Prejudice Facing Indigenous People

[Danyelle] Hello everybody. Welcome to Comets Discuss, part of the UT Dallas CometCast Network, where we provide discussions on big, trending topics. For this series, we’re talking about prejudice. While a lot has been happening recently in regards to prejudice, racism and police brutality, this is not a short-term issue. So we’re talking with UT Dallas experts while practicing social distancing to provide you with various perspectives on this topic. I’m Danyelle. Today we’re talking with Dr. David Edmunds about prejudice involving Native American people in the United States. Dr. Edmunds is an emeritus professor of history whose research at UT Dallas focused on the history of Native American people and the history of the American west. While retired from teaching, he continues to write books and serves as a consultant to Native American tribes. Thank you so much for being with us today, Dr. Edmunds. We really appreciate your time.

[Dr. Edmunds] You’re more than welcome. I’m glad that, glad to talk to you.

[Danyelle] Let’s get started off and can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your research? What got you interested in Native American history?

[Dr. Edmunds] What got me interested in this was my family. My family is of native descent on my mother’s side. We’re like a lot of people from Oklahoma – Cherokee – and consequently, although my initial college work was in something else, I was very interested in, in history all of growing up and very interested in the history of tribal people and so when I was working on a term paper or an essay or a research paper in let’s say in American history or political science I usually worked on a Native American subject and although my other work was, my other formal training was in chemistry, the longer I did it the more boring I found labs and chemicals and things of that sort. And I taught high school for a little while and then finally I had an opportunity to walk on at the University of Oklahoma’s graduate program, which was about the only place in the country at that time who had any kind of focus on Native American people, and I stuck. I thought I’ll give it a try and see if I like it and after a semester I thought, oh my gosh, this is great. And so I’ve always really considered myself to be really, really lucky because if i had continued to be a chemist or something of that nature I would have probably written or looked or researched or worked on Native American or tribal history almost as a hobby and so gosh I’m, I have spent my life being paid to do something I would have been doing anyway. People have asked me this question before, obviously — my standard answer is I’m one of the luckiest people in the world and, and have continued to do this all of my life. In fact I’m still writing on a book right now. [Danyelle] Well it certainly sounds like you are living the dream. That’s what you always hear, is like find your passions and pursue work that follows it. So I’m so glad that you had that opportunity. Outside of the manuscript you’re currently working on, what other types of work are you doing now that you are in a well-earned retirement?

[Dr. Edmunds] Well I do a lot of consultation for Native American tribes, tribal governments. Over my career I’ve worked, for example, with filmmakers as kind of a talking head in like documentaries and with museums and also I was the director of the Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library in Chicago for a very short period of time. So that’s the kind of things I’m doing. More recently, however, there have been in the past oh 20 years or so a concerted attempt by certain people or certain organizations in the United States to move against and to… ‘disestablish’ is the term that’s being used legally, or diminish is another term, Native American land bases or reservations and I have worked with tribal governments attempting to defend that, or with the legal firms for that. So did a lot of work in court. We’ve just finished one in Wisconsin about a year ago. I’ve been involved with a court case in Illinois within the past three or four months and also in places like Nebraska, etc. This amounts to local non-Indians attempting to seize part of a reservation and saying, well you’re really not using all of that land so we think it probably should no longer be Native American land and we’re going to use our influence here in this particular state or locality to have it declared non-Indian land. The other one was when it was set up it really wasn’t supposed to be a reservation anyway. And we’ve gone to court and I must say and I’m very proud of this, by gosh, we haven’t been beaten yet.

[Danyelle] What do most people not know about this time period? You know, we’ve heard of the smallpox blankets and the bountiful harvest and those types of stories but what are some other commonly unknown facts?

[Dr. Edmunds] There’s the myth in American history and in the, among the American public that when the Europeans arrived they’re arriving into a uh sort of a virgin wilderness, an area where very few people lived, an area where they quote brought civilization to the new world. And that’s not really true. The new world, the western hemisphere, North and South America, were not an isolated area that were apart from the major flow of world history. But the thing to remember is there had been cities that had emerged here in the United States — Native American cities which were relatively large. There was a city opposite St Louis called Cahokia, a city of mounds, etc, that in the year, the year 1100 was larger than London at the time. But people don’t know that. And the problem is it’s assumed when the people of the Mayflower landed and the Europeans landed, all they encountered were a few Native Americans running around in the woods hunting rabbits with bows and arrows. Well this is not an accurate picture and, my God, I’m not even talking about Mexico. I mean the Mexico City so dazzled the Spaniards that they were completely awed by it. There’s a wonderful quote by one of the conquistadores who came into Mexico saying, “I have been all over the known world. I have seen this, that and so on and so forth. I have never seen a city like this.” I think also there’s another aspect about it. Disease is something you mentioned. It’s phenomenally hard to overestimate. The population of the of Native American population shrinks markedly after these diseases which were of of European uh or old world origin are introduced. Spectacular loss of life. I mean right now we’re in the midst of a pandemic, it’s like, but it’s nothing compared to what happens to tribal people. I’ll give you a classic example. Even this continued well into the 18th or the 19th century. There were some tribes living in northern part of the great plains and South Dakota — the Mandans, Arikara and Hidatsa — these were the people lived in great earth lodges and before the the plague hits them they had a population probably oh six to eight thousand people living there. In the 1830s a steamboat comes up the the Mississippi River and it has some blankets it’s trading and they’ve been used on smallpox victims and the people on the steamboat — give them credit — did not know this I don’t I think, but it’s so devastating that within three years the population, which had been five to six thousand, sinks to about 145. it’s just catastrophic and it also then facilitates things like this. These diseases facilitate the quote conquest, etc, of the area by non-native peoples, by whites, by Europeans, whatever the term one wants to use.

[Danyelle] I wanted to talk a little bit about how the early Native American experiences impacted what Native Americans are living with now. So you mentioned that you’re in court all the time and you guys are fighting for the rights of Native Americans to their, the land that they were promised in these treaties from back, back in the day. Are there any, like, significant parallels between the way that colonists and the early US government treated natives at that time to how Native Americans are being treated now?

[Dr. Edmunds] What has happened is that as the frontier, for lack of a better term, moves further and further west, tribal people are forced out of the good lands and I think that’s important to understand. The good lands are taken by non-Indians, for lack of a better term here. Consequently people are removed from much of the land east of the Mississippi and they are consolidated on something back in the 19th century which is called quote the great American desert, which basically is, we would call it the great plains. The reason that people are removed into Oklahoma — tribal people are removed into Oklahoma — is that whites didn’t want it. And it was seen as a dumping ground then for all the eastern tribes eventually. Now there will be some areas left in the eastern part of the, of the United States that will be left to tribal people, mainly lands in the great lakes, that are not good farmlands — parts of Michigan, parts of Wisconsin are basically left as large reservations quote but they’re up in the northern part. The Seminoles are in Florida but where are they? They’re down in the swamps where whites can’t get at them and where whites don’t want that either. So the point I’m getting at here is that what occurs is that tribal people are put on lands that essentially non-Indians don’t want. Look where the big reservations have been. The Navajo reservation — starkly beautiful. The whites said well, God, there’s nothing out there. We can’t really grow anything out there so let the Navajos have it, okay? Western South Dakota, western parts of Dakotas the Lakota people get this, this is theirs. It’s right in the heart of their lands, anyway, but well quote let them have it. We can’t grow anything out there, etcetera, etcetera, and this goes on and on and on. Oklahoma was originally seen — that, that’s the real irony there. The joke is there wasn’t a lot of people wanted the whites wanted on the on the top of it and nobody really wanted until what did they find was underneath it? Oil! Maybe we should move into that area again. So you have the big Oklahoma land runs. But the point is tribal lands, reservation lands, what has remained tribal land are places that whites have assigned to tribal people because whites originally didn’t want them. Until recently they have found that some of these areas are very rich in minerals, are very rich in resources. Black Mountain for example on the Navajo Reservation — much of its coal so all of a sudden there’s an interest in maybe developing that area. This is a product of all that. So yes, those early American experiences between Native Americans and non-Indian people have any impact today? It does. That’s what we’re doing right now, in some ways. Some of these lands that were set aside and tribal people said, okay well, we’ll take this small area of land. You’re going to take the rest but we want this area. Now the government — not the federal government but local governments — or local people are saying, well, I don’t really think you need all of that land. And tribal people are saying, hey, wait a minute. Yeah you can have that back if you’ll give us back the rest of Wisconsin. So the policies, what has happened then, have had a long-term impact.

[Danyelle] On the topic of those types of conflicts, I know that wars and a lot of physically violent conflicts are over these days. You know, we don’t really hear about those the way that we read about in history books. Outside of this trying to take back native lands, what types of prejudice still exist for Native American people?

[Dr. Edmunds] Prejudice exists in those areas where tribal people are present in sufficient numbers to be seen as a threat. South Dakota, for example, northern Wisconsin, used to be some places in Oklahoma. Oklahoma’s such a unique place. It’s kind of hard to predict that. There’s more prejudice I think towards tribal people in western Oklahoma than there is in eastern Oklahoma but there’s several reasons for that but this goes on and on and on and more recently there’s some prejudice I think due to jealousy. My goodness sakes, the Chickasaws, which are up the road here, from the Dallas-Fort Worth region at Winstar and have been so successful in gaming that I think there’s some jealousy on the part of non-tribal people. Ironically, however I might mention on that, people are always interested in gaming. Statistics show that gaming is shared by non-tribal people. I mean there are more people that are non-Indian employed in the gaming industry and many of the Native American casinos than there are tribal people. It is something where the economic benefit spreads. So there are approximately — and it’s hard to say because people come and go — over 40,000 Native American people live here in the metroplex. You see tribal people, Native American people, Indigenous people, whatever the term one wants to use, every day. But you don’t know it. Why? Because they don’t fit the stereotype that non-Indian people have about tribal people. In other words you think, well that man, that man, is that man Hispanic? Is that woman Asian? Is that person…? Who is that person? Etc. And I have a lot of friends, for example, I have a very good friend who is a Hikariya Apache woman. She married to an attorney, she lives in Washington, D.C. She doesn’t fit the stereotype. Her daughter went to a prep school in one of the suburbs of Washington but she was raised as a very traditional person back in New Mexico. So when her daughter reached maturity she took her daughter back onto the Hikariya reservation to go through the traditional Hikariya Apache passageway for young women and serious ceremonies. Well she’s mistaken very often for being Japanese in, in D.C. When you go into Oklahoma and you go to a pow-wow. What was it? A pow-wow last summer of the citizen band Potawatomi people and when you were watching people there at the at the dances and so on and so forth — many of the citizen band people looked like quote ordinary Oklahomans unquote, as someone said. In other words they did not really appear as the stereotypical Native American person as portrayed in films, etc. And so I think that has an impact as well. But the prejudice will still exist where tribal people are seen as, as a quote threat. I mean I have been called very derogatory names at times with, when I was traveling with people that were more stereotypical looking than I am. So yeah, it exists.

[Danyelle] Is there any type of discrimination within the North Texas area that’s specific to the North Texas area, or is the North Texas area better about this type of discrimination?

[Dr. Edmunds] I think it’s less overt now than it was back in the 70s or 80s. I had people call me “tonto,” things like that, as a joke I mean. And, and the problem was it was mainly ignorance. I don’t think it was with any evil intent. It’s a systemic racism that we have in this society. I think the changing, the changing nature of this society here has changed. I mean my goodness sakes, we have become a melting pot here. Much more so. I’m amazed when I walk, for example, across campus at UTD. I have taught at Berkeley and UCLA, which has phenomenal amount of non-whites. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a campus that is as culturally diverse as, or any more so, than UTD because of the nature of our student body. And I think that’s indicative somewhat of the larger area itself and we’re seeing the political spectrum of this region change somewhat because of that. The real struggle I think — and a successful struggle, I think it’s very successful — for tribal people has been we persist. We persevere. We are part of American society but we are still who we are! That is a key to understanding tribal people today. Tribal people — as are Black people, as are Latino people — are proud of their ancestry. They have no desire to lose their tribal affiliation. And the federal government has always said, oh well, that will happen eventually. It has not happened and it’s not happening now.

[Danyelle] I love that. I love– As a Black person I don’t have, I don’t have any ties to my African tribes cause I don’t know where I came from, but I love, love, love seeing native celebrations cause I just, I love the tie to the culture and maybe it’s because I don’t have it but I love seeing them celebrate and knowing these are the types of celebrations that have happened for generations. It warms my little spirit.

[Dr. Edmunds] Well I must tell you that when I, when I go to tribal meetings or there’s celebrations and so on and so forth and sometimes there’ll be a, a gathering or a homecoming or a tribal or sometimes even a pow-wow and what I really, I’m really not so interested in quite frankly in watching all the fancy dancing with the people jumping around. What I really like to do or to watch — the women dance. Because they dance with shawls. It’s a quiet dance and you will see a mother and a grandmother and a granddaughter and a great grandmother all dancing together and boom boom, boom boom, boom boom. And as one of my friends, Kenneth McIntosh, he’s a Creek man. You will say, you know the sound of the drums is the heartbeat of the Creek Nation. What they’re doing is something that their mother and their grandmother and their great grandmother and their great grandmother on back through generations have done for centuries. It is a real tie into the past and it’s, it is, I, I’m like you — it’s so heartwarming. Because then you’ll see a little, a little girl that’s three or four years old out there doing it and there is such a sense of continuity there and a sense of really identity of who you are and how proud you are of who you are. That is, it is, it’s an emotional thing. I could just sit there and and watch that for hours and it’s, it’s rewarding. Anyway that’s, that’s a personal aside I guess but it, it does offer that I, I think it’s, I think there’s something else, too, that I think is, is really important. I think that unlike a lot of mainstream Americans, Native American history is almost as much a sense of place as it is about time and you’re tied to a particular place, you’re part of that. That’s where you are, you take your identity from place. Most non-tribal people move around a lot. People are born in, let’s say Mississippi and they moved to Dallas and then later on they moved to San Francisco. So very few non-tribal people are born and raised their life, spend their life in an area where where they grew up. That’s not true for many, many, most tribal people. They’re tied to an area. So therefore when people begin to talk about losing the land they have left there’s a real emotional kind of thing. The only, I mean it’s an interesting kind of a, just a different attitude about certain things that uh, that isn’t held by the the majority of um non-Indian people I think.

[Danyelle] So Dr. Edmonds, do you have one final thought you’d like to leave our listeners with?

[Dr. Edmunds] Tribal people have always been here. We’ll always be here and you know we, we persevere and I think that’s super important to know.

[Danyelle] Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate all of the information that you’ve given us, all of the insight into a culture that is definitely too often under the radar. So thanks!

[Dr. Edmunds] You bet. Talk to you later then. [Danyelle] Thanks again to Dr. Edmonds for joining us. As you heard, even in his retirement Dr. David Edmonds continues to provide consulting and write books. He suggested several resources for folks who want to learn more about Native American history in the United States. You can find links to those and other resources in our show notes. And if y’all could do your fellow Comets a favor by rating and reviewing our show on whichever podcasting platform you use, it would be so, so appreciated. Thanks for joining us. Comets Discuss is brought to you by the UT Dallas Office of Communications. A special thanks to senior lecturer Roxanne Minnish for our music. Be sure to check out our other shows at utdallas.edu/cometcast. For the most up-to-date news at UT Dallas visit the university’s News Center page at utdallas.edu/news. Take care of yourselves, Comets.