Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Jeff Ostler
188 Plays4 years ago
Jeff Ostler is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground and Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.
This conversation delves into the Lakota Sioux, resilience, genocide, the art of teaching, responsibilities in teaching history and the power of place and story.
https://history.uoregon.edu/profile/jostler/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to Something Rather Than Nothing, creator and host Ken Volante, editor and producer, Peter Bauer. Hello, this is Ken Volante. We are on the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast, and I'm really pleased to welcome Jeff Oster, historian
Lakota History and Indigenous Culture
00:00:29
Speaker
and a writer who's written a book that I've just read, The Lakotas in the Black Hills. He's explored questions of the American West, of the United States and its history.
00:00:46
Speaker
And particularly the westward expansion and impacts and culture around indigenous nations that had, you know, existed, you know, through the process and into the 19th, 20th and 21st century. I really appreciate the book, Jeff, and I really appreciate you coming on to the show to share some of your process and thinking and about these historical issues. So welcome to the show, Jeff.
00:01:15
Speaker
Yeah, thank you very much, Ken. I really appreciate the invitation. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.
00:01:22
Speaker
In getting into it, we'll be talking about kind of general issues of how do you write history, how do you create these things, how do you do what you do professionally, but also talk about the content of your historical work, particularly on the Lakota Sioux. Big conceptual question to begin with though, Jeff, is I ask a lot of artists, writers, creators, painters, everyone,
00:01:51
Speaker
a general question at the beginning. And the question is this, were you a creator, artist, create things when you were born?
Writing Challenges and Audience Engagement
00:02:02
Speaker
I thought about that question. And, you know, I think in my early years, I was mainly an imitator, I think. And I guess there's a certain creativity in imitating
00:02:19
Speaker
But, you know, there were things in my environment that I would be exposed to that I would, you know, just try to imitate what other people were doing and what they were good at. Now, as I got a little bit older, I think I became more creative in a sense, an ordinary sense that we would be talking about. And I kind of dabbled. I suppose a lot of young people do dabble
00:02:47
Speaker
and some quite seriously with poetry and writing short stories and things of that sort in my late teens and early 20s. But I wasn't very good at it actually and went on to other things.
00:03:10
Speaker
I think just to start in the discussion initially, one of the things I think I've studied history on my own is a personal interest. And one of the pieces I found really interesting, some comments that I heard from you is kind of writing for different audiences. I've been around, I've studied philosophy at the university and I know
00:03:36
Speaker
You know the the the important the deep dialogue that exists at the university but it can be a dialogue that kind of feels separate from You know somebody in a bookstore in Salem, Oregon picking up a book and say, you know What is this and is it is it accessible to me? So I know in getting into the Lakotas and the Black Hills Published by by penguin you have a massive amount of history a contentious issue and you're trying to speak
00:04:06
Speaker
Generally to you know, somebody's going to pick that up about about these issues What was that process? What was that process like and did it feel just substantively different from? You know trying to maybe popularize or convey the history to a general audience in that type of book. What was your experience? right it was a learning experience to write the Lakotas and the Black Hills and
00:04:35
Speaker
And it had some challenges for me, I'll admit. I was trained in a PhD program at the University of Iowa. I wrote a rather conventional
00:04:49
Speaker
dissertation about political history. I had believed as a graduate student and was taught that one of the objectives was to write clearly. And that, you know, is I think a very valuable kind of baseline for writing history.
00:05:10
Speaker
But it's not always a priority for academic writing. There's some areas in academic writing where I think there's a kind of value placed on a kind of intentional obscurity simply for the sake of it.
00:05:28
Speaker
And I never really liked that and I wasn't trained in that way. So I was trained, I think, to write clearly, but still in a rather academic way and for other academics. And I had written on political history and then I had gotten interested in the history of the Lakota people and particularly their relationship with the United States. And I had written
00:05:56
Speaker
you know, again, another academic book for an academic press called The Plain Sue and US Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. And so I had learned quite a bit about Lakota history and Lakota people doing that book, but it was very academic work, I hope clear, but not for a general audience. So I was approached, you know, by,
00:06:25
Speaker
someone who was coordinating with Viking to write a series of books for a general audience about North American indigenous history.
00:06:37
Speaker
And so there was to be a series. It turned out there were maybe eight or 10 books in this series. And I was approached to do that. But the idea was to write in a different way than I had done, still to be academic, still to be clear, but somehow to write in a way that engaged a general audience more than I had done. So as I say, that was a challenge for me. And I was fortunate to have a good editor at Viking.
00:07:06
Speaker
He knew nothing about the subject. And when I first submitted a manuscript to him, he read it and got back to me and was fairly critical. You know, he said, for example, you know, you're writing about some famous Native Americans that the general public will know about. You're writing about Sitting Bull.
00:07:33
Speaker
Everybody's heard of Sitting Bull. You're writing about crazy horse. Everybody's heard of crazy horse. And you're writing about a landscape. And he said, you know, I went online and looked at some of the places that you're writing about in the Black Hills and around, like Devil's Tower is what the Americans name for it is. And it's kind of an offshoot of the Black Hills in northeastern Wyoming.
00:08:01
Speaker
And, you know, people have been there. It's a national monument. He said, I looked it up. I'd never been there. And these are incredible places. And you need to describe these people need to say something about their lives, who they were. And you need to describe these places.
00:08:24
Speaker
give the reader a sense of I'm here or give the reader a sense of this is how Lakota people felt and understood and lived in this incredible land. And so that was a challenge to me. And, you know, I tried to do it. It was hard. I have never been very good about writing about actual human beings.
00:08:50
Speaker
I'm much better at writing about things like the policies that human beings create or the political wars that they fight, but actual human beings not so much. So I had to really figure out ways to try to do that and then to write about the land. So I don't know how successful that was, but I worked on that.
00:09:12
Speaker
And as I say, I had a good editor, so I would resubmit after a few months of what was for me was difficult work. And then he would say, well, this is better. But and then he would go after me on something else. And we went back and forth a few times. And it is a process when you're working with an editor like that, of course, you respect the person's views.
00:09:38
Speaker
and you respect the time that that person is taking to work with you so closely, but your immediate reaction, or at least my immediate reaction, is to be irritated and annoyed. You know, I wrote this, I think it's great, and you're telling me that it has problems and it still needs work?
00:09:59
Speaker
Well, it's a very common response, I think. But that is my initial response. But then after a day or two, of course, I would realize that he was right and try to go back to it. So I can't remember how many drafts I wrote and rewrote, but it was three or four probably. And I was working with that editor that really helped me learn what
00:10:28
Speaker
new things I had to do to write that book. Yeah, and thank you. I got a sense of the task at hand and I think you lay that out at the beginning and I found it to be just really helpful for my understanding and also
Lakota Sioux Nation and U.S. Expansion
00:10:49
Speaker
It's a strange word to use, but even about what's going on at the time and trying to talk about the general dynamics and to create some awareness of understanding of the Lakota Sioux before and after the historical events that we know about. And that's what I wanted to ask. I know it's a little bit of a difficult question.
00:11:15
Speaker
As I've learned about different indigenous nations and really was surprised at the scope of the Lakota Sioux Nation and the prominence of it to this day and before, but can you set up generally the
00:11:40
Speaker
the dynamic for, you know, United States, whether it be colonialism or encroachment into these lands and the Lakota being in the Black Hills. What's going on in the conflict that many people would know, Wounded Knee and in that history there?
00:12:10
Speaker
When you're doing Lakota in the Black Hills, what's going on in that historical situation, just generally for the listeners? Yeah. Well, there's always, whenever you're dealing with indigenous histories and indigenous nations in relationship to the United States,
00:12:31
Speaker
you know, there's always specific things about any one of these histories, right? So that, you know, you're in Albany, Oregon, I'm in Eugene, Oregon. And we're on Kalapuya territory. And there's some specific things about Kalapuya people. And there's specific things about the settlement of Oregon or the invasion of Oregon, if you want to put it that way.
00:13:01
Speaker
and how the lands of indigenous people where we are are converted into the state of Oregon and into a system of private property and capitalism that we live under.
00:13:18
Speaker
and was emerging in the 1850s when this happened. So there's specific things that occur that we have to talk about. The details will vary. And this is true of the Lakotas as well. I mean, the Lakotas, by the time the United States really wanted to take over their lands in the mid and late 19th century, the Lakotas were a very powerful
00:13:46
Speaker
nation. They controlled a lot of territory, and they also controlled this incredible, and it was the sort of center of their world, both geographically but also cosmologically of the Black Hills. And, you know, I subtitled my book, The Struggle for Sacred Land.
00:14:07
Speaker
I mean, this was sacred land. All indigenous land is sacred land, but it's in this very specific ways that I tried to explain the importance of the Black Hills to the Lakota Nation. So there's those specifics. That having been said though, there is, I think, a very general
00:14:30
Speaker
pattern here. My story is in some ways Lakota-specific, but it also illustrates a very general pattern about relations between the United States and Indigenous people. And in the end, I think it boils down to land.
00:14:48
Speaker
I mean, I think that from the beginning of the United States, and really, if you go to 1776, and why did we have a revolution in the first place? Why did the colonies want to get out from under the thumb of King George and the British Empire was that, you know, the British Empire was placing restrictions on colonists being able to settle and speculate in Western lands. And a lot of the leading
00:15:17
Speaker
Revolutionaries, George Washington would be a very excellent case in point, speculated heavily in Western lands. And they were mad at the British Empire for restricting their ability to secure title to those lands. So, you know, it's all about land from the very beginning.
00:15:38
Speaker
And, you know, the United States, for various reasons, wants native lands. And as, you know, the United States expands West as its empire develops in the West, we have story after story after story of, I think it's a story of theft.
00:15:58
Speaker
The United States wants to make it look like it's occurring with voluntary agreements with native nations ceding their lands, but I don't think that's really what's happening when you actually bore down in the details. I think it's theft.
00:16:16
Speaker
ultimately. And when we come to the Lakotas, many nations have already been dispossessed. And then there's a specific story about how the United States dispossesses Lakotas of most of their lands. And I think, again, it's a story of theft. It has its particular details, which I tried to work out and tell in the book.
00:16:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
Mount Rushmore and Colonial Symbolism
00:16:45
Speaker
I had one of the pieces, I think, for popular thinking or something that I've thought about is Mount Rushmore. And I would have been
00:17:03
Speaker
You know, I when I when I went through, you know public school the one I heard I had two days of indigenous history, you know, probably 1980s in Rhode Island and I learned about the the Nez Perce and I learned about Chief Joseph. Well, Chief Joseph immediately was my hero. I was so deeply like enthralled with those stories and after a couple days that was that was the
00:17:28
Speaker
You know the the end of my education. I think there's a lot of popular notions if you take a look at like mount rushmore rights, uh, you know monument, uh I as I got into that I I could not I I could not understand Um That that that what was done and where it was placed in the images that were used there was such an overt
00:17:57
Speaker
It feels to me like such an overt corruption or this isn't your place. This is who stands here. These are your leaders. And it stands to me as a deep scar just for me looking at it. And I struggle with
00:18:19
Speaker
how we generally view our monuments and this and that, and it's told as a story of perseverance and cutting into the mountain. Mount Rushmore, this stands right there. There's such controversy around this,
00:18:45
Speaker
Was that there just as a as a primary offense or symbol to the peoples or is just a kind of a general manifestation of colonialism ignorance or What have you do you know what i'm asking?
Genocide Narratives and Cultural Resilience
00:19:00
Speaker
Well one way to one way to approach the question can I think might be just to Uh, you know When I I have been to mount rushmore
00:19:14
Speaker
Before I really become interested in Native American history and visited, you know, I was aware of some of the history that I later learned much more about, but I wasn't working in that area. When I started working in this area, then of course I went back to Mount Rushmore a few times.
00:19:42
Speaker
you know, and also Devil's Tower, which is kind of part of the Black Hills too, you know, and also a sacred place to Lakotas and many other nations. And I would see a few native people at these sites, like in the parking lot, I remember in the parking lot of Devil's Tower, seeing, I'm pretty sure Lakotas, they were Native American, a couple,
00:20:12
Speaker
And they were just weeping. And I knew that it was because of how they understood these sites as not only that this was their homelands that had been taken, that they no longer had them, and that they were being overrun by a bunch of tourists and mountain climbers who really didn't care anything.
00:20:36
Speaker
about them and the whole history of what and what they're living through and who knows what this particular couple might have been living through. But you know I know enough about current Lakota life and so on. So it's not just that though, it's also what I think you're getting at with Mount Rushmore in particular is that
00:21:06
Speaker
You know, it's really just a symbol in your face, symbol to Lakota and other indigenous people of a kind of arrogance, an imperial arrogance of white supremacy, right? And, you know, it's been described, I mean, one Lakota described it as if it was the boot of a cavalryman.
00:21:34
Speaker
Stomping right, you know that older history and there it is still right and so Those are those are some of the resonances that I think I've picked up You know Lakota people don't like to go to Mount Rushmore really now they did of course when Trump went there back in You know summer of
00:22:04
Speaker
2020 on July 4th and you know gave a big speech and so on and the South Dakota governor really likes it you know and of course you may remember and your listeners may remember that there were a number of Lakota people who protested Trump's visit and for a period of time blocked one of the access roads for traffic
00:22:30
Speaker
And many of them were arrested and some on felony charges, which had been dropped. And I was watching that protest in real time, and they were saying, this is stolen land. We want this land back. And this was part of this growing movement
00:22:54
Speaker
uh among indigenous people generally uh, you know, there's a hashtag for it hashtag land back Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that. I um It was one of those I think as far as going into um, uh indigenous indigenous, you know history and and we're
00:23:17
Speaker
I think any academic or thinker just really kind of dislikes kind of like lazy thinking or accepting the narrative and it usually takes a radical juncture of being introduced information being that's not really what this thing is or at least
00:23:34
Speaker
It interrogating a force in that to think about that, like if that happened to you. And so it changes the thinking. And of course, as you mentioned, connected to sacred lands, it wasn't just a monument on the side of the highway that's offensive and displays the wrong person. It's a wholesale, this is where it is, here's the mark, and deal with it.
00:24:00
Speaker
I wanted to ask you, and I know this topic is very large, but one of the things that I find around the language in speaking about indigenous issues is one of which you raised in your book about genocide.
00:24:22
Speaker
and how there's a complicated history and the definition that comes out from the UN and historians and others dealing with the meaning of genocide. And one of the dynamics that I've noticed, and tell me maybe if you see it this way, is that
00:24:46
Speaker
I've been introduced by you and delving into more about what genocide is and what the intent is. But at the same time, I think when you hear the word genocide in common speech, we think, eradication, they're gone.
00:25:04
Speaker
Let's tell you what happened. The dynamic is one of facing genocide, dispossession, but also surviving as a culture and having resilience as a culture. And the fact is, when we talk about Lakota Sioux right now, we're not talking about wounded meat, we're talking about a vibrant, existing, and fighting culture for their lands. So my main question is for you, as you talk about both
00:25:35
Speaker
genocide and resilience, is that a dynamic that you're moving back and forth between? Because I think when people hear genocide, they're like, oh, let's hear the history about a gone people. Well, your question, I think, is very important and matters a lot to a lot of current discussions.
00:26:01
Speaker
you know, there are concerns among many indigenous scholars that I know and have talked with and have read about writing a history of genocide for the very reason that you say, because particularly indigenous people in North America are extremely vulnerable to a myth
00:26:31
Speaker
a widespread public notion that they have disappeared and or a very little consequence and and then you know can be available as mascots or something like that but otherwise they're not real people and that they are people you know the only real Indians
00:26:54
Speaker
are those in war bonnets and on horses on the plains in the late 19th century and that they're gone. And that if we talk about genocide, indigenous scholars and activists
00:27:11
Speaker
and ordinary people worry sometimes that it will reinforce those precise notions and I think there's a real sense of, because there's such a long mythology about Indians disappearing and having disappeared, that we have to be extremely cautious.
00:27:33
Speaker
So should we talk about genocide at all? And I think we have to because I do think it's a fact. But how do we do it? And I think that it's a challenge. I've written about this in various venues and always find it a challenge to both balance the fact of genocide with the fact of
00:28:03
Speaker
a term that a lot of scholars use is survivance rather than survival as a kind of way of conveying a sort of active resistance instead of just a kind of passive survival. Resilience is another key word. And so both of those things need to be in play
00:28:27
Speaker
Now, I should also say that although one thinks of genocide generally as meaning the extinction of the people, there's always survivors of genocide.
00:28:45
Speaker
you know there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish people and you know the Holocaust being the sort of paradigmatic genocide and as horrific as the Holocaust was you know of course there were survivors both kind of within the core of what was happening but also elsewhere around the world and so
00:29:10
Speaker
These things always are going to need to be operating together, a sense of both genocide, but also of survival. And the afterlife of genocides and how we think about, okay, a particular genocide in Rwanda is over, or a particular genocide in Guatemala is over, but it lives on.
00:29:40
Speaker
you know, in various ways through trauma, through memory, through trying to write the histories in various ways, through reconciliation, through
00:29:56
Speaker
you know, what's the term I'm looking at, reparations in some cases as well. And, you know, we see that quite dramatically lately in terms of the Canadian residential schools, you know. There's been such a public discourse about the finding of these graves that every, all the survivors of those residential schools knew they were there. And they actually told people about them and they'd say, well, I don't
00:30:26
Speaker
And now they're finding the evidence, you know? And, you know, it's very traumatic, I think, for people who are descendants and survivors. But it goes on and it needs, you know, people want a reckoning about it. Yeah, yeah.
00:30:46
Speaker
I will say, in listening to your comments, it's helped with a more sophisticated and useful idea of genocide and continuing on about the impacts within culture. And I think my thinking was also informed that I had recently read a very long book by Ann Applebaum about Ukraine and the Holomador.
00:31:14
Speaker
and famine. And I was startled after hearing everything that had happened about the nuances of the discussion around is this a genocide.
Creative Teaching Methods in History
00:31:27
Speaker
And I think those are useful, those are very useful discussions.
00:31:32
Speaker
And far more sophisticated than I thought. And I think my natural, like, so I'm an activist in, you know, I work in labor. So sometimes I look to here and say, What is it? Is it this? Okay, since it's that we go ahead there. But I think the considerations are really important because they show a dynamic of genocide rather than just blunt fact that we move on from that it has these complicating
00:31:57
Speaker
factors so I appreciate the work that you've done and also like I said reading about other significant issues of course with Ukraine and famine and God goodness like just what you said that's going on right now right all we're doing many people are looking at the Ukraine in that history of starvation and being used as
00:32:20
Speaker
the food basket for Russia is today as well. Jeff, I wanted to ask you a question of particular interest around the process and the creativity and the thinking that you have
00:32:38
Speaker
because you're a professor. So you've done this research, you have a lot of training, you've changed and developed as an historian, but now you're in front of a classroom and you've got the minds who are interested and signed up for your course. And I know when I've taught, I've always been super excited about maybe the power to talk about things or to engage and to direct.
00:33:06
Speaker
What about the creative aspects as you are working with students and saying, OK, I did this. I read this. You read this book and you read these histories. What about the creative interactive process for you as a lecturer, professor, to convey what has happened in our history? Yeah. Well, some of the work I do in classrooms is pretty conventional.
00:33:37
Speaker
teaching of history which one wouldn't ordinarily think of as particularly, you know, on the creative side of things or on, you know, as art. So students need to learn to analyze documents, you know, and to read them well and to think about them correctly. That's kind of basic work
00:34:07
Speaker
That said, there are things that I've done in classrooms that I think do involve a little bit more of what we think of as creativity in a kind of sense of art. And I think one of the things that has happened with the technology of teaching
00:34:31
Speaker
is just that you can do quite a bit more with visuals than you used to be able to. So when I'm teaching to a group of 150 or 200 students, I'm using much more than I used to high quality visual material that is pretty easy to get and to show. And so then you're thinking a little bit maybe more about
00:34:58
Speaker
How can I use visual material to move students? Because a painting of Wounded Knee, the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, which I write about in the book, you can ask students to analyze those documents.
00:35:21
Speaker
you know, we have accounts by Lakota survivors and that can be moving and you can ask them to analyze those and that is important work to do. But if you then show them a 1950s painting by
00:35:43
Speaker
a Dakota painter named Oscar Howe, who was a quite brilliant painter and is known some, but should be better known. He's on par with the great painters of the world, there's no doubt. He has a very compelling painting of the Wounded Knee Massacre. And he, of course, was born after it. And he did not know about it firsthand. He knew about it
00:36:12
Speaker
partly from reading about it and partly from hearing about it. But, you know, he has an interpretation of it. I think it's as strong a work as Picasso's Guernica, you know, which I've seen as well. And of course that painting moves people. I mean, it's so powerful.
00:36:33
Speaker
And so you can show students that. So in a way, then there's a creativity that I've tried to do of bringing art like that into the classroom. And you can get students to talk about that and other imagery of that sort as well. I also like to use novels in my teaching.
00:37:01
Speaker
I've often felt that having students read novels that are historically situated, novelists can do things that historians really can't do.
00:37:16
Speaker
in the way of getting you to feel and know certain things and have certain kinds of empathies maybe, that historians generally can't quite do. So I've lately been teaching a novel by Louise Erdrich, the Ojibwe novelist who
00:37:42
Speaker
finally recently won the Pulitzer Prize, which I think was overdue. But you know, and she's your listeners, many of them, most of them will know of her and know of her work. But the novel of hers that I've been teaching is The Roundhouse, which is maybe six, seven years old.
00:38:02
Speaker
And it really centers on the issue of rape of Indigenous women, which is very serious and not well enough understood and certainly poorly addressed.
00:38:22
Speaker
major problem. And so it's, you know, a historically based novel, but it gets you, gets students to be able to think about this issue, because they can see through that novel the impact
00:38:40
Speaker
of the rape of a woman on herself, but also on her family and her community and can think through the issues of why we have such a hard time addressing matters of justice in cases of this crime. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.
00:39:09
Speaker
for your answer and kind of taken us in about the art, the visual representations and novels. I'm a lover of novels myself and, you know, connecting that to the history of the, I think in a more of a building empathy, right? It needs to be a good novel and these, you know, those things need to be there, but building empathy or the internal workings of the mind that you might be able to convey by a novel.
00:39:37
Speaker
I had a question I'm really interested in your thoughts about, and it's about writing history.
Historians' and Artists' Responsibility
00:39:45
Speaker
And I viewed, like, you know, if you go to a bookstore in the library and you see a topic, just a regular person, right? And it's like, here's a history, it's in the history section in the history book here, and then they read it. And there's a, I think, a natural deference to the historian who studied this and, like, knows stuff about it.
00:40:07
Speaker
Is there, in writing history, more responsibility than in other types of writing? I think there can be. I haven't written a history book, but is there more responsibility because what you're trying to do is convey the narrative of what occurred? And there's some deference on part of the audience to take what you said occurred. I think that's a very interesting question.
00:40:36
Speaker
I'm not sure I'm going to get the answer right on this. In some ways, yes, maybe, because I think there is an obligation in the discipline of history to be accurate. We've become very sophisticated about thinking about writing history. Nobody really thinks
00:41:04
Speaker
that it's possible to write a totally objective, totally accurate history. Because, you know, we know that we all have subject positions. We all know that historical interpretations are affected by, you know, the political environment and so on by, you know, who we are. And we know that writing history is a form of storytelling. It's a form of narrative and we know
00:41:35
Speaker
whether we're conscious of it or not, that histories tend to be imploded. And so some people write a tragic history, some people write a happy history, some people write an ironic history, and so on. And so we're more sophisticated about thinking about that.
00:41:53
Speaker
But I do think that because there is an obligation, at least most historians, I think, feel this in one way or another to be accurate. They may be uncomfortable with saying, I'm going to tell the truth. But I think there's some obligation to that. And that may not be as operative in other areas. And so
00:42:21
Speaker
one could argue that there's a kind of specific responsibility there. On the other hand, though, I would say that other areas have the same kind of responsibility in a certain way. So just jumping to mind, you know, one thinks of historians as interested in facts. One doesn't really think of painters as interested in facts.
00:42:51
Speaker
But one of the painters that I've found most compelling is the British painter Francis Bacon. And he, to describe his own work, I believe it's his own self description, talked about the brutality of facts.
00:43:13
Speaker
and his figures are trying to get at some fact that is kind of beneath the surface in a certain way about the human body and about human beings.
00:43:28
Speaker
maybe not necessarily a responsibility on his part as an artist that all artists would take up, but he certainly did and wanted to reveal a certain truth. And certainly artists do that, right? So they have a responsibility to truth. They may think of it in different ways as to how they are revealing certain aesthetic truths, certain philosophical truths, and so on. So there would be a responsibility there.
00:43:58
Speaker
Now, if we also are thinking about this in terms of indigenous cultures, histories, representations, and so on,
00:44:09
Speaker
Then I think, you know, so I'm obviously a non-native scholar. And so I come at this as an outsider. So I have certain responsibilities there, I think. And some of this is, I think, a responsibility to write in a way that does not damage or harm the people I'm writing about.
00:44:39
Speaker
And that is a kind of ethical responsibility in this field, I believe. That would mean, for example, that I may not want to write about certain things that a given community might regard as private or sacred or none of my business. It would also mean that I would need to establish relationships with the people themselves, you know.
Respecting Indigenous Perspectives in Research
00:45:07
Speaker
And, you know, I,
00:45:09
Speaker
tried to do that. Maybe I didn't do enough of that, but I certainly did establish relationships with Lakota people as I was doing my work. And the way that that worked for me was kind of just talking to them about ideas I had and checking things out and having them share with me information
00:45:32
Speaker
both oral histories but also just documents, because Lakota people understand they can know history through documents as well as oral histories. I think there's a responsibility there for a historian or for an anthropologist or whoever, an academic. But I also think that anybody who is working with indigenous communities would have to have this same kind of
00:45:58
Speaker
responsibility. So if you were doing a documentary or something, I think, and going into a community, you would need to do this. If you were writing a novel that had, that featured indigenous characters or an indigenous community, I think you wouldn't want to just make stuff up. I think you there is a responsibility on the part of a novelist as an artist,
00:46:25
Speaker
to have some sense of trying to do this ethically in the same way that a historian would have. It would obviously work out in different ways, but I think that same responsibility I would think needs to be there. Others might disagree on that. Yeah. Well, and thank you, thank you for thinking about that. And yeah, you know, expanding it out to say,
00:46:56
Speaker
you know, as in the question of creation. When I asked this question in general, I've asked it different forms of it in a time to time. One way I've asked about responsibility has been with artists and being like, you got a gift, what's your responsibility towards it? And I find it such an interesting area to engage because you have individual, you have everybody's individual autonomy and you have folks from the outside being like, you can do this and you must do it or
00:47:24
Speaker
as an artist or a creator or a writer, you're around people who show a propensity towards that. You got to go in there and help them with that too. So it's always a fascinating area because I think in general, you know, there might be that there, but who's, you know, who is it? And I think you're pointing that here.
00:47:46
Speaker
and attention and kind of ethical discourse and knowledge is kind of the focus for anybody who's going to speak about. Folks, we're speaking with Jeff Osler, Professor of History, University of Oregon.
00:48:05
Speaker
And I've just really enjoyed talking with you, Jeff, and about some really fascinating areas about your work and about the Lakota Sioux people and about politics. There's some really
00:48:22
Speaker
There's some really big topics here that we obviously get into, but one of the things I wanted to say to listeners is that, at least my personal view, is that I've seen
00:48:39
Speaker
scholarship and academic activity and also popular TV shows, cultural shows created by indigenous folks, whether it be independent media, whether it be something that's on NBC, Rutherford Falls, whether it's reservation dogs on FX. One of the questions I've asked, Jeff, is that I've seen maybe more awareness, more political awareness around missing and murdered
00:49:04
Speaker
Indigenous peoples about the Lakota Sioux, about fiction or true narratives around Indigenous life.
Storytelling in Indigenous Cultures
00:49:16
Speaker
Do you think, whether it's within history and popular culture, that we're in a different spot now here in 2022 with how we engage around U.S. history and Indigenous peoples? I do somehow. I'm not quite sure
00:49:34
Speaker
One of the things I'm aware of as a historian is that people historically have never had a very good sense of what was really happening at the time. And we, looking back from 200 years, understand much better what was happening in some ways than the people at the time. Because we're in it. We don't know quite where we are and where we're going.
00:50:04
Speaker
But I said something different in the last few years. And I think I would mark the Standing Rock water protectors trying to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2015-16 as kind of the point where I see
00:50:29
Speaker
And I don't think that triggered everything, but I think it's really a point of reference and I'll bet.
00:50:35
Speaker
historians in 20 or 50 years are going to look back on that as an important event, like we look back on some of the protests of the 1960s with the American Indian movement, but also with civil rights and black power and so on. But I also think culturally, and these things are always related, I think
00:51:01
Speaker
You mentioned Rutherford Falls. I think it's a sign of something, you know, really indigenous produced with indigenous actors and modern and funny in its way. And I haven't seen reservation dogs, but I've heard very good things about it kind of in the same way and need to look at it. And also just take for example, you know,
00:51:31
Speaker
To some extent, this comes out of Black Lives Matter, but very quickly, you know, in the summer of 2020, you know, we saw also the turn to people protesting. This had been going on, you know, with, say, Father Sarah in California and so on. But, you know, we saw, you know, in Minneapolis or in St. Paul, not at all far, you know, from
00:52:01
Speaker
Um, where George Floyd had been murdered, you know, we saw Columbus go down, uh, and, you know, other similar things like that. And, you know, and then, uh, we did see the Washington football team's racist name renamed. And, you know, there'd been a lot of resistance to doing that for a long, long time.
00:52:22
Speaker
So that happened. And a lot of people say, well, that didn't really mean anything. It's very symbolic. So what? But I think something like that shows us that something is changing. Now, I think we're also seeing a lot of backlash to that. Most of it's centering around this backlash to critical race theory that's been demagogued by the right.
00:52:54
Speaker
and resistance to changes in the curriculum and things like that. Fortunately, we don't see much of that in Oregon, gaining much traction, but it is afoot around the country. I do think something has changed in the last few years and there's more awareness and engagement on the part of non-native people. I see it in my classrooms.
00:53:23
Speaker
non-native students are more interested than they've ever been. And they also feel that there are important things that they can learn and need to learn from Indigenous people and communities and histories. And I think climate change matters in that connection, particularly. Because I think a lot of people are saying, you know, the continent was actually in pretty damn good shape.
00:53:51
Speaker
for like tens of thousands of years, right? And now it's not. And it, you know, it's extinction, it's climate change. And so what can we learn from indigenous knowledge? Along these lines, students at University of Oregon are reading Robin Kemmers book, Braiding Sweetgrass this year. You know, she's a Potawatomi scientist.
00:54:20
Speaker
And I believe her formal scientific training is botanist, but she really wants to bring in indigenous knowledge into thinking about ecologies, you know. And I think, you know, in those kinds of areas, environmental studies and so on, people are much more focused on indigenous knowledge than they were.
00:54:44
Speaker
Yeah, and and thank you for bringing in those, you know, different components to consider as part of that. And, you know, when we look at land stewardship ideas of land stewardship over generation over years versus the main dynamic of, you know,
00:55:04
Speaker
kind of expropriation and creating a value and money. It's kind of a big part of the dynamic as we go along. I know there's been a struggle in a lot of spaces for indigenous folks to be in like, okay, you want to know how to take care of the land? Give us a seat at the table. We know some stuff. It's been passed down. We're here.
00:55:30
Speaker
And so I appreciate that because those issues are certainly prominent. OK, before we wrap up, Jeff, I'm going to do like a little bit of a transport here. I'm going to put you into the philosophy department or the big general conceptual department. There's a question I always ask in this show.
00:55:49
Speaker
And and so I'm not sure how far the philosophy department is but just for you One of the things I ask as the prominent Question about everything is why is there something rather than nothing? Yeah, that's that's the name of the podcast I'll start up Ken by saying that
00:56:19
Speaker
I mentioned earlier that I'd kind of a dabble in my teens and early 20s, maybe with writing poetry. And it's sort of embarrassing to think about. But I was also read a lot of philosophy. And I think I might have considered becoming a philosophy major and wound up thinking sort of less about big philosophical questions as I've gone along.
00:56:50
Speaker
That said, I think, you know, my contribution to that now fund, I guess, that you've developed through your podcast with a bunch of different interesting people responding to that challenging question would be, you know, I was kind of wondering about how a Lakota person or an Indigenous person might have answered that.
00:57:18
Speaker
and from what I know. And one way of approaching it might be to say, to think about it in terms of why human beings have to tell stories rather than not. That wouldn't explain the universe, but in some ways it would explain a lot about our experience of the universe.
00:57:44
Speaker
And I'm struck, I'm always struck by, it's a very simple thing that the novelist Anne Scott Mamade said at one time, you know, Mamade is now in his 80s and was the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for Housemate of Dawn. And he's a Kiowa.
00:58:14
Speaker
And he talks about his people, the Kiowas had come through and lived in the Black Hills for a period of time, probably in the late 18th century and early 19th. And Lakota has kind of come in that area a little bit later and they're there, but don't really gain complete control of it at first. And so there's a lot of different nations coming through
00:58:44
Speaker
the Black Hills area, and the Caios were among them. They wind up down in, you know, what becomes Oklahoma. But Mama Day talks about how when the Caios first came into the Black Hills, and when they first saw Devil's Tower, which is, you know, this giant monolith,
00:59:06
Speaker
seven or 800 feet high. He says, and this is the thing that he says, very simple, but I think very profound. He said, when they saw a thing that powerful, they could do nothing else but tell a story about it. They had to somehow. And I think that tells us something about, you know, who we are, and that I don't know why this is, right? But we do, we have to, you know, it's not like they could just say, huh,
00:59:36
Speaker
and go along. They were in the world, and the world told them that they had to say something about the world. And so, you know, the Kai was then made up a story about the creation of this huge, incredibly, overwhelmingly powerful thing. And it was actually
00:59:59
Speaker
I'm not sure the Kiowa version of the story, but the Lakota version of the story, and they're all fairly similar, so there's a lot of exchange. The Lakota version of the story is that there were seven girls who were playing, and they kind of got away from the camp, and a bear started to chase them. And so they ran, and as they did, the land below them rose up, and they were on top of the land,
01:00:29
Speaker
it rose up and the bear kept trying to get them and was clawing at the side of the land as it came up. And if you see Devil's Tower, it has these striations in the, and they look like, yeah, I can see that, a bear clawed there. And then they were lifted up and then they were taken by
01:00:51
Speaker
one of their cultural heroes, fallen star, rescued them and put them up into the sky, right, as stars. And so that's briefly the story, one of the stories, there are various versions that Lakota's told about that. So, Kiowa's story is similar. And Mamade says, you know, they had to tell that. So, that's one way maybe to respond.
01:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, no. Oh my gosh. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, thank you for that. And, um, I, I, I just pointed to the particular, uh, you know, land and that'd be that you have to talk about it. It's something has to come out of it and it has to be a story because it's somehow bigger, bigger than what we can figure out. Yeah. And the story, the stories are,
01:01:49
Speaker
you know, kind of the grounding of creativity, right? You know, and of course in the Black Hills, they're doing pictographs all the time. You can go and see them. You know, a lot of the pictographs show lightning. And, you know, of course we know that all the peoples in recent times where we know something, you know, they all have many, many stories about thunder and lightning.
01:02:18
Speaker
Yeah, you know, so they you know again Yeah, you know that's it's all over the place. Yeah Jeff Before we let you go here deep. Thanks for for for sharing your mind your thinking and You know your flexibility around some pretty big topics in and stuff that you spent your life, you know
01:02:47
Speaker
exploring. The final bit for the listeners and for you is, is there a way folks can find your work or can engage with you or what you do academically or otherwise as far as maybe where to find things, your research, things that you would like to share? Yeah, well thanks for providing that opportunity.
01:03:14
Speaker
My book is still in print. It's been 12 years since it was published, but you can get it through all the usual outlets. For a while, I was buying books on Amazon, and I've kind of repented of that.
01:03:34
Speaker
I've got an arrangement with a local bookseller in Eugene where I send him links from Amazon because it's a convenient way to look up books. I send him links and I say, please order me these five things, and then he does. However people like to acquire books, that book is still out there and it's not that expensive in paperback. I don't know quite what it is. There's used copies around that probably aren't that expensive.
01:04:04
Speaker
You know, I also want to recommend a recent book on Lakota history that some of your listeners may know of because it's gotten quite a bit of attention from a Lakota scholar who's now going to become a professor at University of Minnesota. He'd been in New Mexico. His name is Nick Estes, E-S-T-E-S, and the book is called Our History is the Future.
01:04:35
Speaker
and it's a Lakota history, it's an academic history, but it's also deeply informed by his own experiences growing up Lakota and knowing Lakota history as somebody who grew up, but then studied it in an academic way as well. That book came out in 2019. Yeah, 2019.
01:05:04
Speaker
I've assigned it to my students. It's the kind of book that some of my students have just been blown away by the book. It's the kind of book that could change somebody. You know, you could read a book like that. Like you were saying earlier, before I guess we started, we were having a little conversation before you started the recording where you mentioned that Richard Grinnan's work.
01:05:34
Speaker
And I found his work quite compelling as well when I came across it many, many years ago as well. Our History is the Future is a similar kind of book, I think that, you know, at anyone's age, but I'm thinking particularly of my own student's response to it. Yeah, yeah, thank you. And I love the, you know, the future right in there. I've talked to
01:06:02
Speaker
an artist Steph Littlebird is very interested in indigenous futurism and there's a science fiction fantasy author Rebecca Roanhorse who's you know was up for a Hugo Nebula award of just like there's something very vital very exciting about future oriented
01:06:25
Speaker
Thinking and in computer at so I and that's going on there that that indigenous futures Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's just it's it's exciting stuff Jeff deep pleasure. I thank you from the bottom my heart for coming on to to this show I am very curious. I love to I love to hear and I feel it's a privilege for me to be able to read a
01:06:54
Speaker
Your book and then be able to talk to you about it in a way where I think it's just really helpful for people to hear understand interrogate in times are a changing and so again deep thanks for coming on to something rather than nothing and Gosh on the basis of us talking here I'm not gonna assign you as a resident historian, but I think it would be it'd be nice to
01:07:23
Speaker
to talk again in the future because you know some of these big topics we've broached and again deep thanks Jeff for coming out to the program. Yeah well thank you so much Ken I really enjoyed it it was really got me thinking about some things I haven't thought about so I appreciate it very much. Hey that's for me I declare that's always a good thing and I think we might share that.
01:07:49
Speaker
Thanks so much, Jeff, and best of luck at the UFO. And maybe when I go try to visit my daughter, if I can find time that our schedules sync up, I'll try to look for your office. Maybe we could chat in person sometime. Let's have a cup of coffee or something. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Jeff, and best of luck.
01:08:18
Speaker
This is something rather than nothing.