Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 910 ｜ Are We on Stolen Land？｜ Guest： Dr. Jeff Fynn-Paul

00:00:00.000 Are we living on stolen land? Is Thanksgiving racist? Dr. Jeff Finn Paul, a historian who

00:00:09.920 recently wrote a book about this subject, is here to dispel some myths that many young people today

00:00:17.000 are learning about the history of the United States and the discovery of America. This episode

00:00:23.580 is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout.

00:00:27.800 That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.

00:00:39.420 Dr. Finn Paul, thank you so much for taking the time to join Relatable. I think I saw an email come

00:00:45.460 across in my inbox with your book title. Maybe someone pitched you for the show and we get a lot

00:00:53.080 of pitches, but I came across this one and I was like, oh, I definitely want to talk to him. This

00:00:58.660 is a fascinating subject for a book, Not Stolen, the truth about European colonialism in the New World.

00:01:05.260 So just go for it. Tell us, what is this book and why did you write it?

00:01:09.960 Yeah, well, it all started several years ago when I kind of got fed up with what was going on in

00:01:17.240 academia and I said, it's time to find a way to celebrate indigenous cultures without also 1.00

00:01:25.560 trashing Europe. So everybody's gotten into this weird binary where if you say something nice about

00:01:31.380 indigenous people, you have to trash Europe. And I thought, why not do both? Let's tell a history 1.00

00:01:37.920 where we can celebrate all of those great things about indigenous culture without making Europe look

00:01:45.220 as bad as possible. Okay. So tell us what is the truth then? Because let's go along with that

00:01:51.620 narrative that I think that we hear a lot now. I mean, as you know, we can't have Columbus Day

00:01:57.040 anymore. It has to be indigenous people's day. And we have kind of heard in the past several years

00:02:05.540 that it is wrong to even say that there was a discovery of America that it was exclusively the

00:02:14.380 exploitation of indigenous people. We disrupted their very peaceful harmony that they lived in.

00:02:20.840 We came and we brought disease. We brought violence. Yes, we brought technology, but it's been a net

00:02:25.940 negative for the world that the United States was eventually established. So what is the truth?

00:02:33.320 Like, are we on stolen land? Is America completely illegitimate because of that?

00:02:37.580 Well, that's just it. I think that the truth is that it's complicated. And that's really a big part

00:02:44.960 of what I want to say in this book is things are never one sided. So, yes, there were treaties that

00:02:52.260 were broken. There were certainly massacres that were perpetrated by European Americans. But there were

00:02:59.100 also many European Americans who dedicated their lives and careers to trying to ameliorate to make

00:03:05.320 better the lives of natives. And, you know, for many decades throughout our history,

00:03:11.880 there were peaceful relations between the Europeans and the natives in a way that most people don't

00:03:17.020 understand. Things like smallpox blankets, which everyone has heard of, it turns out that's almost

00:03:22.920 a total fabrication. The numbers of natives who are massacred are far fewer than anybody would guess.

00:03:30.040 So there's just so many fundamentals that that nobody hears about anymore in the media.

00:03:35.940 And I thought it was time to just bring some of those things back up to the surface.

00:03:40.180 So smallpox blankets, I don't think actually everyone knows what that is. That is the idea

00:03:44.940 that basically natives were purposely infected with smallpox?

00:03:49.120 Yeah, well, it turns out that something like 90 or 95 percent of all the casualties in the new world

00:03:56.240 were caused by disease, not by deliberate European massacres. But then what that means is a lot of

00:04:02.800 people have tried to say, OK, well, maybe they did die of disease, but they died because Europeans were 1.00

00:04:08.460 intentionally spreading disease through infected blankets and clothing. Well, it turns out that there

00:04:16.480 is only one chronicled example of European-Americans trying to spread disease through a smallpox blanket

00:04:25.800 in all of American history, one time. And yet most students think that that's what happened every day.

00:04:32.640 Do you attribute this kind of misunderstanding and this negative interpretation of

00:04:50.520 this portion of history to the people's history of the United States, which is, you know, that left-wing,

00:04:58.780 I don't even know if I would call it a textbook, but it's kind of been used as a textbook in a lot

00:05:03.200 of schools and a lot of colleges, that a lot of progressive students, they read and they realize,

00:05:08.800 wow, the history of the United States has exclusively and unconditionally been oppression and,

00:05:16.000 you know, discrimination and things like that. Do you attribute some of the myths that you bust in

00:05:21.680 this book to that book? Yeah, you know, I mean, so Howard Zinn, that dates from the late 1970s,

00:05:28.680 people's history. And I mean, the title says it all. It was intended as a Marxist rebuttal to the

00:05:35.840 standard story of American history. Basically, Marxists on campus were angry that American history

00:05:40.980 was making capitalism look too good. And so, yeah, unfortunately, with the rise of social media,

00:05:48.160 I think Zinn's book has gotten more and more popular until almost everybody now is assuming that

00:05:53.920 that is the standard history of America. When, of course, for many decades, most historians thought

00:06:00.720 of Zinn as kind of a wild-eyed radical. But here we are, suddenly things have shifted so far to the

00:06:06.400 left that he's being considered gospel. Right. And I think that he has actually admitted in the past

00:06:13.800 that it was more of a narrative that he was, or a point that he was trying to make that, look,

00:06:19.760 this could be another perspective to offer to the history that we have accepted. It's not

00:06:25.660 necessarily historical fact that he is relaying in all of the different pages that he wrote. He is

00:06:32.580 trying to make a particular point about the downside, as he would say, to capitalism and Western

00:06:38.740 civilization. I mean, that's propaganda. It's propaganda is what it is.

00:06:43.220 Exactly. Well, I mean, for many decades, you know, maybe people erred a little bit too much on the side

00:06:49.120 of, you know, rah-rah versions of American history in the earlier 20th century. And so, sure, it was

00:06:55.820 good for some people to come along and say, hey, this is a genuine critique. You could look at things

00:07:01.400 this way. I have no problem with Noam Chomsky coming up with critiques of American history and maybe

00:07:08.220 making people think about things a little bit that they might not otherwise would have. However,

00:07:13.320 it needs to be understood that these things are indeed radical critiques. These are meant to be

00:07:18.240 fringe interpretations. They make you think, but they're not supposed to replace the standard

00:07:24.320 narrative about the Constitution, about George Washington and all that good stuff.

00:07:28.620 Yeah. Let's talk about Christopher Columbus, because we hear that he was simply a mass murder and that

00:07:37.600 there is no reason to celebrate him at all. And so there should be no honoring. You shouldn't get

00:07:44.620 off work. It's Indigenous People's Day. What's the truth about Christopher Columbus? 0.96

00:07:49.680 Well, I mean, the main thing is, is the numbers that have been attributed to Columbus. I mean,

00:07:54.100 there's websites now that are saying that 8 million people died on the island where he first landed,

00:08:00.180 Hispaniolo, which is now Santo Domingo in Haiti. People were saying 8 million people died there. And it

00:08:06.560 turns out that number was made up out of thin air by a couple of Berkeley professors in the 1970s,

00:08:12.640 and almost no specialists have agreed with it. Even Zinn says that that island maybe had 200,000 people

00:08:18.980 on it instead of 8 million. So it turns out a recent genetic study has now found that in fact,

00:08:25.240 only about 40,000 people were living on that island. And that's almost the exact number, which was counted

00:08:31.860 by a Spanish census 50 years after the Spanish arrived. In other words, people were thinking

00:08:38.480 that the island's population had dropped by nearly 8 million people, when in fact, it now looks as if

00:08:44.520 most of those people had simply interbred with the Spanish, and the Spanish had hardly killed any at

00:08:49.660 all compared to what people used to think. So it's basically just exaggerated. You're not saying that

00:08:54.420 he was a perfect person, that the whole arrival was, you know, rainbows, but it's been hyperbolized over

00:09:01.780 the years. And it's crazy how distorted the figures have been. And so you get the same thing with

00:09:10.100 Columbus and slavery. Yeah, after one war, he actually did load up a couple hundred people on

00:09:16.140 the ship, but then the Spanish ransomed them and actually sent them back and forbade Columbus from

00:09:20.500 doing that ever again. So, you know, the idea that he was this mass slaver and inaugurator of the

00:09:25.900 Atlantic slave system is also greatly exaggerated. He was practically forced to do this by his

00:09:31.660 creditors at one point. So in other words, things are much messier if you actually look into what's

00:09:37.760 going on. Most of the myths we're being told in the news stories are, again, mostly made up.

00:09:43.760 Yeah, the truth is people are really complicated. The founders were complicated. A lot of American

00:09:49.820 history heroes that people on either the left or the right would admire are complicated. The truth

00:09:57.800 is that they're not all, you know, completely and totally virtuous. There are even things that

00:10:04.040 Martin Luther King Jr., someone that we would all say did a lot of good that he said and did that I

00:10:08.780 would not agree with, that I would not say is moral. But why do you think people are so reticent

00:10:13.480 to simply rest in the fact that history is complicated? Historical figures are complicated.

00:10:21.300 It's not just this nice and neat dichotomy of oppressed versus oppressor or black versus white 0.82

00:10:27.660 or settler versus Native American. It's really messy. Why do you think people just resist that reality?

00:10:35.060 Well, gosh, you know, I mean, there's something called the Dakota 38. And this is held against

00:10:41.580 Abraham Lincoln, where he ordered the execution of 38 natives after an uprising in the Civil War.

00:10:48.220 It turns out he had actually pardoned over 90 percent of the people who were originally supposed

00:10:52.580 to be hung. So Lincoln is blamed for this when he actually pardoned most of them on humanitarian

00:10:58.040 grounds. So yes, this complication, we see it all the time in history. And that's why using history

00:11:05.960 as a sort of political stomping ground or a social media stomping ground is usually wrong. But I'm afraid

00:11:15.300 that since social media, people have really wanted to pick teams. And they're trying to turn history

00:11:21.360 into a sort of spectator sport where everything the other team does is bad. Everything our team does is

00:11:27.220 good. But as you say, if you look at it that way, well, pretty soon our students or our kids are going

00:11:34.080 to grow up thinking that the entire world has been black and white. There's no gray areas. It makes it

00:11:40.420 very difficult to compromise, for example.

00:11:42.300 Now, Thanksgiving specifically, there are even people who say Thanksgiving, the history of Thanksgiving

00:11:59.820 is racist. And our thought of Thanksgiving as pilgrims and Native Americans coming together

00:12:07.460 and sharing a feast. We hear that that's just all wrong. That in itself is propaganda. It really is

00:12:12.480 yet another story of American colonial oppression. So what's the truth about Thanksgiving?

00:12:19.340 Yeah, I know. I mean, so yes, it was whitewashed to some degree in the 19th and early 20th century.

00:12:26.320 It was a story told to schoolchildren. Again, very few of these were natives. And so it was told

00:12:31.760 to the majority of children. But when you dig back in the history again, it's just as wrong to say that

00:12:40.680 that this is totally racist or totally anti-Native American as it is to say that it was all flowers and

00:12:47.780 wine. So you go back and you see that there were truces made with Native groups. Natives were 0.99

00:12:55.380 intentionally coming to live with the pilgrims or near the pilgrims because they gave them lots of useful

00:13:00.900 things like metal tools, for example, things that they really found useful. And one of the treaties

00:13:07.600 with the local Indian tribes lasted for 50 years after the first Thanksgiving. I mean, by most 0.93

00:13:14.840 by most measures in world history, a 50-year truce is a pretty serious truce. And also the idea of

00:13:22.920 Thanksgiving, Native tribes actually celebrated a version of Thanksgiving themselves. And so it was

00:13:29.520 originally celebrated in the 1620s as a way to bring both people together. So the idea that this was

00:13:36.460 only about oppression or race or warfare has been greatly exaggerated. And there's actually a lot to

00:13:42.880 celebrate if anyone wanted to find a positive reason to celebrate Thanksgiving.

00:13:48.080 Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about that? About the, I know that you just mentioned a lot of the

00:13:53.240 things that brought the two groups together, but is there any more about the relations between Native

00:14:00.120 Americans and pilgrims that we may not know that we can look back and be thankful for?

00:14:05.420 Yeah. Well, you know, one thing is that people in the 17th century weren't really racist in the way

00:14:11.120 that we think. So people in the 17th century thought that skin color depended on latitude. And so they

00:14:16.940 expected to find people lighter skin further north and darker skin further south. So the concept of race

00:14:23.240 didn't really exist. And we find that with Pocahontas and with many other natives in the early

00:14:31.680 colonial period, we find Europeans trying to marry the daughters of Indian chiefs because they thought

00:14:39.340 that this would make them noble. This would ennoble them. And remember in the 17th century in Europe,

00:14:44.720 being a nobleman or noblewoman was the thing that everybody aspired to.

00:14:49.420 Right. So they thought that by marrying, say, Pocahontas, who was the daughter of a chief,

00:14:55.340 this would actually raise their social status. So again, the idea that people look down on Native

00:15:02.600 Americans or saw them as a group which should be, you know, exterminated or something like that.

00:15:08.420 Actually, when you look at it, they were thinking these people can actually raise my social status.

00:15:14.060 The nobles of the Native Americans are higher status than most Europeans are. 0.77

00:15:19.900 So that flies entirely in the face of the idea that these people were racist or exploitative.

00:15:25.820 Right. They didn't have any concept of white supremacy. They might have thought these people

00:15:30.100 are different, but they, you know, respected their nobility as nobility. They didn't see themselves

00:15:36.840 as better just because of the melanin count that they had in their skin.

00:15:40.300 Absolutely not.

00:15:42.920 Yeah. OK, another question that I have, because we hear this a lot. Well, actually,

00:15:47.500 let me ask this first and then I'll go into the reparations question. So the specifically the claim

00:15:53.260 about stolen land that America lives on or that we as Americans live on stolen land and therefore

00:16:00.640 we don't have any right to sovereignty. We don't have any right to close our borders. We don't have

00:16:05.240 any right to call this ours. And we owe Native Americans reparations. We hear this phrase land

00:16:11.840 back. OK, we should give them their land back, distribute all of our wealth and resources because

00:16:15.680 this was their land to begin with. What do we do with a claim like that?

00:16:20.700 Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, we need to remember that for a very long time, and this is

00:16:25.360 accepted by almost every mainstream historian, for a very long time, Europeans were not attempting to

00:16:31.440 take over this continent at all. And even by the 1820s and 1830s, they barely had a foothold in North

00:16:37.940 America. They only were living along the East Coast. Most of that land along the East Coast had

00:16:44.880 actually been purchased over centuries of slow development of a property market. For example,

00:16:52.100 in Massachusetts all through the 17th century, we see Native Americans selling their land voluntarily

00:16:59.760 to Europeans, often as their tribe shrank in number due to disease, because the Europeans offered them

00:17:07.260 gunpowder, shirts, metal tools, things that they absolutely wanted. And the natives would often trade 0.99

00:17:13.180 away scrub land that they no longer needed. So in fact, most of the land of the original 13 colonies was

00:17:19.320 actually purchased in a land market, sometimes conquered in war, which can be seen as a violation

00:17:25.420 of a treaty and was certainly legal by the prospects of the time. And then most of the land, most of North

00:17:36.960 America actually flipped from Native control to European control over only a 50-year period, right in 0.94

00:17:44.020 the middle of the 19th century. So most generations of Americans who have lived before and after that,

00:17:50.180 you know, they weren't even involved in theft of land in any stretch of the imagination.

00:17:56.780 And then that middle period of the 19th century, we saw most of that land was held by hunter-gatherers

00:18:04.160 who didn't really have a definite title to the land in the center of the United States anyway.

00:18:09.280 There were often only 2,000 or 3,000 natives living in an area the size of a U.S. state,

00:18:17.020 and they often roamed around. So these groups didn't really have any more claim to the land

00:18:22.320 than anybody else did. And besides, by that point, hunting and gathering was gone for good,

00:18:29.140 because with the introduction of firearms, people were going to have to settle down and farm,

00:18:34.040 and they didn't need nearly as much land as they did for hunting and gathering. So between all of

00:18:39.840 these things, the idea of the idea of stolen ground is, again, an exaggeration and very hard to justify

00:18:47.560 using. Right. And I guess you could say in some way, the entire world is basically stolen land. I mean,

00:18:55.440 you could say that we've all been on the side of the conquered and the conqueror at some point in our

00:19:01.740 lineage. And we've all been in our lineage, probably our ancestors have been on the side of the

00:19:08.980 enslavers or the enslaved, the oppressed or the oppressors. As you said, history is very complicated.

00:19:15.220 It's not this neat and clean binary. 0.87

00:19:29.620 Is it true that the U.S. government killed Buffalo in order to starve Native Americans?

00:19:35.660 Yeah, this is another one of those rumors that, you know, everybody has heard of and they think,

00:19:41.040 oh, they're definitely guilty of this. Well, then you look at it and you realize that only about 10%

00:19:46.100 of Native Americans were dependent on the buffalo when the great slaughter happened in the 1870s.

00:19:51.320 So we're talking, you know, if we're trying to starve the Native Americans, that's a silly way

00:19:55.700 to do it because only 10% of them are even going to be affected. Second of all, the real reason the

00:20:00.780 buffalo were slaughtered is there were advances in firearms during the 1870s. So within a few year

00:20:06.500 period, it became much easier to hunt buffalo. This actually took everyone by surprise. And

00:20:12.560 the U.S. Congress actually passed a law against the slaughter of buffalo in the early 1870s. It

00:20:19.700 got vetoed by Grant, but still the legislative will was there. Another thing people don't realize is

00:20:25.300 about a quarter or a third of those buffalo who were killed in the great slaughter were actually

00:20:29.180 killed by Native American hunters. So again, this whole thing, when you dig into it, it's astonishing 0.98

00:20:35.560 how untrue it is.

00:20:38.220 And about this issue of reparations for all of these injustices that people say have occurred,

00:20:44.960 Native Americans, I mean, have received forms of reparations, right, throughout history?

00:20:52.460 Yes, there's been lots of reparations going on from the beginning, actually. I mean, even in the

00:20:58.440 Trail of Tears, most of the people affected were offered a farmstead and several hundred dollars

00:21:04.780 cash, which was the equivalent of several years' salary. This would have set them up for life.

00:21:10.220 So usually the U.S. government has been compensating

00:21:13.100 all along, more than people realize. And there were forms of welfare that were adopted for various

00:21:19.800 Native American groups already in the 19th century, long before the average American had it.

00:21:25.100 And to this day, we have agencies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education,

00:21:32.720 which are paying out money to Native Americans. So that compared to African Americans, I think Native 0.87

00:21:39.480 Americans are getting something like double the amount of money from the government per person,

00:21:44.440 as African Americans are today. So they're already today, you know, the most compensated minority 0.96

00:21:51.440 group by a long shot. Yeah. But of course, nobody really wants you to know that. So it's pretty

00:21:55.940 hard to find those figures online. Yeah. And, you know, last year, right before Thanksgiving,

00:22:00.700 we had an author, Naomi Riley, on. I'm sure you've heard of her. And she wrote a book about the reality 0.51

00:22:06.960 of these reservations, that not only have they been given so many reparations, but also a lot of

00:22:15.020 immunity from the law. There is a different law, set of laws or set of policies that really protects a lot

00:22:22.460 of these Native Americans that live on these reservations. And unfortunately, it hasn't led to

00:22:27.420 freedom and prosperity for the people that live there. It's actually led to rampant, rampant abuse.

00:22:34.360 There's child abuse that is absolutely pervasive in many of these reservations,

00:22:38.620 because they are protected in a different way. And that's an unfortunate form of so-called

00:22:47.080 reparations that they really fought for. But it's actually concluded in a lot of destruction and

00:22:55.380 despair, especially for women and children on these reservations. So this, to me, is just another

00:23:01.020 example of how social justice and left-wing revolutions have maybe good-sounding,

00:23:08.320 reinstated intentions, but end badly. Exactly. It's not always the best thing. You know,

00:23:15.000 they started giving more freedom to individual reservations in the 1960s and 70s during the

00:23:20.840 hippie movement, basically. And as you say, kind of absolving people from normal federal laws and other

00:23:27.700 laws that have become standard. Well, I think that something like 70% of Native youth have admitted to

00:23:34.660 never wearing a seatbelt. And they have the highest incidence of automobile accidents of fatalities of

00:23:40.320 any group, of course. So and also, you're right, in Canada, there's so many reservations where

00:23:46.500 violence against women has become practically an epidemic. And yet people are sort of, you know,

00:23:54.860 they have immunity from normal laws, and it makes it a lot easier to get away with these things.

00:23:59.600 Yep. Yep. Tell me a little bit about the Conquistadors and Cortez. That's another group that

00:24:07.580 obviously we hear only about their violence. So what did the groups then, though, think of them?

00:24:14.240 Yeah, exactly. I mean, I wanted to bring in the Mexican angle because something like 50% of all

00:24:21.240 natives in the New World were living in Central Mexico. So the reason why most Mexicans today are 1.00

00:24:27.460 mixed race is because there were so many natives living down there compared to up here.

00:24:33.360 Interesting. We never hear that Mexicans are living on stolen land. It's only Americans. 0.77

00:24:38.520 You know, and I mean, the Mexicans actually celebrate Columbus as sort of the, you know,

00:24:44.420 one half of the father of the Mexican race, they call it that day. And so, I mean, people still

00:24:50.500 celebrate this, they realize they're mixed race, and they realize that Europeans have something to

00:24:54.880 offer. So this is a very North American liberal idea that we only should look down on Europeans.

00:25:01.860 And the same thing happened in Mexican history. I mean, many Aztec tribes, the reason why Cortez 0.93

00:25:07.440 could conquer the Aztec empire with 500 men is because he had 20,000 or 30,000 allies at his side,

00:25:14.020 and they were all natives. So the people who didn't like the Aztecs, who the Aztecs were warring against,

00:25:18.860 allied with Cortez. And so that's the reason why Cortez was able to conquer. Also, he had a wife,

00:25:28.200 a concubine, Marina, and she was his voluntary lover and helped him to conquer the Aztec empire.

00:25:38.620 And so she actually played a pivotal role in his success. And we see that the Spanish then come in 0.99

00:25:47.620 and their religion forbids the human sacrifice. So they think that even within 10 years,

00:25:56.460 the Spanish may have saved hundreds of thousands of sacrificial victims from being killed by the

00:26:02.060 Aztecs. That's another one you never hear. And then the Spanish imposed peace across Mexico when

00:26:08.520 all these tribes have been at each other's throats for centuries. Again, where's this bloody conquistador

00:26:14.360 story when you actually look at the facts? You know, that is a very uncomfortable part of

00:26:21.240 colonial history is that that portion that you just talked about, the stopping the human sacrifice

00:26:27.260 and the Aztec culture. That was also true throughout Africa when Christian colonizers,

00:26:33.880 if you will, went there and with the order of the British empire said, you can't do this anymore.

00:26:39.940 You're not going to do child sacrifice. You're not going to do human sacrifice to your gods and

00:26:44.720 witchcraft and things like that. I mean, you can call colonizing oppression, but the fact of the

00:26:49.600 matter is, is that that saved tens of thousands of innocent lives by stopping the practice of human 0.80

00:26:57.060 sacrifice in several countries across the world? Oh, and wherever they can, my colleagues will say,

00:27:03.620 actually, they were only doing human sacrifice because European influence had somehow been there

00:27:08.320 before the Europeans even arrived. You know, so they'll concoct these crazy stories that they were only 0.69

00:27:13.480 doing bad things because of European influence when everybody knows, you know, that that's a fable 0.99

00:27:18.620 that's made up. But in Mexico City, yeah, they had a skull wall, which held 100,000 skulls and

00:27:25.680 skulls tend to fall apart after a couple of years. So those were all recent victims. So they know

00:27:30.680 there's proof that that was going on in a major way. Yeah, this is kind of more Howard Zinn

00:27:35.940 romanticizing pre-civilization. I see this a lot on the left, romanticizing time before civilization,

00:27:43.200 before societies really existed, before the rule of law, before Westernism, pre-Christianity.

00:27:48.700 They kind of romanticize, especially like Native American life is something that was just

00:27:53.300 peaceful harmony, that they were one with the land. They respected the land. They respected the

00:27:59.480 power of nature. And then the evil white man, European, came along and, you know, brought in 1.00

00:28:05.340 capitalism and exploitation. So is it true that before the settlers came, that before Columbus came, 0.98

00:28:13.480 that Native Americans were living in this beautiful harmony with each other and with nature?

00:28:17.800 Yeah, I mean, that's another one of these wild myths that now everybody takes for granted. But of

00:28:24.220 course, right up to the 1960s and 70s, everyone, including Natives themselves, realized that they

00:28:30.200 were a very warlike culture. The main thing in the 1950s and 60s that American culture celebrated about

00:28:35.940 Natives is what good warriors they were. And then the, you know, the 70s hippie era comes along and

00:28:42.400 suddenly the hippies want to rewrite Native history as if they were always smoking peace pipes and they

00:28:47.120 never went to war unless they absolutely had to. But of course, as in any tribal society, when a chief

00:28:53.940 only monopolizes violence in an area, you know, maybe 10 miles around, that means there's going to be a

00:29:00.060 lot of people living in close quarters and they're all going to be tempted to take over each other's land.

00:29:05.660 So warfare was absolutely a fact of life. Genocide was a fact of life. When you conquer a tribe, you try to

00:29:10.940 wipe them out. You take all of their women and incorporate them into your tribe to basically erase them from 1.00

00:29:16.820 history. And that was absolutely normative. And the idea that they lived in harmony with nature,

00:29:23.300 once again, I mean, we see when the first Native peoples actually come into the New World in the

00:29:29.180 Stone Age, they actually were responsible for killing off about 60 species of megafauna,

00:29:36.700 all sorts of creatures, horses and buffalo and elephants and lions. They used to live in the New World,

00:29:42.720 but they don't anymore. You know, so the idea that one group of people was more environmental than

00:29:48.900 another group is silly. Everybody's been the same.

00:29:51.320 So let's fast forward a little bit to cultural sensitivity today, because something else that's

00:30:09.740 shifted in the last few decades, and I think has kind of accelerated in the last few years,

00:30:15.960 is this idea that we cannot use any part of Native American culture today. Like, you can't be called

00:30:21.780 the Indians, and you certainly can't have like a depiction of a Native American alongside the word

00:30:27.680 Indian. You can't be called the Chiefs, and you can't be called anything if you're a sports team or

00:30:35.680 whatever that pays homage to Native Americans because it's seen as cultural appropriation. Don't dress up

00:30:42.420 as one for Halloween. And so, I mean, is this, are we moving in the right direction there? I don't think

00:30:50.440 so, but what do you think? Yeah, exactly. I think this is, this really perfectly exposes the

00:30:56.260 schizophrenia of the left in the United States, because they're saying, you know, on one hand,

00:31:01.580 they're saying you're erasing Native culture, you're erasing Native voices, you're not giving Native

00:31:06.520 people a proper representation in your histories. And then, you know, in the next breath, they'll say,

00:31:14.160 wait, you're not allowed to dress as Indians, you're not allowed to, you know, use, have any cars named 0.93

00:31:19.100 after Indians, you can't have military things named after them, can't even use the term Indian. And that

00:31:25.340 says to me, that's, that's like a ridiculous PR move, actually, because Native Americans are famous the 0.78

00:31:32.360 world over. So if you're a Native American, I mean, Europeans are using dream catchers and things like 0.90

00:31:38.580 that. Everybody knows about Native Americans. But there's so many Native groups around the world that

00:31:43.540 nobody has ever heard of. And so in some ways, if you're a small minority group, and you've had this

00:31:50.600 outsized effect on the world, where almost everyone thinks of you in a positive way, why not go with

00:31:57.260 that? I mean, that's something you could capitalize on in so many different ways in the modern world.

00:32:02.360 But if we ban everything about Indians and Natives in America today, in about 20 years,

00:32:10.080 nobody will ever have heard of any of these legends. Nobody will have heard of any of the

00:32:13.740 good things about Native culture. And so it seems to me ridiculous and short-sighted. 1.00

00:32:20.200 Yeah, I think so too. Is there anything else, any other myths that you want to bust or any other

00:32:25.460 thing that you want people to remember going into Thanksgiving? Maybe they are sitting across the

00:32:31.240 table from their progressive cousin who just graduated from Colombia and thinks that they

00:32:38.740 know everything about American history and is protesting Thanksgiving because it's racist.

00:32:42.840 Is there any tools that you would put in their toolkit?

00:32:47.080 Yeah, I mean, I think one of the number one things is to remember that Natives and Europeans were

00:32:53.080 living side by side. They were intermarrying in a way that almost nobody understands today,

00:32:58.960 just like they did in Mexico. And so there has been much more peaceful interaction. There have

00:33:07.080 been so many schools. Did you know that Harvard University opened a Native American college in the

00:33:12.660 1640s right after it was founded? I mean, nobody knows this stuff. So there have been so many

00:33:19.460 fertile cross-cultural pollinations, so many ways that people have been getting along.

00:33:26.080 And all you hear in the media today is that there was constant warfare. The people only hated each

00:33:33.080 other. So our history is very much a history of an American melting pot in a very positive way if

00:33:41.140 people would actually look at the facts. Yeah, I think so too. Well, thank you so much for being a

00:33:46.540 historian that actually cares about history and is doing this work because I think it's important.

00:33:50.980 I think it's important for our health as a country to be able to see things as they really were,

00:33:55.140 which, as you said, is complicated, but not quite as exaggerated and negative as people today would

00:34:02.680 like us to think, who really have political goals behind their negative interpretation of history, by the

00:34:08.920 way. Exactly. And I mean, yeah, I think that we have to remember that the United States is still the

00:34:15.200 greatest bulwark against authoritarian evil in the world. We're the only ones who are even capable of

00:34:21.700 being a global policeman. So if none of our young people believe in America, why are they going to

00:34:27.380 want to fight and die for this country? We need to think of the big picture and what's actually keeping

00:34:32.280 us safe and actually keeping human rights alive in the world. It's basically us and our military

00:34:37.980 and our self-image is so integral to that. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I

00:34:44.800 encourage people to go out and get your book, Not Stolen, The Truth About European Colonialism in

00:34:50.080 the New World. Very necessary. Dr. Finn Paul, thank you so much. Thanks so much.

00:35:00.260 Okay. Thanks so much for listening and watching. I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving. We will

00:35:05.280 have another episode tomorrow. A fun Q&A for you to listen to, but I hope everyone has a wonderful

00:35:11.060 restful week. I did want to remind you, maybe a fun thing to do one night this week with your family

00:35:16.840 is to watch The Blind. This is the amazing transformation and testimony of Phil Robertson.

00:35:22.720 You know him from his Unashamed podcast on Blaze TV, also from Duck Dynasty. He and his wife have an

00:35:28.680 incredible story. They had a really rough and tumble start to their marriage. The life that he was

00:35:35.620 leading was completely lost. I think he would say degenerate, but then Christ transformed him. And now,

00:35:41.560 of course, through the power of the Holy Spirit, he is an amazing minister of the gospel. So go watch

00:35:47.040 that if you want to be encouraged. It's a really great movie. Go to blazetv.com slash the blind to

00:35:52.120 purchase for $19.99. That's blazetv.com slash the blind for $19.99. All right. That's it for today.

00:36:00.600 We'll be back here tomorrow.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - November 20, 2023

Ep 910 ｜ Are We on Stolen Land？｜ Guest： Dr. Jeff Fynn-Paul

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - November 20, 2023

Ep 910 ｜ Are We on Stolen Land？ ｜ Guest： Dr. Jeff Fynn-Paul

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Ep 910 ｜ Are We on Stolen Land？｜ Guest： Dr. Jeff Fynn-Paul