Transcripts For CSPAN3 Firearms Trade And Power In Native No

CSPAN3 Firearms Trade And Power In Native North America February 5, 2017

Downstairs, in the gallery, on the west side of the museum, there is a room with a taxidermy bison. If you look to the left of the bison, there are a couple cases. One of them is a case of artifacts related to the battle of the little bighorn. Inside that case, there is a firearm, a springfield, acquired from a native named little moon. You can look at that object and contemplate how it changed hands, the travels that it took prior to that and the ways that might help us think differently about history in the west. Coincidentally, in the west, there is a small macabre basket. Maybe after this talk, you will be able to look at those objects differently. Maybe the objects will help you reflect on the talk differently. I was going to Say Something about trends in historiography, and about how different authors have been rethinking this, but i think it will come up. I will skip that part. It is part of a new wave of history that thinks about native geopolitics differently. In a lot of other histories, violence is a big part of how we rethink. There is violence in these histories, but trade is the theme of todays talk. Thinking about trade is another way that different native will nations and outsiders have boundaries that lay claims to territory. I will introduce one of our speakers. He is kind of a moderator today, but also a participant. His work explores the intersection of continental, trade networks, food pathways, and more across the west. Him him him him him his newest him his newest book traders and raiders, tells the story of the Lower Colorado river, just a few hours east of here. He is now working on a book titled froude frontiers and borderland ecologies in early america which explores the evolution of native and nonnative food systems and north america. He is currently the visiting Research Scholar at uclas center for american cultures. Before ucla he served as the director of the Garden Organization which focused on ecological literacy, in addition to other projects. I will let him introduce our out of town guests. Thank you. [applause] hello, everybody. I want to say what an honor it is to be on stage with these guys. I love your books and i am looking forward to conversation. Josh reed was born and raised in Washington State. He is from the snohomish nation. He is an associate professor of history and native american studies at the university of washington. He got his doctorate at the university of california in davis. His book, this is my country, the Maritime World of the and macabre was couple of in 2013. It was part of the henry broke cloud system. The American Society the western history the American Society for oceanic history. He has received numerous awards. He currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Pacific Northwest quarterly. He is a distinguished speaker for the west history association. His next monograph, the project examines indigenous explores from the 18th century to that 19th century. He is also editing and volume of photographs of American Indian activist. He has a new symposium on indigenous communities and violence. David silverman, who got his phd is aprinceton in 2000 professor of history at George Washington university. His most recent book, thundersticks and the firearms and violent transformation of native america. He is the author of red brethern. Published with cornell in 2010, as well as faith and boundaries, published with cambridge in 2005. He is the coauthor with his wife julie fisher of the biography of an immigrant. A niantik. Of also published with cornell press. His essays have one many awards from the institute of Early American History and culture and a new York Association of history. He is currently writing a history of the colony and the thanksgiving holiday for Bloomsbury Press which will appear in 2020 of the quadracentennial of plymouths founding. The work is aptly titled no thanks. Lets give him and hands a hand. As josh mentioned, i will kick off and moderate. I will ask some questions and hopefully be able to answer some questions as well. We will also have some images that i will pull up from all of our works. I wanted to start with whoever wants to go first. All of our works, the thing today is rethinking the north American West and rethinking native america. One of the ways a lot of the scholarship regencies this is , rethinking borders, frontiers, all the terms that many of us think we know both in Popular Culture and within the academy. These are things that we are starting to rethink by thinking about indigenous Global Economy is trade. All of us work with these concepts and josh uses the term borderlands. Of gun book the concept frontiers. Concepts of the interior world. We can talk about how those terms and how you think about it and how they were employed and how that helps us think about indigenous space in early america. Mr. Reed i came into this project as a trained American West historian and as an environmental historian, in addition to my primary field of American Indian history. When i started think about the macob relationship with the ocean some spatial framework needed to be discussed, examined, and included to that point. I found this borderland framework. Me, unlike many other borderland scholars. At the time i was in grad school i was looking at it in the way , that native peoples were creating this property spaces of power where they were sharing and contesting these spaces and the resources in it. That is where my mind started to take me to seeing an indigenous borderlands. Unlike other scholars, my borderlands were not on the land, but out in the water. A lot of these realizations came from many conversations i had with macaw fisherman. They started telling me stories about going out fishing with their fathers grandfathers and , grandmothers. They would leave early in the morning. Grandma would wake them up. Later that day, they would be out in the middle of the ocean. They would say this is our family fishing spot. The kid would look up and say, how do you know where we are . Starting to unpack those histories that the indigenous knowledge of the space in these marine environments really kind of led me to unpack spatial relations in what at that time was a different way of understanding native power in places. Mr. Silverman i used the term frontier in that formulation gun frontier advisedly. The term frontier has fallen out of favor in Academic Circles because it is ideologically fraught. It is traditionally associated with the east to west sweep of angloAmerican People, and institutions. The term is supposed to foreground indian dispossession. What academics have tended to favor in recent years instead of the term frontier is the term borderland. A short and successful way to define the term borderland is the contact zone. Instead of the area that is for grounding native dispossession. The reason i chose to use the term frontier instead of borderland is i try to draw in academic and popular audiences. My assumption is that most popular audiences would not understand what a borderland was. I tried to use this term to draw in readers, but to disinvest this term frontier, which has become known colloquially as the fword. Of the ideological fray and frame and to try to reorient my readers toward a world in which one cannot assume that angloAmerican Peoples would eventually win the contest for the continent. Likewise i wanted to reorient zones thato frontier did not necessarily moved from east to west. Do you mind putting up the gun frontier map . When i do in my books is trace the spread of guns through native america, and the various ways that native American People revolutionized their lives with firearms. There is no question about it that by and large, guns spread from eastern bases of European Occupation into native america. That is not the only direction in which these guns flowed. The Hudson Bay Company trafficked in guns throughout the canadian arctic and reached a sizable portion of north america, spreading into the canadian artic, plains, the northern part of the planes in the United States and the Rocky Mountain west. Guns unloaded by the french, later on the spanish, later on the United States in new orleans spread hundreds of miles to the west, north, and east. If you turn your attention to the Pacific Northwest, guns sold by new english merchants such as various communities on Vancouver Island, or to a community in the alaskan panhandle, eventually spread from west to east. What ive tried to do is similar to what josh does with the term borderland. To draw readers in and have them exposed to a time in which native people held the power and tended to dictate the terms of interactions, which no one could have predicted. When you take borderlands and also at indigenous much that less so amongst the general public, but borderlands itself almost carries a certain kind of ideological weight as the frontier now. When you add in indigenous borderlands, it creates a different sense of the dimensions of power and who is dictating what those contact zones are, or how they would unfold. I think if i can talk about i guess in conversation with the , way i think of the interior world, which i have a map of here in my book, same idea. The idea of reversing the direction of history, showing multiple nodes, multiple ways of understanding these interactions. But also thinking about it for me was thinking about these into your spaces, which many times are often outside the process of archives. When these native groups show up in the archives, it is usually from a distance, or from a skewed perspective that did not really give them the economic or Political Agency that really existed on the ground. So in many ways im interested about i think of borderlands, or indigenous borderlands and the frontier, im thinking of multiple directions. And that these interior spaces that is where the furs are, this is where the guns are moving. That is where a lot of these Global Commodities are emanating out of into the atlantic and pacific worlds. Repositioning and rethinking that allows us to get a much different sense, a more complex understanding of these movements of power, people, and goods. Dr. Silverman and you raised an important point in your comment. Frontier assumes racial identity. It is a place of contact between white people and indians but for much of the period im studying, there were no indians. Native people did not conceive of themselves as indians. That wasnt a part of their identity. And their contact zones with other Indigenous People were as, if not more, important to them than their relationships with euroamerican powers. I think that perspective, emphasizing intertribal relations, intracommunity relations is one of the ways in all of our work and the field in general is making some serious advances right now. Dr. Reid we could take a quick look at the map that he has put up here. David has mentioned this idea that the frontier, one of the problems that historians oftentimes tease out when they discuss the frontier, or recognize with it, is that it assumes that history, were talking big, capital h history, the grand narrative of the United States, moved east to west. The frontier inexorrably marched all the way west. On one side were indians, the other side were nonnatives typically your white settlers, your pioneers, moving ever westward. And so one of the big pivots in American History and understanding this is was thinking about what it looked like facing east. This was dan richters big intervention. Lets talk about history facing east from indian country. All right, so that flips it around, but what we see here is and its something were all talking about and that our work all engages with. It is not facing east or west, its facing out. What you then start to see are the relationships among various native powers and Indigenous Peoples across north america. You start to get a different perspective on all of the different colonial powers coming in and a different perspective on how power played out in north america from the 17th century on. Where you had many different types of people who were powers. Think, there, i has been a big transformation in American Indian history, that helps us understand some of these larger narratives. That is something that all of our work has been engaging with. Dr. Silverman i wanted to come back to your work in particular because as you know that is the , atlantic world, the pacific rim. The oceanic histories are in some ways not catching up, but there is a whole wave of books that are trying to reimagine some of the maritime spaces. What do you see coming out of oft in terms of in terms the saltwater front tier . Frontier . Dr. Reid what i take away from those is another layer or more examples of indigenous power. But another interesting aspect is this notion of indigenous nobility. A lot of times people work from the assumption that native peoples were in isolated communities, maybe some immediate trade with nearby neighbors occasionally, but there wasnt this idea of vast mobility. We are talking about mobility at the continental level. When you start throwing in ocean spaces, you start to see other types of connections and mobilities that also covered impressive ranges of space. We start to see from nancy shoemakers most recent book about native whalemen from the new england ending up in the pacific. One of her case studies is a native person from the northeast who ends up in new zealand and becomes venerated as a white pioneer there, because he is not me re maori, because the racial classifications there are wildly different. What you start to see when you throw in the atlantic scale or the pacific scale, or the global scale there are many different , works engaging with this. You start to see ways that native people are engaged with the modern world from the very beginning. Oftentimes it is following up on , indigenous priorities and agendas, other preexisting Power Dynamics or networks, and they are tapping into the Global Expansion that comes at this time period. They are taking advantage for their own purposes and own agendas. Dr. Silverman the place that you see this at work in thunder sticks, is in a chapter i wrote about the seminal war in the feis second seminole war second seminole war in the 1830s and 1840s. There is no way that the seminoles shouldve been able to bog down the United States in its longest and most expensive indian war. If you took the money the united and putpent on this war it in todays dollars, it would have run into that many billions of dollars. The seminoles are only 10,000 at 4000 people facing a country of 19 million people. They were not landlocked. The United States controls access north and south of the peninsula. They had an arms trade with cuba and the bahamas, building on diplomatic relationships they had cultivated over the course of generations. The United States could not control the seminole coastline. One of the reasons they were able to wage such a destructive war against the United States is that they were as well armed, if not better armed, than the u. S. Troops fighting against them. That gets of the question about indigenous consumers. Trade used to be perceived as barter. That deemphasized these global networks, the sophistication, and the power that these consumers have. Maybe both of you could speak directly to that work, talk a little bit about thinking of commodities in your new book, maybe we can show some of the images of the guns. A lot of times, even when the early works look at indigenous roles in the early modern world, producers offering goods, or if the consumption of firearms is only negative for only to the detriment of indigenous communities. We could talk about how indigenous consumers come into play, in terms of borderlands and power. Dr. Reid why dont you bring up that one image. That one. So, this is one of john webers watercolors that he made after cooks voyages and it is quite large. The original is in the british library. In the big one, you can see some really interesting detail that i think speak to the level of sophistication of the trade networks that already existed in this part of the world, long before cooks ships sailed in. Sale then, well, they actually had to be rowed in. At the very back of the ship, this is one of these examples where you can see it better on the original. Right here, there is a sailor who is reaching out trading with one of the Indigenous Peoples who has come up from behind the ship, and you have all of these highlevel diplomatic protocols unfolding. One of the first things native out wasneeded to figure who are these newcomers . Or they local outsiders were they local outsiders . Were they distant outsiders, or so far distant that they were from somewhere else . One of the things that help them figure out who they were or these types of diplomatic protocols to figure out precisely what type of people these were. In aehood was understood broader way, in terms of who or what counted as a person, but trade was the other way. To figure out who these people were. What value they had and what good they had. And and operated at different levels. And is operated it operated at different levels. Commoners managing trade on the side, with oth

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