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe. It has nothing to do with your culture, nothing to do with your language, nothing to do with your DNA, nothing to do with anything. The only thing that matters is that you are an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe. There are some exceptions to that outside of this where people get the rights to use the Indian health service, some other things like that. But that's the basic definition.
[00:19:30] So, whether Elizabeth Warren has or has not an ancestor, what is it, four or five times removed potentially, yeah, it doesn't change anything about who she is and doesn't change anything about the fact that she, yeah, no, she's not native. All right? But the discussion is, as you said, it's about native identity. Basically, this is a discussion that has been [00:20:00] here forever. Ever since people have tried to narrow down who is native and who is not native, we have had this discussion. So, it ties into a long history of the question of how do we define somebody who is American Indian?
I think Elizabeth Warren and Donald [00:20:30] Trump, of course, because Elizabeth Warren is trying to prove her native identity because he called her Pocahontas, so there's that. I think that is on a different level because it is outsiders trying to discuss who is native and who's not. Unfortunately, there's, of course, also being a long history of that, that in many ways, it is not necessarily, at least on a national level, up [00:21:00] to native communities to decide who is native and who is not. But that conversation is also, has been had for a long time by outsiders who, however, have the power to impose some of their conceptions about this subject onto native communities.
Ben Binversie:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). How do you deal with that in your own work as someone not necessarily ... You are not the [00:21:30] arbiter of who is native and who is not, but as a scholarly voice in these issues, I'm sure the issue comes up. So, how do you deal with that?
Sebastian Braun:
So, if somebody says I'm native, I don't question that. So, if Elizabeth Warren would walk in and say [inaudible 00:21:49] that will never happen, right?
Ben Binversie:
She's actually the next guest on the show.
Sebastian Braun:
Okay. Well, okay. I'm looking forward to meeting her. But if she would [00:22:00] say I'm native, okay. Well, that's your perception of things then. There are lots of people who are not enrolled members of a federally recognized tribe who know for themselves that they are American Indian, right? As you said, it's not my role to be the arbiter. I think whose role it is to be the arbiter is the communities that people claim. Just like somebody who says, "I'm Norwegian," [00:22:30] well, that's wearing a Norwegian sweater and eating lutefisk on syttende mai. Does that make you Norwegian? Well, you find that out when you go to Norway. Right?
Ben Binversie:
Right.
Sebastian Braun:
So, in my own work, I'm trying to ... Let me put it this way. I think that my responsibility as somebody who's engaged in American Indian Studies is to people in communities. It is not to people who claim [00:23:00] that they're native, whether they are or not, but are not embedded in communities. That is my first responsibility to people who live in communities. Now, that can be like if somebody works in urban communities, that's also a community I want to [inaudible 00:23:19]. But I think there are many people that we deal with in academia [00:23:30] who claim ties to communities that they might have never seen or might have seen maybe decades ago.
If I say there are many people, that happens with all kinds of different populations, societies, cultures, right? If you live in exile, you rediscover [00:24:00] ties that you probably never had just to identify yourself. So, it's not like that I reject those claims because I have no basis to do that. But my first responsibility is to look at realities in the communities that I work with.
Ben Binversie:
Makes sense. Can you talk about, in the communities where you hae been, the importance of language as a part of that identity [00:24:30] and efforts for language revitalization that you've maybe been witness to or that you've heard of or seen?
Sebastian Braun:
Yeah. Language is one of those issues, because we just talk about identity, right? So, in many communities, language is a form of proving your identity these days. Right? So, for example, if you look at Lakotas, it's the language that I'm most familiar with, in 1953, [00:25:00] I think, the chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe wrote this article where he ... This was time of termination where the federal government tried to terminate tribes to freedom from federal oversight as they reposed it, which would have also meant, and which meant for many tribes, that social safety net that the federal government provided through different laws would be gone.
[00:25:30] So, tribes around the country were told that they would be terminated. So, Chairman Ducheneaux's concern was how could he prepare the people for a future in which the reservation would no longer be there, is where they would live in mainstream society, where they would have to live without anything that the reservation [00:26:00] provided? So, he says in 1953 that at that time, over 50% of the children on Cheyenne River grew up in homes where the first language they learned in the home was Lakota. Today, I don't know what the percentage is. But I would guess if it's 5%, that's high. Right?
So, over the past 60 years, [00:26:30] we've gone from a situation where first language Lakota speakers went from the majority to an absolute minority. Right? At the same time, however, as people are looking for ways to identify themselves, language is one of those means by which we identify ourselves, right? So, interest in using language to do that has gone up. Now, [00:27:00] revitalization programs, basically what they need to do, revitalize that language. Lakota is one of those native languages that actually has a chance for survival. There are about 20 who have a chance to survive the next 30 years or so. Right? Not more.
What you need to do is you need to have immersion schools. Not just kindergarten. You need to have immersion schools K through 12. Right? [00:27:30] You need to have not just schools because if you look, for example, at the Blackfeet in Montana, I had a student whose sister went to immersion school in Blackfeet. It's one of the model immersion schools in Indian Country. So, she went to immersion school, I think it was elementary and middle school at the time. Then she went to high school, and after four years of high school, well, she wasn't fluent anymore. Right? So, [00:28:00] you need schools, but at the same time, you also need businesses. You need to be able to live your daily life in that language basically. Right?
This is what doomed these languages in the first place. Right? If you think about the challenges that are ahead for doing this, well, who is going to teach the content in immersion schools, for example, [00:28:30] if there are high schools? Because you need teachers who are not only content specialists, but also at the same time, are not just fluent in Lakota, for example, but who also can translate the content into Lakota. Right?
Ben Binversie:
It's a big project.
Sebastian Braun:
It's huge. Right? It's huge. It can be done, right? Look at Israel with Hebrew, right? It can be done. Right? But it needs ton of resources and it needs a [00:29:00] lot of commitment and conviction. There are schools in reservations where the tribe wants to introduce language programs and native parents take their children out of school because they do not want their children to learn that language. That comes out of this ... Right? Here's a larger problem, right?
In the United States, [00:29:30] do we treasure learning other languages or do we have a culture where learning other languages, especially if your first language, knowing other languages, especially if your first language that you learn at home is different from English, is seen as an obstacle to you or to your academic, to your professional career? Because the idea is that it will hold you back. Right? Unfortunately, I think [00:30:00] we're more tending towards the second. Right?
Ben Binversie:
Well, Sebastian, thank you for taking the time to talk to me about these complex issues and I'm looking forward to your talk tonight.
Sebastian Braun:
Sure. Thank you.
Ben Binversie:
Sebastian Braun is the director of the American Indian Studies program at Iowa State University. By the way, the court case with the Indian Child Welfare act that he mentioned, an appeals court heard arguments in March and it might make its way up to the Supreme Court eventually. [00:30:30] We aren't going to be specifically talking about them, but because we're here in Iowa with the Meskwaki settlement about a half hour away, it bears mentioned that the land of this city and campus used to be Meskwaki land. I just think that's important to acknowledge on the show today.
Native Americans are excluded from the dominant historical narratives of this country and working to bring them back front and center is critical. In most history classes, we associate the story of settler colonialism with Northern settlements and westward [00:31:00] expansion. That dominant narrative of progress and American exceptionalism, taming the land and bringing civilization to the West, that story fails to include a lot of voices. But it also largely neglects the role of the South. Gina Caison is an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University who specializes in Southern studies. I asked her what we miss out on by not acknowledging the critical role of the South in the formation of this country and how native peoples are a part of that story.
Gina Caison:
It's important to [00:31:30] remember that when we look at the history of colonialism in the Americas, it does begin in the Caribbean and the Southeast. That is, in fact-
Ben Binversie:
Where it begins.
Gina Caison:
... where first invasion and contact occurs. When we don't look at the Southeast, one of the most important things that we miss, in addition to the importance of Indigenous peoples in the story, as actors and people who are having things happen [00:32:00] to their society, we also miss the history of Spanish colonialism and that Spain was in the Americas long before the English. So, first of all, we have to put into perspective that the story of colonialism is not just an encounter between English people and Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Next to that is the fact that they first English settlement was in fact in present day North Carolina on Roanoke Island and is centered around Jamestown [00:32:30] and Virginia. So, when we think about what our founding narratives are in this country, we really do need to think about what happens in Virginia around the establishment of the Americans, not as some space for religious freedom, but as a space that people came to make money. That moneymaking very quickly [00:33:00] becomes about plantation agriculture.
So, in 1619 when the first ship that's carrying enslaved peoples from Africa and the Caribbean lands in Jamestown, and when you look at across the 1600s, the solidifying of ideas of race and enslavement in Virginia, if we don't understand what's happening in the Southeast with these founding narratives, it's hard for us to understand how we got to the country and [00:33:30] the conflicts we have today. So, we have to pay attention to what happens in the Southeast because it explains a lot of the later story of the Americas as a country that depends a lot on continually a capitalist economy, dependent upon still, and I know this is something people see in the Midwest, agriculture.
Now, two, I think that when we think of that story of settler colonialism as part [00:34:00] of western expansion, indeed, there is the thing of the old Southwest. You read newspapers from the 1800s and when they're talking about the Southwest, they're talking about Alabama and Mississippi as the frontier. They're not really talking about across the Mississippi yet. The late 1700s, early 1800s, the space for settler colonialism is happening and is in Alabama. It's in the section of present day Georgia that is still Cherokee [00:34:30] Nation territory. So, how settlers colonialism starts to refine itself as it tries to gather land for the plantation economy can also tell us about what happens as the system moves west.
Indeed, the presence of slavery in the Southeast, when we start to see western expansion, well, states be added to the union, as states that support enslavement are abolitionist states, [00:35:00] that debate plays out. But we have to understand that settler colonialism proceeds across the continent. It doesn't just become invented once it is in something like present day Iowa.
Ben Binversie:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, do you feel like your area of study in particular, studying the South and Southern native literature, is more important because we have ignored it for so long?
Gina Caison:
Southern studies has, not until very recently, [00:35:30] the past decade, particularly Southern literary studies, paid much attention to native concerns, native land claim, native literature. There is a saying in Southern studies that gets used a lot, which is the sense of place. The thing is, is when we just imagine that places are ephemeral sensory, it allows us to ignore that there is [00:36:00] a material land claim and land theft that matters for how that region came to be. So, Southern studies is usually very obsessed, understandably, with the Civil War. Old South, new South. That's how it just gets divided.
What happens if we realized that the Indian Removal Act and native removal in the Southeast maybe tells us a lot more about how the region takes its shape than the Civil War? The Civil War is a lead-up [00:36:30] that emerges from what happens how Georgia test their right to enact removal. That is a state's rights question that they enact. Is the federal government going to stop us from doing that? The answer is no. You look at South Carolina nullification. Was the federal government going to stop us? We don't want to pay the tariffs.
So, when we get to the Civil War, of course, Confederate states thought it would work. The federal government had stood by while they committed genocide against [00:37:00] Southeastern native peoples. So, why wouldn't they think this other thing's going to work? So, it tells us a lot more about how we got to the Civil War to back up and look at what's happening with Indigenous politics as they're interacting with the states in what we think of as the Southeast.
Ben Binversie:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, your new book, Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies, discusses popular misconceptions about Native American identity in the US South. [00:37:30] What are those misconceptions and how are native peoples portrayed in literature?
Gina Caison:
Well, first, just popular culture, I think there is a large misconception that native people are completely absent from their contemporary region. I teach a lot of fantastic students and they say, "Well, after the 1830s and Indian removal, we never talk about native people again." So, they just think-
Ben Binversie:
They're gone.
Gina Caison:
... they're all gone. They've been gone [00:38:00] for coming up on 200 years. Well, that's just not true. Right? There are lots of native people both in terms of tribal group, as well as individuals of many tribes in the Southeast. So, the first thing is native people are contemporary people in this region who have concerns that we need to pay attention to and respect. The other thing is a little bit of what is colloquially known as the Cherokee princess grandmother. [00:38:30] As it turns out, Cherokee people did not have that type of royalty. So, there were no official princesses or princes. It's never prince. It's always a princess.
Everyone in the Southeast imagines that they have this deep Indigenous heritage, and I don't mean to question anyone's grandmother, but sometimes these are stories, maybe there's some root of truth there, but because there were no Cherokee princesses, no one's grandmother was a Cherokee princess. [00:39:00] It's like if someone from Germany told you that their mother was an American princess, it would make no sense because you're like, "Wait. But that's not even our governmental structure. That's not a thing that one could be."
I have had a colleague, Ben Fry, who is the Cherokee linguist at Chapel Hill. He was telling me that he had heard that unfortunately, even that term, Cherokee princess, emerges from young women who were kidnapped in the region and essentially sold into [00:39:30] sex trade. There would be advertisements for a Cherokee princess.
Ben Binversie:
Wow.
Gina Caison:
So, when we even hear that term, in his words, it should raise some red flags because even if the person doesn't know that that's what they're repeating, it may have a history that we don't really need to replicated as a romantic one. So, I think that you see a lot of non-native people in the South want to attach themselves to this [00:40:00] romantic image of native people, and indeed, sometimes we can think that romantic images are positive ones. But they're still dehumanizing ones, and rather really think about living Southeastern native peoples, Cherokee, Catawba, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, could go on, they want to just have this romantic vanishing Indian stereotype that is gone after removal.
So, I think what I try to do is when [00:40:30] I look at the literature, say, okay, why, for example, is something like the story of the lost colony so popular, why does it get retold, and what ideas is it giving non-native people about the native people who are still right next to them? Usually, that idea is that they are gone and therefore, it is okay to take their land because I refuse to see them as a living human who still has a territorial right or connection.
Ben Binversie:
So, why do you think these misconceptions [00:41:00] matter nowadays for native people still living in the South?
Gina Caison:
I think that unpacking the misconceptions matter for contemporary native people because they don't have to start at ground zero when they're trying to assert, for instance, you look at tribal nations and groups and communities in Louisiana who are fighting against the Atchafalaya Basin Pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline [00:41:30] has had a lot of coverage, and that's important and it should. Native peoples in Louisiana are fighting the same fight.
But because we have a national sort of mythical image of what a native person looks like, it's harder for tribal groups in Louisiana who have different histories and different stories and a different way of looking and being and speaking, a lot of them speak French, they don't fit that media image that sells on the nightly news. It makes the story a [00:42:00] little more complicated. So, if in some way, non-native people can educate themselves about it isn't just a homogenous identity.
There's regional inflection, there are 570+ federally recognized tribes, maybe it allows them to engage with something like the activism happening in native communities in Louisiana against a pipeline and they can get to the meat of it very quickly about how to be good allies because they've had some [00:42:30] of that homogenous pan-Indianness lifted. They don't have to go through that first. They can educate themselves, understand that's not the universal image, and then ask, "Well, how can I help this tribal community in this space that's not getting the same attention and media coverage?"
Ben Binversie:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, what's the story of the lost colony and why is it such a sticking point in the history that we teach and talk about?
Gina Caison:
Well, I think people like the lost colony because [00:43:00] it's supposedly a mystery. Right?
Ben Binversie:
Yeah.
Gina Caison:
There's a lot of pathos because it's the first English settlement and Virginia Dare was this English child who was born and disappears. It happens by chance, I guess, in what becomes North Carolina. So, first of all, there are a lot of people in the South who are attached to the story because they feel like it puts them back on the map in terms of early American celebration. [00:43:30] That is not why I think the story is that important. I don't meant to spoil it for anyone, but here is my conclusion and I'll walk you through the events leading up to it. Right?
There are several settlements. There are several dispatches. Several people come from England are on the island. By the time the famous group that has men, women, and children gets there, there have already been about three failed attempts. I believe [00:44:00] it is Phillip Amadas and Arthur Barlow are two men who do a particularly bad job while they're there. They just have a small dispatch of English soldiers. They have dinner with one group of people. After they have, for all accounts, a very good dinner, they leave, they march away. I assume they're always marching. In the archives, they're always marching and I'm like, "Did you just walk? Because it sounds like maybe you just walked."
They march away [00:44:30] and then they realize that they say the Secotans stole a silver cup from them. So, they, in a rage, march back and burn down the whole village because they say they won't give back the silver cup. Now, this is insane because in all that travel, you're going to lose a cup or two. Right? Is this cup that important to burn a village, kill people, and burn their food stores for the winter? [00:45:00] They're very proud that they've done this. They write it down. It does indeed piss off Eastern Algonquin people in the region because it definitely seems like an overreaction.
The situation for them deteriorates very, very quickly. So, by the time Sir Francis Drake comes up from the Caribbean to see how they're doing, they're like, "We got to get out of here. It's bad. We have essentially pissed off everyone because we're killing them," shocked [00:45:30] that they're pissed, right?
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. Yeah. Surprise, surprise.
Gina Caison:
Surprise, surprise. So, Sir Francis Drake allows them to come on his ship. But he doesn't have a lot of room. So, he dispatches what's listed in the archive as 200 persons cargo, which means these are enslaved people from the Caribbean. We don't know what background they are, but they had been enslaved. That is why they're listed on the ledger as 200 persons cargo. They just get dropped of on Roanoke Island. [00:46:00] All the English leave.
Okay, so what are these 200 people who are from the Caribbean, who've had probably significant experience with the Spanish, and slight experience with the English, who've been enslaved, get dropped off on the island, it's not a big island. You have to imagine that they probably talked in some way or communicated, indeed they wouldn't have spoken the same language, with the Indigenous people who are like, "What are those guys about?" [00:46:30] Those 200 people are never heard from again. They never appear in the archive. But we know they get dropped off.
Fast forward. That's them coming across the ocean. Here come the people that will become the lost colony. They land in a space that the situation is already really messed up. There is no way the Algonquin people are going to be particularly trustworthy because not only do they have their own experiences among various groups in the region, 200 people who had been [00:47:00] enslaved by various European powers have just been dropped off on the island a couple of years before. Indeed, maybe the Roanoke Island with the men, women, and children, maybe they try to repair this relationship. I think that we can know that they were probably not successful.
So, rather than think of this as a lost colony, what we really need to think of it is it's an Algonquin win. It is an act of resistance, and indeed, it [00:47:30] is horrible potentially that these other English people who maybe were only tangentially responsible for the previous violence, they show up at a bad time and they all died. They died. Maybe there are some survivors, maybe people are adopted into other tribes, maybe people were taken as what we essentially might think of as prisoners of war. We can't know that. But we do know they all eventually died. [00:48:00] Right?
Ben Binversie:
That much is true.
Gina Caison:
It's 2018, and instead, when we call this the lost colony, what is invisible in that is this is actually a huge win as a early resistance movement to colonization by Eastern Algonquin people. It's really the win colony, not the lost colony.
Ben Binversie:
Okay. So, you host a podcast of your own called About South, which asks, among other questions, what is the South, is it real, [00:48:30] and what's so special about it? So, in your podcast, have you come upon things that you can say are uniquely Southern, or maybe things that we would be surprised are Southern, or things that have become attributed to Southern culture that maybe shouldn't be?
Gina Caison:
Yeah. I don't know. Do I think anything ... This is an interesting question. Do I think anything is uniquely Southern? I think the idea in believing that something is uniquely Southern-
Ben Binversie:
Is.
Gina Caison:
... is uniquely [00:49:00] Southern. That would be my answer. Indeed, every region has its own mythology, its own sense of family or food. As the very smart Jennie Lightweis-Goff said to me once, every place is particular and no place is exceptional. I think that's the distinction we have to hold onto. Things that I'm sometimes surprised [00:49:30] that have a history in the South that I never knew, a guest in my first season, Scott Heath, who works on music, went through the history of hip hop in New York and he's like, "All these kids who started hip hop in The Bronx, they're all kids of immigrants from other Souths."
So, when we look at the patterns of African American music and culture and hip hop, yeah, [00:50:00] okay, so it happened in New York, and that's not to take anything away from The Bronx or New York, but where did these people come from? They're from the Dominican. They're from the Deep South. Their families move and something happens in that movement. But we don't need to negate how important this continuum between the Southeast United States and the Caribbean with the history of a Black diaspora really is to the cultural production of our contemporary [00:50:30] American popular culture.
Ben Binversie:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, thank you, Gina for taking the time to talk with me and for coming to Grinnell.
Gina Caison:
Yeah. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Ben Binversie:
Gina Caison is an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University. You can find links to her work on our website. Gina and I also talked about S-Town, which is a podcast from the producers of Serial and This American Life. You might have heard of it because it's pretty popular. It's the only podcast that comes even close to the quality of All Things Grinnell. I put a little [00:51:00] snippet of our conversation as a little podcast extra, so give it a listen if you're interested.
I didn't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't listened or bore you if you aren't interested. But I highly recommend listening to S-Town and then to my conversation with Gina. She has some hot takes on the portrayal of the South depicted in the eponymous town of Woodstock, Alabama. Shifting gears a little bit, there's been a bunch of great music coming to campus this semester, and a few [00:51:30] weeks ago, we were treated to a very special guest, Noura Mint Seymali and her band swung by Herrick Chapel all the way from Mauritania. If you don't know where Mauritania is because you failed high school geography or because you're a stereotypical resident of the United States, it's a country on the Northwest coast of Africa.
Mauritania is known as the land of a thousand poets, and they have a deep musical tradition. But it's not as internationally known as some of its neighboring countries. You could be forgiven for not hearing [00:52:00] of Mauritania on the musical scene, as it's historically been overshadowed and largely stayed within the country. But Noura Mint Seymali set out to change that. Noura comes from a long line of Mauritanian musicians known as griot. They are praise singers, poets, and musicians, and they have a special status in the country. Much of the Mauritanian musical tradition is passed on through families, as there is no formal school of music in the country. Noura's father was the first person to notate Moorish music theory [00:52:30] and he basically wrote the book on Mauritanian music, and Noura took the baton from there. (singing).
[00:53:00] She wanted to bring Mauritanian music to places it had never been, and she's done just that. She is Mauritania's foremost musical emissary, by far, the most traveled musician from her country ever. She stopped by Tony Perman's Music in Africa class before her performance to talk a little bit about their music and students were able to ask some questions of Noura and the band. It was fascinating to hear them talk about the structure of Mauritanian music and their vision for what they do, as well as the politics of praise singers in their [00:53:30] country. I'm no musicologist, so I'll let their producer, drummer, manager, and translator, Matthew Tinari, explain a little bit about their music.
Matthew Tinari:
The way that Moorish melody is conceptualized is in this five mode system, which is really fascinating because it's like a whole cyclical kind of concept vs. a linear tradition in the West where you start in one place and you end in another. In Moorish music, there's [00:54:00] five different modes, and within each mode, there are different what they call roots or ways of playing. There's a black way and a white way and there's a spotted way where you mix the two. The music moves in this progression. In a traditional concert scenario, you would start playing in the first mode and you would move successively through the five modes. Once you leave a mode, you don't go [00:54:30] back to it.
Ben Binversie:
Noura met her husband, Jeiche, on the Mauritanian wedding circuit where griot often play. Unlike in the United States, being a wedding singer in Mauritania is actually a big deal and people adore the griot who perform. But Noura and Jeiche wanted to do something different. So, they started a band and experimented with blending traditional music with a modern electronic twist. In addition to singing, Noura plays the ardine, a harp-like instrument only played by Female griot in [00:55:00] Mauritania. Her husband, Jeiche, plays the tidinit, a banjo-like instrument.
They take the first few frets from a traditional guitar and add them in between frets further down the neck of the guitar, creating sounds that really just don't exist in Western music. They performed in Herrick Chapel. As far as we know, her concert here at Grinnell was the very first Mauritanian music performance in Grinnell. A completely unique event, and it truly was. Here's a little taste of their music from the performance. (singing). [00:56:30] That was Noura Mint Seymali performing at Herrick Chapel here [00:57:00] on campus. You can find more of her music on this episode's webpage.
Just a couple quick notes before we go. If you listened to the Off the Field episodes from a while ago, you may remember Lou Moore, the history professor who specializes in the history of sports, race, and gender. Well, he's got his own podcast now, Black Athlete. You can find it on SoundCloud, and there's a link on this episode page. Somewhat related to that, I want to take a second to shout out Adam Dalton from the class of 2016 who [00:57:30] qualified for the Olympic marathon trials in 2020. Dalton is just the second openly gay male identified athlete to qualify. Check out the rest of the story on our website.
With that, we'll wrap up this week's episode. Next time, we're going to talk to John Garrison, associate professor of English here at Grinnell, about his new book, Shakespeare and the Afterlife. Then we'll talk with his Dutch colleague, Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, associate professor [00:58:00] of English literature at the University of Leiden, about his new book, The Literary History of Reconciliation. I know it sounds a little dark, and you're right. It is. Music for today's show comes from Brett Newski, Podington Bear, and Noura Mint Seymali. Thanks to Alec Wood for his help with the Noura Mint Seymali story and Randye Jones for listening for the audio from the concert.
If you'd like to contact the show, email us at podcast@grinnell.edu or check out [00:58:30] our website, grinnell.edu/podcast for more information about the guests from today's show. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. Stay weird, Grinnellians.