Untold stories of America’s earliest immigrants.
What does it mean to have no story that lines up with the official stories that you chose to forget without your ancestors holding you accountable, how do you know who you are in this world? How do you know how to conduct yourself?
Dr. Desmond Hassing:But Choctaw doesn't mean that us, the Oklahoma Choctaw, and us, the Mississippi Choctaw. Choctaw just means people. And that's what's missing from the way in which we construct American identity.
Joanna Brooks:My name is Joanna Brooks, and right now, I am in what we call the state of North Carolina, but it's it's really too low. It's a pony land. I'm looking at a forest of skinny and unfamiliar trees, but I'm really delighted to be having this conversation with my friend, Desmond Hassing, about my book, Why We Left, untold stories and songs of America's First immigrants in paperback with a new preface. Desmond, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:You're welcome. I also just wanna say palito to the audience and to, point out that I myself am Choctaw of Oklahoma, meaning my people's traditional homelands are not far from you in the border region between Mississippi and Alabama for the most part. I'm also a settler here in San Diego, California, where I am a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, where I'm currently on Kumeya Island. I'm also a proud grandson of, Irish grandmother who came directly from clan Mulholland, so much so that her name was Mulholland, and she was from County Cork. And I'm really excited to talk about the tenth anniversary of a book that has become pretty significant in the way I come to think about how we tell stories about where we come from, how we got here, and most importantly, how understanding those stories allows us the opportunity to envision ways we might want the world to be different moving forward.
Joanna Brooks:I've gotta say and, you know, full disclosure, we have a community of scholars that connects us in San Diego as part of a broader community of folks who do indigenous studies, American Indian studies on Kamiyah and land as settlers and as indigenous people from elsewhere. So I just wanna acknowledge those relationships and everyone that brought our worlds to touch. But I just wanna let you know how important and moving it is to me when I heard that you enjoyed the book, first of all, but also that it had been meaningful and important to you. That was about the best outcome I could ever hope for. Thank you for saying that.
Joanna Brooks:You know, I'm an early Americanist by training, so I do American studies, and a lot of my work has been in those earlier periods, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries. And you're from a different but adjacent connected field as they all are. Why don't you share a little bit about your expertise and your soon to be, we hope, granted a PhD, which you're studying for, across town from where I work at San Diego State?
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Of course. What I look at most often in my research is I try to understand American culture from basically the founding or the pre revolutionary period through predominantly the twentieth century and the ways in which the people who came to this country were building a narrative not just that allowed them to deal with the indigenous peoples that they met here in The US, but also to feel justified in claiming land from those peoples and in the actions they took to carry out those actions by building a distinctive and unique new American western identity. And I just look at that culture as if all of that culture was part of a giant narrative war that we often look at the films, movies, comic books around us as if they're apparati that are meant to be entertaining, but they're not meant to carry a story that helps us understand the world. And that there's just meaning we can get by looking at how those might have a kind of a psychological warfare component to them. There's certainly a lot that gets unpacked in that, but it's all about who we are as people, how we came to be here, what stories we told.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:And I'm really particularly interested in the idea of how things we embrace as art and as entertainment carry that story, which is one of the reasons why, obviously, I was drawn to your book originally. Because I read it as kind of a book about a group of people having a a large lament, not just about lost land, but about lost culture, lost meaning, lost placement.
Joanna Brooks:Right. And so just to reprise for folks who might be listening who don't know the book, Why We Left uses borrowing from some early work in American Indian studies and in anthropology fossil memory. Right? So embedded folk texts, things long overlooked and not thought to be actual, like you say, Desmond, stories that we have been carried with us to tell where we came from. Right?
Joanna Brooks:So all these murder ballads, all of these dark, dark murder ballads that we can document as being first in England, you know, the seventeenth century, eighteenth century, and then also there was showing up as part of a vast American folk repertoire in the centuries that followed. And what spurred my attraction to this archive or this body of fossil memory was this really unsettling experience of being an early Americanist, but, like, just not recognizing in my bones the way people around me who are professional early Americans talked about this time frame. My ancestors were here. Okay? Like, they came over, and this is part of the story the book tells, is that my ancestors came over really early.
Joanna Brooks:Like, some of them were here in the sixteen aughts in Virginia area and came and stayed landless and just kinda kept moving west and west and west and west and combined with all sorts of this is on my dad's side, combined with all sorts of other people along the way and some of which is documents and which is not, but ended up Okies in California, Texans in California, you know, after the depression looking for work. Right? So how did I square the sense memory, everything I'd inherited, which wasn't that much. Right? Because the culture we we check white on the census, and the culture of whiteness is the culture that forgets on purpose.
Joanna Brooks:But there were these tiny, tiny fragments along with sort of the lived memory. Like, I could just see. I just knew in my bones going back, there was just brokenness and violence and drinking and sorrow a lot and rootlessness, just rootlessness. Like, they didn't hang on to anywhere. And it was really tricky trying to square that with, like you know, I don't know if you ever heard of the book, Albion Seed.
Joanna Brooks:It was this big classic of, like, American folk historiography, and it was like, oh, people fought in Appalachia because that was part of the honor culture. I'm like, what the hell are you talking about, honor culture? Like, my uncles beat ass on each other, and it wasn't part of I don't know what that means. That that doesn't feel like what you're talking about. You know?
Joanna Brooks:So that romance of our origins and really seeing instead, like, whiteness as the product of this, like, trauma culture. Right? And and getting back to the fact that and this is well established in other history if you look at radical history. Like, the displacement the mass displacement of the people who would later become the settler colonials of North America was in itself a displacement of indigenous people. Right?
Joanna Brooks:Like, we belonged somewhere once. My last name is Brooks. It doesn't get more common than that. It basically means we lived in a van by the river somewhere in England. You know?
Joanna Brooks:But what does it mean to have no story that lines up with the official stories or not even an unofficial story about where you came from. Other than that, you sort of find in these fragments, but that's the condition of being that makes people available to do the kind of violence that day to day whiteness entails. So, you know, that was the origin of the project and its impulse, And it's really moving to me to hear you say that my efforts to sort of work back through what was available to understand where we came from was helpful to you in the way you tell your story as well.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Yeah. Definitely. But I've often found when I started becoming a indigenous academic so so long ago is that there seem to be a binary in the way we talk about these things where there's indigenous peoples and there's settlers, and there's no real understanding that both parties at this point are implicated in this system. And as someone who's a white coated indigenous person, I've always kinda felt like I existed in this uncomfortable middle ground. And when I initially did that, when I thought about that in the beginning, I thought that that meant I I didn't fit anywhere.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:I didn't understand anything. And part of what I got from this book was an understanding that the sense of disconnection I had, both from my Irish roots but also from my Choctaw roots, was a sense of disconnection that many people were feeling, particularly here in The United States because that that sense of Western American, identity comes with an implication that you have to put away whatever significant cultural identity you came from, that that you have to leave it at the door, and maybe you can bring little pieces of it as an interesting thing. What really stood out to me was a passage you put towards the end of the original text, which just kinda put it in perspective for me, and I thought maybe we could talk about a little bit.
Joanna Brooks:Oh, that would be so great. Like, I'm I'm very touched. I have, like, access. I can see you on a camera. Like, you have the book and it's bookmarked.
Joanna Brooks:Like
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Yes. Well, with with many little little things. Basically, what you say towards the end of the book is that the narrative that's being given of American identity is that it's a narrative that both flatters us and precludes us from understanding how much we have in common with other peoples pushed about by empire, the people that already were here, or from reckoning with how mixed and illusory our gains may have been. I put that in context with reading about all of these ballads and laments, particularly the ballad that you go into called the two sisters, where it just seemed to be a these were a group of people who understood that they were losing the thing they had brought with them, and didn't necessarily know how to keep it, but they continued practicing the song. And, as a big proponent who super loves fantasy books, every fantasy series in the world has always used song as this idea of the repository for oral history.
Joanna Brooks:Ah.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:So I was just geared to enjoy the book a great deal. And so maybe we could just talk about the general premise of where you go in the book, the idea of what is lost and what these songs are telling us.
Joanna Brooks:Sure. One of the things that prepared me to do this work was studying with some really wonderful folks in American Indian studies back when I was a grad student at UCLA. Like, I I got to study with Paula Gunn Allen, you know, and I remember really learning from her to understand, for example, the way that the stories come through, like yellow woman stories. Right? That that that when your culture has stories, it tells and retells.
Joanna Brooks:It is, of course, a canon that is reshaped over time and that contextualizes and evolves. But the ones that make it through and survive have some poor material that, sometimes entails traces of historical events or events in a time immemorial that need to be remembered, that are significant, that are in in some ways a kind of medicine that can help you adjust or connect or that help you understand the way that the landscapes you live in operate. And I was searching my brain for the stories and song, the songs I actually grew up with that had come down. And one of them I could find I don't talk about this one in the book. One of them I could find on my mother's side, who is also English way back on most lines, was the song I was saying every night as a kid, and it talked about, like, a forest and two kids wandering off into a forest and dying and then robins coming to cover them with strawberry leaves.
Joanna Brooks:And as I thought about it, you know, this little tiny shard of song that I had authentically, You know, I thought, well, a strawberry is a specific plant that belongs to a specific place, and the forest is a specific formation. It belongs to a specific place. And over time, I've learned to sort of take that line of my family, which I don't talk about in this book, and trace it back. And so now, finally, I can say, I know what river my people came from on my mother's side in England, which is how Maori people identify themselves. Right?
Joanna Brooks:I know they came from the River Derwent, and I know that that's an aboriginally named place. Right? And I've learned so much being willing to follow those shards back. The project and why we left was about taking similar shards and trying to reconstitute from these, recordings, twentieth century recordings of folk songs that had come down that could be traced to their transatlantic origin, an archive that would help me understand the precipitance of colonization. So in the one you cite and these songs, like, uniformly, they're chilling.
Joanna Brooks:These are not happy tales. Like, if you know the yellow woman stories from Laguna, right, these, like, really powerful characteristic stories that I was taught by Paula. It's all about this woman who kinda gets around and the world is better for her being out and about because she's pollen, and that's how the world works. You spread yourself around in good follows, and Paula taught us how that sort of contributed to certain social ideas, informations, and Laguna culture, etcetera. And it's never that simple, but that's how it was initially taught to me.
Joanna Brooks:If I look at these stories, you know, that Anglo American folk music gathers and commemorates, these are stories about siblings killing each other for stuff. Siblings killing each other for stuff, and they're also about people going out on ships and getting, like, beat to a pulp. I mean, the themes here are betrayal, abandonment, violence, and this is not an accident. This is fossil memory. And it was so funny as I went back into early generations of folklore scholarship on it, like a lot of the early anthropology was in both indigenous American and indigenous anywhere communities.
Joanna Brooks:They were so ruthlessly formalist, and they were also ham handedly Freudian. They're like, oh, a brother killed his brother because his brother cut down a tree, which might mean a bush. It has to be about incest. And I was like, and then I you look at the text, and it's like, it's actually a hazel tree, and that's significant. They don't grow everywhere.
Joanna Brooks:That meant something. I was in the British Museum a year ago and, you know, going into, like, the Sutton who who room and, which, by the way, we should say British Museum has stuff from, like, indigenous California folks they should repatriate that we were, like, jaw droppingly horrified to see. Like, hats from our friend tribe. Like, we're like, why is this here? Note to self.
Joanna Brooks:Note to British Museum. It was gross. But, you know, I went and looked at the English indigenous stuff, and there was this plate of hazelnuts that had been dug up by archaeologists. And the notation seriously say, we don't know what this means. We don't know why they thought hazelnuts were important.
Joanna Brooks:I'm like, well, jeez. Like, I clearly, hazel trees, nuts were incredibly important subsistence for peasants before the rise of big grain cultures when you were still in hunter gatherer mode, when you were living in your forest, taking care of the forest, maybe a little plot you're growing, to cut down a hazelnut tree was, you know, to destroy forest, was to destroy habitat, was to destroy sustenance, and that's what pissed the brother off. Right? Like, we can actually take this fossil memory. And if we do that kind of you know, it has different terms, faraway reading.
Joanna Brooks:If we don't reduce everything to a metaphor and let it be instead like a placeholder, an anchor in lived histories and actual geographies or these other stories that unfolds. Two sisters is about sister who kills sister for a gold ring and the promises of transoceanic migration that are, you know, turn out actually to be escape routes for people who have committed betrayals at home. There's another one about, someone who kills someone for a beaver hat, and everyone naturalizes. Just, oh, of course, you kill them for a beaver hat. I'm like, okay.
Joanna Brooks:Wait a minute. Okay. So the beaver trade was an actual thing. There is an actual history here. We can locate when people started killing people for beaver hats in England or theoretically doing it the way that people killed each other for Air Jordans in The US.
Joanna Brooks:There's a history here of betrayal. In all of the stories, you know, and the songs that are from this time period. The song on both sides of the Atlantic are telling us that there was violence, that people were uprooted, and that that was the context for the mass of Anglo migration that that peopled with settlers the first wave here. So is that a helpful what did I miss, Desmond? Is that a pretty helpful gist of it?
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Yeah. No. I think I think that's very helpful. I I also think that when I was reading the portion of the book on two sisters, what stood out to me was the obviousness with which in those particular laments, those particular ballads, the the miller is perceived as such a kind of vile and evil character because you can't really see the miller as serving, like, a sustenance role. The miller by definition is about taking food goods and turning them into something commercialized.
Joanna Brooks:That's right. And you look at the actual histories. Right? You look at the histories of the kinds of riots that indigenous English folks were throwing when forests were denuded, when land was enclosed. You know, there were people who would climb onto the barges going down English rivers of grain for export and seek to disrupt it.
Joanna Brooks:And, again, like, the miller you're so right to pick up on the role of the miller is not neutral. He is the one that is turning subsistence into profit. And this is ultimately what leads to this mass displacement. Right? The transition from a subsistence economy to a commercial economy that uses lands that were once habitat for humans and other creatures, right, other kin in a very interconnected way and really redoes it.
Joanna Brooks:And the deforestation stuff was another big revelation in this. Once I started see from the hazelnut tree. Right? And once I started seeing deforestation, I realized you can see deforestation at work from early Portuguese colonization of the Canary Islands. Like, it's just a pattern.
Joanna Brooks:Folks go somewhere and they just kill forests. You know? And then that causes displacement. And through these kinds of, like, more global narrative, doesn't it, is how, like, we come to that passage you shared that's like, yeah. No.
Joanna Brooks:A lot of these people have stuff in common. A lot of people who have been displaced have have these things in common. And it shifts the way, at least for me, I see my white ancestors. It doesn't dismantle the privilege they accumulated. It just brings me this sobering realization that to persist in the replication of trauma was a choice they made over and over again at these contingent precarious intersections of their lives.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Yeah. Definitely. I think that from earlier in the book, there's a period where you go into an argument where you very clearly state out how you think the process of deforestation and the seizing of the commons represent kind of an internal colonization within the British Empire specifically, but Europe more broadly that serves to take what we might think of the the indigenous peoples of the Isles, right, the Irish, the Scottish, the Welsh, and the Britons. Yeah. And turn them into a new class of subject that I think it's too simple to say, like, a subject to the Brit Britishness, but a specific otherness than they they were originally.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:And maybe we should just think of like, talk about that for a little while, like, what that process was and how it related to the seizing of the commons.
Joanna Brooks:Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'll retell the story the best I can, but, you know, what you see, there is a literature that starts happening in England in the sixteenth century about vagabondage and masterless men. And the idea that there are now whether they're discharged sailors and soldiers or just, people displaced without known home, that there is this surplus population roaming the land. Where did they came they came from somewhere.
Joanna Brooks:Right? Like, they belong just as somewhere before this modern vagabondage became their condition, this rootlessness. This is where history suggests the populations that were put out to settle in North America. Right? It wasn't like they all hopped on a boat and said this is a great idea.
Joanna Brooks:There were a lot of ways economically, legally, people were conscripted and resettled. Piecing this together without being able to reconstruct with any surety what those before times look like. Right? Because if your name was Anglo Saxonized, if you have a Germanic name, it is hard to get detail of where you originally from. Right?
Joanna Brooks:There's no place name betrayed there, like a a Breton origin or a Welsh origin. So realizing that and realizing how destructive the British English imperialism in the seventeenth century was to English homelands. Right? So, like, one of the things that stunned me when I started peeling back into these older and admittedly what looked at first to be quite boring, but I often find awesome stuff there. Histories of English navy was the enormous acreage of mature oaks it required to build just one of those English imperial army navy ships.
Joanna Brooks:Right? Like, it took acres. You just you had to destroy acres and acres of ecosystem. Acres and acres and and there was this mass deforestation. That too contributed to the displacement of people.
Joanna Brooks:So it was both enclosure and imperialism. Imperialism wrecked their homeland. It wasn't all so good. So you have this massive people who are cut off at the root wandering around, and then they come over here, my ancestors, and acted unaccountably. Happy tales.
Joanna Brooks:No. But I mean but it helps me understand because that actually feels like where I come from.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Yeah. Well, what I would say is that the idea that the particularly, the class of what we might consider less than willing immigrant to The United States, the specific people who came in a form of a denture indentured servant status or as as transportees or debtors. That these individuals very much were part of a process where the behavior in which they engaged in here in the new world was always the intended purpose.
Joanna Brooks:Yes.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:And at least as in, as someone who's Irish and an indigenous scholar, I associate that a great deal with what happened in, say, North Ireland in the in the sixteenth, seventeenth century where a great many Scottish people were encouraged to move there and settle land from Irish people and creating a whole new people that are North Irish, right, that became the an amalgamation of those people.
Joanna Brooks:Thank you for remembering the story of Celtic Scots people, picked people, and displaced onto the Irish, right, who as they used to call them the martial race in some of the really early Americanist literature, but, you know, the idea that once colonized, once radicalized, once uprooted, these people were actually good at doing unto others as had been done unto them. That's pitious, but that's who we were. Right? And so we got here, and we did hear what had been done to us because our memory was short, and that's all we knew. We knew that forests were to be cleared.
Joanna Brooks:We knew that land was to be enclosed. We knew that violence was a necessary part of this modern world, and, we didn't know why we knew those things. One of the things that I encountered and, again, a lot of this stuff comes up in these tiny little shreds and fragments as you look through the literature because most of the historiography of indigenous England has been written focusing almost entirely on this culture of kings, which had, like, nothing to do with the rest of us. Right? Like, it's just kings.
Joanna Brooks:Yay. That happened. You know, the history of England is not and everyone who followed. But one of the things that really struck me in it all was finding a reference in an older ethnographic text to forests in a lot of Northern European cultures being the home of the dead. Right?
Joanna Brooks:Like, your ancestors were in forests, which kinda makes sense. It makes sense if you think about, again, the broad folklore of forests and Northern European literature and what's happening there. When you cut down forests and you moved away from your forests, where did your ancestors go? You didn't even have your ancestors, so look over your shoulder. I mean, ancestors are a really powerful part of cultural cohesion, of memory, of accountability.
Joanna Brooks:One of the things that has struck me is, as I've done this work, is what is to be honored in the tenacity of indigenous people who have held on to their ancestral memories. It's a choice. At key points, my ancestors didn't make that choice. They chose to forget. And without your ancestors holding your account, well, how do you know who you are in this world?
Joanna Brooks:How do you know to con how to conduct yourself?
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Yeah. Definitely. I think that there's something you point to in the book that I think is important to consider is that you make a distinction in the book that the the story of the song is forgotten, why the song is, why it's important, but the song itself isn't. So I guess the question I would ask as we perhaps start to move towards the idea of where we go from this text is the idea of reclaiming that cultural identity. And can these particular ballads serve as a valuable mechanism for people, especially here in what we consider the Broad West, to help reclaim a sense of cultural identity that was forgotten for them, which I think is an important aspect of this.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Right? They didn't choose themselves to forget these cultural values. Previous generations made that choice for them.
Joanna Brooks:Yeah. That's right. I think it's part of the broader work, and I love that you're turning it towards next to the I wanna hear what you see from where you stand as a scholar looking at these narratives that are effectually as you call them psychological warfare. I use the term prosthetic memory in the book and the idea of when your memory has been lost, there are still ways to connect to bodies of memory that allow you a kind of access to what what is missing. And this is not an unfamiliar circumstance for any modern people.
Joanna Brooks:Right? Like, this is not a disqualifier. Everybody has to reconstruct where they're from all the time. But, you know, I think the big takeaway here is when we look back and, first of all, recognizing that there was so much profound discontinuity that for people who are allegedly protestant and therefore literate, that for people who were allegedly in relationship to power, poor white people did not keep big archives. They just didn't.
Joanna Brooks:And that what did persist was very rugged and very dark, and that was what we carried. And I see it through to people like Woody Guthrie who is born in the same town in the same month as my grandma, my Oki grandma. The tradition of song, he maintained and turned towards solidarity, towards something more emancipatory, to count our losses, to count our past treacheries as valuable experience in adopting a more humble disposition towards our place on this earth. Right? Like, just not buying the fiction so cruelly devised of whiteness that told us we were better than others that we depended on to eat.
Joanna Brooks:There's gotta be other ways to eat. I mean, I look back at the pictures from my grandma's side of the family, and her world was less white than the one I grew up in. It was always a lie that the best way to eat was only to hang out with other white people. It's not sustainable. It's not kind.
Joanna Brooks:It's not fair. It's not good. I can claim this body of memory that no one wants. There's nothing romantic about it, but for me, it is it feels very anchoring, and it feels like a good kind of humility with which to potentially enter conversations right now about decolonization and settler colonialism and late capitalism and the end of the Anthropocene because all of this requires of us great humility and, more vaunted stories of our pasts don't set us up for that. But I'm really interested in what you've been able to do and what you're doing in your work, and I wanna make sure I hold time to hear it and talk about it with you.
Joanna Brooks:So what have you come to see in these narratives that structure? And you're working in media. Right? Like, what are the key narratives you've seen that we can be more mindful of to sort out as we figure out who we really are and what the moment asks of us?
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Yeah. I I'm gonna frame this through kind of how I related to the book when I first read it. I'm gonna go on a bit of an indigenous tear here. One thing we do is, especially as scholars, is is I could give you a bunch of facts or figures, but I'm much better off just telling you a story. When I first started being an academic again, I felt very out of place.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:If we think of the general types of stories that have been presented about indigenous people throughout most of the twentieth century, I was that, I don't know, indigenous, not superhero, but that indigenous, quote, unquote half breed character who didn't really fit in one world and didn't fit in the other. What I didn't realize when that was happening is that that was just an essentially a false dichotomy. That the the thing we call Western American identity, whether we use the term whiteness or we call it a cast, It's simply an identity that forces you to accept that the culture you came with is no longer 100% acceptable, and it doesn't really present a culture of its own. It presents a culture of difference. You become a American Western subject because you're not indigenous.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:You become an upper class person in our society because of where you work or whether or not you live in a poor part of town. It's always about things you aren't. But it also makes you very distinctively into a an eye. And as an indigenous person, I think I've read many indigenous people put this over the years. I wish I could give a direct quote from someone.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:But often, the description of why indigenous people have troubles treating with western subjects is because the they've forgotten how to be people. They no longer see themselves as the part of the broad story of people. And I think it's just wrong to think in terms of, like, my Choctaw ancestors got along with the Haudenosaunee who lived up north. The truth is, I'm sure over the course of many centuries, we had many disagreements with them when we were in contact with them. But we never essentially stopped viewing them as other people.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:We saw ourselves as part of a shared narrative between the two. And what I saw in your text was an understanding that the western subjects who came to accept that narrative of individuality, that narrative of the American subject, they had been worked upon by a narrative that was intended to take all those things of peopleness from them. And then one thing you have to think about when you're an indigenous scholar and you're basically know you're gonna spend most of your time telling people, yeah, the things you believe, I don't think they're right, and I don't think they're right because they've been lying to you for a bunch of centuries. You're gonna talk to a lot of people who respond in the way of, well, if you take my otherness from you away, you're taking away my identity. So we need a frame for understanding how do we how do we have that conversation with people that doesn't instantly turn them off.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:And after reading your book, the thing that like, the thought that I took away from the book was the thought that absolutely none of us are responsible for the choices our ancestors made. But we are products of those decisions they made, and it's 100% on us how we relate to what they did. In thinking about these ideas of of colonization, specifically, the way we build and generate and regenerate and reinscribe American identity. We need to try to get away from the idea that we're answering answering for the sins of our ancestors, which we're not. But we do have to have some obligation for the ways in which we implicate that story going forward, which I don't at least with my students, I don't advocate means that they should take a contrary position to whatever the history book they read in high school said.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:But that they should see accepting whether or not a traditional idea of American history is accurate or the one I present to them as being more indigenous in nature. It's up to them to decide which of those they find more compelling, and then go out and make the world into whatever they think the world should be. All too often when we talk about this subject in the academic space, there seems to be a an incentive issue, Will, to take the most hard line approach, whatever you're arguing, that doesn't leave all that much room for the other side to feel connected to the material. Especially in your text and the way I write now, I'm always looking to provide that space even if I have to tell you an uncomfortable truth. Because, ultimately, again, when I say some comic book artists in 1938 created this horrible image, which helped make children think that all indigenous people people spoke in broken English and didn't understand English or couldn't read.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:That doesn't mean I'm saying you did it. Right? Some person in our history did it, and it's our shared history. We're both responsible for living in it.
Joanna Brooks:I love that. You know, taking this book out in public has always been, and I anticipate it will be again. It's it's really it's gonna be a different experience now than it was ten years ago, but it's always very tenuous. Like, who wants to actually hear this story? I don't believe in white studies.
Joanna Brooks:Right? Like, there's it's it has a whole story about what white studies where it came from. You know, when I was in grad school, I was studying with Nola Ignatius too and, like, the race trader collective. And so I'm much more comfortable in a position of being an accomplice, a minor character in black and indigenous stories. And so if if I can be helpful to people who are doing that work, I hope to be.
Joanna Brooks:And if I can offer memory to people who don't have it and and encourage them to find it, you know, I'm still finding it too. Like, my great grandfather was an indigenous Basque person who spoke Basque, who, you know, migrated to LA really early. I'm just barely learning my words again. I know the house name, the tribe in Muscati where I'm from. I know that.
Joanna Brooks:But I was never raised to honor that or hold that. Lately, I've been thinking like, okay. I know my river in England. I know my house in the Basque land. Like, I can say more for myself, but, also, I have to say, but we chose not to remember this.
Joanna Brooks:And it's up to me to remember humbly, including our own treacheries to ourself as the price of entering conversations with people like you in a respectful way. Like, I have to do that work and show up prepared to share my lineage in a specific and responsible way with a full understanding that it's very complicated. But if it means I get to talk to you all day, I'm I'm game.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Yeah. And and I think it's important to note that what you've just described is something we all should be doing regardless of what our placement is. We started this podcast with a a an acknowledgment of the land upon which we sit. And and the truth is is that those types of land acknowledgments can become very pro form a. And that's the danger in any of these kind of conversations.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:And the way to avoid that is to say that we try to do a relational land acknowledgment. When I suggest that I'm here on Kumeyaay land, I also generally tend to point out that the Luiseno people in the Sandy in the county of San Diego have a a long history. And for all we know over the course of many, many generations, the land I'm on now was their land. Right? Like, the use of land is always a negotiation.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:What we deal with in colonization is a rather one-sided asymmetric conversation about how we use the land. Relationality gives us the room to admit our own failings, our our own placements. I'm not necessarily the best representative to talk about Native American thoughts and processes broadly throughout The US. I did not grow up on a reservation. I am an urban Indian.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:I'm white coated. My people, the the Choctaw, not only are a vast majority of us very, very Irish, but we also donated money to the Irish people during the potato famine. We've always acknowledged a commonality of spirit between ourselves and and Irish people. But the truth is all of that stuff is part of who I am. And it can be uncomfortable to admit all of those little ways in which we're implicated in the system, ways in which we challenge or transgressive against the system.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:But it's important for us to remember just to remember the idea that we're the people. I have my people. You have your people. But beyond that, we're just the people. Not that I speak much more Choctaw than you described.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:But amongst Choctaw, I am Choctawokla, meaning I am Choctaw of Oklahoma. But Choctaw doesn't mean that when we say that word, doesn't mean me us, the Oklahoma Choctaw, and us, the Mississippi Choctaw. Choctaw just means people. And that's the way we as indigenous peoples have always, for the most part, used that word. At least for the Choctaw, I presume most tribes are very, very similar.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:And that's what's missing from the way in which we construct American identity. And if there's one lesson I could take anyone who wants to read your book or wants to discuss and consider the theories in the book or just listens to this podcast, It's just if you can, in general, think of yourself as being part of the large community of people and provide the same type of compassion for the people across the argument from you as you would hope for yourself, there's not a version of the world where that compassion compassion is going to make the world a worse place. I agree with all of your sentiments. I just wanna make sure that that I don't like the binary that somehow there's, like, a a person who's right in an argument and there's a person who's wrong. The truth is in an argument, one person's right, one person's wrong, and they're both right and wrong simultaneously throughout the argument.
Joanna Brooks:I'm so glad you're in our community of American Indian studies folks in San Diego, Desmond. You've been very generous with this time. I'm gonna have my fingers crossed for a good dissertation defense, and I look forward to your book.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Yes. Well, I have to take the dissertation and turn it into a book first. But Yes. I I do hope to provide everyone the chance to read it at some point, and it's not overly wordy dissertation media thing.
Joanna Brooks:I'm here for it. For I'm here for the process. I'm gonna close out by practicing, one of my bass chords. I am gonna say, Agur, which is thank you. Agur.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Thank you for your time, and I hope the audience, gets something from it as well, and I hope they appreciate it. And, yes, everyone at home, go buy the book. It's a good book. It's fun. I know a book about people murdering their siblings.
Dr. Desmond Hassing:Doesn't sound like it'd be a fun book. It's still a fun book, so go buy it.