America's other origin story

This episode is being recorded just a couple of days before the 4th of July, and as so many are calling it, America's 250th birthday. And we here at Civics 101 have spent a lot of this year trying to understand when and how America, as we know it was really born. What is our origin story? Why are we like this? And why don't we talk about the empire that was here before the United States? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hannah McCarthy?

  This episode is being recorded just a few days before the 4th of July, and as so many are calling it, America's 250th birthday. And we here at Civics 101 have spent a lot of this year trying to understand when and how America as we know it was really born. What is our origin story? Why are we like this?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  What's the origin of America? And most often, when I hear that story, Native people are left out. We have just been written out of the founding story of the United States. And without us, you actually don't know what happened. You know, without us, that story is wrong in really foundational ways. And so the podcast is telling the true story of the origin and the beginning of the United States.

• 0:52Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Rebecca Nagel.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Ose on aga gohin da wodon chilaka yedlin gaine la. Hi, everyone. My name is Rebecca Nagel, and I'm a citizen of Cherokee Nation. And I am the host of the podcast First America.

• 1:07Hannah McCarthy?

  First America just launched. And if you have not yet, please take a moment right now to go find it, wherever you get your podcasts, follow it, and do not miss an episode. Because Rebecca, along with the help of scholars like Maggie Blackhawk, is going to give you a history lesson you probably have not gotten before.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  I'm Maggie Blackhawk. I'm Fon de lek bandajibway, and I'm the Moses H. Grossman Professor of Law at NYU Law School.

• 1:34Hannah McCarthy?

  If you are someone who has been surprised, confused, or dismayed by things you may have seen our government do, either lately or in your lifetime, part of that could be because you never got the whole story. This is Civics 101. I am Hannah McCarthy, and today we are going to help the scales fall from our eyes.

• 2:11Hannah McCarthy?

  You may already know Rebecca Nagel from her first podcast, This Land, her many articles or her book, By the Fire We Carry. And when she set out to make what would become First America, the goal was a history podcast.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  And I think what I found as a person who started off thinking I was making a history podcast, I read a bunch of books, I talked to a bunch of historians, I've visited historic sites, was how much the past was echoed in the present. And what I discovered was that all of this history that we don't know how to talk about, it's actually why we don't understand what's happening today. You know, as Americans, we don't understand how our country got here because we don't know how it started.

• 3:00Hannah McCarthy?

  What Rebecca found over and over again was that for all of the quote unquote unprecedented things happening in the United States today, there is, as it turns out, plenty of precedent. We just don't talk about it.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  And so, one of the big ideas of the podcast is that a lot of what we're seeing in our political moment, the chaos that we're seeing, the fear that people have around the rise of authoritarianism, a lot of that goes back to what our country did to Native Americans.

• 3:33Hannah McCarthy?

  And you might already have this sense that you know what our country did to Native Americans.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  I think most Americans would agree, you know, with sort of a general statement that, you know, what our country did to Native people is wrong, you know, that it was violent, that was bad, right? But I think where most people stop with that history is that they think that it's only in the past and that it only affects Native Americans. And if there's one thing people learn from my podcast, what I hope that it is, is that what our country did to Native Americans, it affects you because it's foundational to our government. The US would not be what it is today without it.

• 4:24Hannah McCarthy?

  We're going to do this in two parts. First, it's the story that we stopped telling about America, without which we only know the half of it. And second, how and why that story can help you. And yes, this does apply to you today. All right, so what's missing and what happened to it?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I think what's happened in the United States is that we've had the phase of celebrating the colonization of Indigenous people, and then we've had the phase of forgetting. And what we've never had is a reckoning.

• 5:04Hannah McCarthy?

  If you hear "celebrating the colonization of Indigenous people" and think to yourself, "But we don't do that." Well, here's the first history lesson of the day, brought to you by Maggie Blackhawk.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  The historians that actually developed American history at the founding of the discipline in the late 19th century, up until the mid 20th century, and these were both political scientists and historians because the field was pretty blurred together, they understood openly that the work of expansion and with that Native American dispossession and colonization of all sorts of people across the "west" from 1776 onward, the development of what became the United States took an immense amount of work and government work, legal work, as well as the work of individual citizens. It was largely an act of government.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  And those early historians and political scientists in the United States understood that that work shaped the United States government profoundly. They first understood it as in a way that was celebratory.

• 6:16Hannah McCarthy?

  This early way of telling the American story understood that colonization, subjugation, and land acquisition were an integral part of nation building. And to bring the people who were already here, people perceived as literally uncivilized, into the American project of independence. The powers that be created systems to rule over them first.

• 6:41Hannah McCarthy?

  And for quite a while, this was perceived as a good thing.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Seen in this positive light as a way to develop them towards self-government. Because we were taking savages and we needed to administer them from a top-down system to be able to get them towards the ability to self-govern.

• 7:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Put this together and you have got a foundation of American government and American-ness. Take the land, make the country bigger, lord over those who are already there.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Frederick Jackson Turner, father of the frontier thesis, imagined that American character was truly born on the frontier of facing down savagery and surviving it. Actually facing native people whom were declared as somewhat less than human in their savage state and that all of these Europeans, British nationals, became Americans by settling and expanding into the West. And so, not only did these historians and political scientists understand that it shaped the government, but it also, and the Constitution of the United States, but

• 7:55Speaker 02

  literally the Constitution of every American citizen, of the American ethos, was something that was born in this act of American expansion. And so, that history, even just the idea of how did we treat native people specifically, is entirely erased today.

• 8:17Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, what you've got to understand here is that the United States was, for a long time, not queasy or quiet about the project of colonizing.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  So, I'm working on a book right now called Governing Others that actually studies the history of the science of governing non-subject populations, colonial administration, as they called it. And that was a science. Because the United States governed so many people that it would never bring into its polity, there was a whole field of scientific analysis that formed the pillar of the majority of academic disciplines in the United States from their founding and professionalization in the late 19th century into the 20th century.

• 9:04Hannah McCarthy?

  Basically, you need a whole other way of governing people in the country who are not going to be considered citizens of the United States. And you need to pick a method for incorporating more and more land and more and more people. We live in 50 United States today, but we don't spend much time learning about how we actually became 50 states.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  The reality, I believe, is that most members of the public, when they learn US history, they kind of learn a bit about the Louisiana Purchase. You know, there's a reference to expansion. But the reality is that most people, when they think about the founding, even 1776, but definitely 1789, we think that that nation from sea to shining sea sprung whole cloth from that moment. We don't think about, oh, the Constitution was actually only really deliberated over and ratified by a slender minority of state governments and peoples.

• 10:10Hannah McCarthy?

  The same body of law that was created and agreed upon by a small group of elites on the eastern seaboard came to govern the entire massive stretch that would eventually be the United States.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  That process of constructing that sea to shining sea and now overseas vision of the United States was a long process that we have essentially all forgotten because we immediately envision at least the continental United States as something that sprung whole cloth from the founding moments. Because it's not like each of those states had a moment of constitutional deliberation. There wasn't a constitutional amendment. Every single time new lands, peoples, and states were added to that Constitution, bringing everyone into it.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Actually, there was a moment where that could have been possible, where Thomas Jefferson was about to propose that, where John Quincy Adams really wanted to have an amendment process, but out of pragmatism, out of the desire to expand regardless of the constitutional and governmental forms that that expansion took, they rejected it. They did not have that amendment process. So instead, we turned to this top-down, delegated administrative authoritarian, often military-driven forms of incorporation of those lands and peoples outside of those original states.

• 11:37Hannah McCarthy?

  All right. So how do you do that? How do you square liberty with colonization?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  They built institutions to, even after the revolution, develop what was an empire for liberty, to be able to bring representative democracy to certain people. But with the idea that some people can't have those forms of government, even when we have a representative democracy, even the American experiment of a Republican-written constitutional democracy is one in which certain people, Indians, a word that I like to describe in part as a legal status under US law, under the law of nations, that was equivalent in certain respects to slave. These were the people where their governments could not govern independently.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  And they turn instead to this idea that they, Republican constitutional democracy, can just extend their borders and their governing power over these people.

• 12:37Hannah McCarthy?

  So our form of government was used as justification for both taking land and exerting power over the people who had been there for thousands of years. But these people were not brought into this representative government. As the United States government saw it, Native people were no part of "we, the people."

• 13:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Here is Rebecca Nagel again.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  What happened is that the founders then built a government to treat the people that they saw a savage differently, fundamentally differently, not a democracy. And, you know, our government rounded Indigenous people up. You know, our government at different times has told Indigenous people where we could live, where we could travel. There was a time you needed a pass to leave some reservations, what we could eat, what kind of crops we could grow, how we raised our children, if we could even keep or even have children. And so the level of top-down government that Indigenous people have experienced in the United States is pretty profound.

• 13:51Hannah McCarthy?

  And while this may seem utterly at odds with the espoused principles of American democracy, it was actually reflective of what the founders saw happening around the world.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  It's important to remember that what we understand as liberal political philosophy, its foundations were born at a time where most governments were empires. And most of the authors of those liberal political philosophies were themselves colonial administrators, John Locke, John Stuart Mill. So we have folks who are quite literally involved in the administration of colonial government over peoples who are deemed to be not deserving of representative government for a range of reasons. So there's an internal justification for it.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  And so in the place of trying to slot this diversity into representative government, they instead draw limits to where representative government ought to go. And instead, come up with both a legal, ideological, and political doctrine that justifies the extension of certain governments' borders and governing power over certain peoples. Part of the reason, of course, we have the revolution in the first instance, and even then the Constitution, is that British colonists wanted to expand into what even the British Crown was fighting to designate as Indian country.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  They wanted Indian government over certain lands, not just land in terms of property, but Indian sovereignty, Indian government, Indian ways of being, Indian legal systems, tribal constitutions, all of those things stretching over that landmass. And the British colonists did not want that.

• 15:48Hannah McCarthy?

  The British colonists, as in the people who were living here in what would become the United States, they did not want what their homeland was pushing for. Native people who had been here for tens of thousands of years before the colonists arrived to govern themselves.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  You know, when you read the Declaration of Independence, it does start with these beautiful words, these lofty Enlightenment ideals, you know, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the bulk of the document, the body of the document, is a list of grievances against, you know, George III, the King of England. And I kind of think of the Declaration of Independence like a breakup letter, sort of like her founders are breaking up with England, and it's kind of that part of a breakup where you tell the person everything that they did wrong. And a lot of historians think that that list has an order. And when you get to the last grievance, the last complaint, it's about, quote, merciless

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Indian savages. And so, you know, according to our founders, in their own words, the thing that they were most angry about was native people. And I think that fact, for me, when I learned it, was just shocking, I think, in how, how much this history has been erased. Because it's not like you have to go and dig through the archives and Thomas Jefferson's personal papers to find that the founders were mad about Indian affairs. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence, in the most famous document in the United States and perhaps the world.

• 17:34Hannah McCarthy?

  There is a plaque in Itasca State Park in Minnesota that commemorates the acquisition of the Northwest Territory, the land that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and a bit of Minnesota. It calls the Northwest Territory, quote, "the first colony of the United States."

• 17:55Speaker 01

  The Northwest Territory, it's past the same summer that our founding fathers are meeting in Philadelphia to talk about the Constitution. And so you can see these two forms of American government being created at the same time. So at the same time, they're creating this government where there's going to be courts and three branches and a balance of power and voting and representation. They're also creating a form of government that's going to rule at that time. The area is kind of basically like the Great Lakes region. So today it would be like Ohio to Minnesota. It's going to govern that area not through elections, not through representation,

• 18:40Speaker 01

  but through top-down government. And so the leaders there were all appointed. Nobody was elected. It's a very different kind of government than what we think of as American. It's like what American government is supposed to be.

• 18:55Hannah McCarthy?

  When Maggie and Rebecca talk about the treatment and perception of Native people in the US as integral to American government, they really mean integral, constitutional. We say it all the time on Civics 101. The Articles of Confederation did not work out. They wrote a new Constitution, and that is the same one we have today.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  So you can start to see this constitutional moment happening. The US has a chance to think about the problems, the real problems of linguistic, religious, governmental, constitutional diversity, and to stretch its vision of representative government for the first time. And instead of doing that, instead of actually engaging in that act, it chooses. Instead, to turn back to these old tools of empire, including top-down delegated administrative executive-driven, often military-driven government, to try to change those people,

• 19:56Speaker 02

  to change those diverse people into English-speaking Protestant people who might appreciate the original constitution in its original form without changing it. So it was this moment of, does our constitution change for new people? Or do we try to change those people through, often through top-down unrepresentative government and violence to fit our constitution? And we chose the latter, and we kept choosing the latter. And frankly, I think we're still choosing the latter.

• 20:29Hannah McCarthy?

  So if these principles, top-down, unrepresentative, violent, were baked into the law and policy of this country, why don't we talk about it? Or rather, when did we stop talking about it? That's coming up after the break.

• 20:47Nick Capodice?

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• 22:58Hannah McCarthy?

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• 24:15Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. Today I am talking to Rebecca Nagel, author, journalist, and creator of the First America podcast, and Maggie Blackhawk, scholar, author, and teacher of federal Indian law. Before the break, we talked about the would-be forgotten foundations of America, integral and for most of our history, especially in the last 80 years or so, ignored.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Where did it go? And there are many points of cause of its erasure, but you can really pinpoint it to a post-World War II period where the, not only the concerns about colonialism and governing others were at the fore worldwide because you had so many colonies across the globe where European powers had retreated from their colonial administrations of those colonies during World War II because they were under attack themselves. And then they had to, they wanted to go back after the war. And of course,

• 25:19Speaker 02

  you know, it was not well received by the people on the other side. They had enjoyed those periods of independence. But there was also a sense, particularly in the United States, that the, the concerns about colonialism really became something that existed elsewhere.

• 25:41Hannah McCarthy?

  Basically colonization is bad. It happens over there, not here in the United States. In fact, it's fascism, authoritarianism, a very dirty word, especially after 1945.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  So it was deeply connected with the experience of individuals during World War II who were subject to the power of Nazi Germany. One can imagine after the war, top-down authoritarian government was no longer seen as a great place to develop people. It was seen as a place for the grossest forms of violence and mass destruction of individuals, including genocide against Jewish peoples in particular during World War II.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  So the idea of this authoritarian government really just became fascism, rather than a deep science of how do we govern other people, especially people who are a mismatch with the representative governing system that we've set up, we believe. So how do we fix that gap between representative government and represented?

• 26:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Because before World War II, the United States unabashedly believed that problem was solved through top-down administrative forms of government for native peoples.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  After the war, they just didn't talk about it anymore.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  It was just believed to be, ah, well, this is fascism. If we have a population that is seen as too diverse for our government, we just don't deal with it anymore.

• 27:17Hannah McCarthy?

  Maggie says the whole idea of our administrative colonialist government of other people was essentially gestured away. But it didn't go away. The United States continued to govern and still continues today to govern millions of people with the same kind of colonial administration. Consider, for example, places like Puerto Rico and other territories that the US has claimed.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  You can't call it anything else than colonial government today. So running tribal elections, approving tribal codes, approving amendments to tribal constitutions, intervening in the government of Puerto Rico, rejecting the proposed constitutions of the US Virgin Islands, trying to undermine the traditional forms of government in American Samoa. These are areas of government that happen every day within the United States. There are administrative apparatuses to deal with them. There are reams of regulation, full titles of the US Code, hundreds of treaties that are still in force. All of this goes on every single day in the US, yet our science of government and our political histories don't actually recognize this anymore.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  You know, people who celebrated colonial administration thought that they could have, you know, democracy here and authoritarianism over there. And that's just not how it works. You know, it's sort of, it always kind of comes home. And so, I mean, just the reason I think why Indigenous history is erased from the founding story is because it just explodes the whole story. And I think even people who are critical of the founding want to tell a story that our founders built a democracy, right? Like, that feels so fundamental to who we are as a country.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  And what I've learned from Maggie's scholarship is that that's actually only half the story, because they also built an empire.

• 29:22Hannah McCarthy?

  This is just part one of my conversation with Rebecca Nagel and Maggie Blackcock. In part two, we're going to dig deeper into how these roots of American government are still very much growing today, and why understanding that is essential to actually understanding how America works, AKA, the Civics 101 of it all. Stay tuned.

• 29:49Hannah McCarthy?

  This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy. Nick Capodice is my co-host. Rebecca Lavoy is our executive producer. Marina Hinky is our producer, and Dana Cotaldo is our digital producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound and Chris Zabriski. I cannot recommend Rebecca Nagel's new podcast, First America Enough. Consider this episode of Civics 101 a primer for the history she goes on to tell you. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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