Transcript

Andrés Reséndez: The canonical history of the West is that California joined the union as a quote-unquote, "free soil state." But a coalition of Americans living in California, along with old Mexican ranchers who came to dominate the early politics of California, drafted the so-called Act for the Protection of Indians of 1850. I call it in my book a piñata of laws that enable people to exploit natives in different ways.

Meredith McCoy: That’s Dr. Andrés Reséndez, who we’ll continue to hear from in today’s episode. Dr. Reséndez’ comments about California remind me that the stories we were told as students—even stories that are viewed as "canonical history"—may not always tell the full story. The telling of history is not static, and how we remember history changes as we listen to different voices and perspectives.

Meredith McCoy: We live in a time when we as a nation are grappling with our memories of the past and their role in our future, particularly with regard to slavery and the Civil War. I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and I attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For decades, even before I went to Carolina, students had been fighting to remove Silent Sam, a Confederate statue strategically placed at the entrance to campus in 1913. After years of indecision from administrators, protesters removed the statue last year. And agree with their tactics or not, the statue was gone. The issue felt more or less resolved.

Meredith McCoy: And then this week, the UNC Board of Governors reached a private and questionably legal multi-million dollar settlement for the care of the statue with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate organization that has been covered by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog. UNC, like the nation, is wrestling with the implications of the memories we construct about the Civil War.

Meredith McCoy: When we teach about enslavement and the Civil War, we can help students develop critical thinking skills about how history gets recorded and told—and which stories are being left out. We can discuss how the stories we know about the past are constructed based on the perspectives and goals of people at particular moments in time, and how the telling of history might change based on whose voices we choose to hear.

Meredith McCoy: The same is true when we revisit colonial history we thought we knew through the lens of Indigenous enslavement. For example, students studying the Pueblo Revolt often learn how local priests forced Catholicism on Indigenous people. But there’s more to the story. As Dr. Reséndez shares in this episode, recent research reveals the role of enslavement as a contributing factor. These tensions in the curriculum leave us with choices to make about our classrooms. Adding more voices and more experiences to the conversation will necessarily change how we teach, and that includes telling the often untold history of Indigenous enslavement across the Americas.

Meredith McCoy: I’m Meredith McCoy, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery—a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material, and offering practical classroom exercises.

Meredith McCoy: In our second season, we are expanding our focus to better support elementary school educators, to spend more time with teachers who are doing this work in the classroom, and to understand the often-hidden history of the enslavement of Indigenous people in what is currently the United States.

Meredith McCoy: Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

Meredith McCoy: Dr. Andrés Reséndez is the author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, and this is our second conversation between Dr. Reséndez and my co-host Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries.

Meredith McCoy: In this episode, we’re going to focus on the history of Indigenous enslavement in Latin America and the American West. We will learn how enslavement drove economic development in what is currently New Mexico, reshaping relations between native nations, and ultimately leading to the largest uprising in the Southwest. We’ll get to know historical figures like Juan de Oñate, James S. Calhoun and Po'pay. And we’re going to talk about the role of forced labor within the silver mines that were pivotal in the economic development of colonial Latin America.

Meredith McCoy: I'm so glad you can join us.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm really excited to welcome back Andrés Reséndez, who joined us for a previous episode, but now we get to dig a little deeper into the history of the other slavery, the enslavement of Native Americans and Indigenous people. Andrés, welcome back. So glad you could join us and spend some more time with us.

Andrés Reséndez: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well look, I'm still taking in what we talked about during the last episode, in which we kind of explored the broad contours of the enslavement of Indigenous people, the other slavery, scale and scope, 2.5 million to five million people. And so here I want to dig a little deeper, if you will, and explore some of the details of what's driving Indigenous enslavement, how enslaved people rebel, and then what brings it to an end. So if we were to start at the beginning, you know, one of the things that students are taught a lot about is the gold rush in U.S. history. But there is a different kind of gold rush, a different kind of precious metals rush, that occurs earlier in time that is really serving as fuel for the emergence and development of Indigenous slavery in the Americas. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Andrés Reséndez: Absolutely. And I think the idea of digging deeper is very appropriate because indeed, we're going to be digging deeper into these metals. So Americans are especially familiar with the California gold rush. And to get some perspective, let's just talk a little bit, one minute about it. It is a phenomenon that attracted 300,000 people to California. It started in 1849, and it reached its peak only four years later. So in terms of duration, the California gold rush was pretty much over after 20 years, having attracted these 300,000 people.

Andrés Reséndez: The earlier silver rush that we are dealing with for comparative purposes was a much longer affair. It really started in the 16th century, it plateaued in the 17th century somewhat. And it continued to grow in the 18th century, reaching the highest watermark years at the very end of the 18th and early 19th centuries. So we are really talking about a metal rush that lasted for 300 years, and it came to encompass large areas of the new world. If we compare the number of kilograms of gold extracted from California during the gold rush to the number of kilograms of silver extracted from just northern Mexico during this period, I figure out that we are really talking about a sum that is 12 times larger.

Andrés Reséndez: So what we have to imagine is 12 California gold rushes strung out throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries to get a sense of the scale of what we are talking about. Whereas the California gold rush happened at a time when there was widespread transportation across the oceans, and news and communications were relatively easy, this earlier silver rush occurred at a time when the Spanish crown essentially blocked anyone but Spaniards to go to the silver districts. So this had to be worked on the basis of what was available around here, mostly Indian labor. So not surprisingly, the first peoples inducted into this powerful, long-lasting silver rush were the natives who were living in and around the silver mines. And once those sources of labor were depleted, the Spanish crown and the silver barons went farther afield, eventually getting their laborers from a catchment area that came to include parts of what is now the American southwest: Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona and so forth. So that gives you a sense, again, of the enormous necessity of labor for the extraction of silver during these centuries.

Andrés Reséndez: The silver mines are absolutely central to the story of the other slavery. The miners resorted to a variety of different labor regimes in order to extract this enormous wealth that is in the ground. So side by side in the mines you would have Indian slaves, you would have African slaves as well, and you would have salaried workers. In fact, some of the best paid workers may have been even of Indigenous extraction who had some skill in mining. So in that sense, the silver mines appeared like the harbinger of free, salaried work. And some scholars have looked at the mines in these ways. But at the same time, these salaried free workers were rubbing shoulders with African slaves. There were also people from either the Philippines Archipelago or from the Indian subcontinent. They were known as "Chinese slaves," quote-unquote. And of course, there were Indian slaves. They had a place because they were a lot cheaper than African slaves. Whereas in the 17th century in a mine like Parral in Chihuahua, a skilled African slave would be worth anywhere between 400 and 600 pesos. You could have an Indian slave for 50 to 100, 120 pesos. So if you were on a shoestring budget, you would be better off getting Indian slaves into your mine. And of course, this vast differential also affected the way you organize your workforce in the mines. So many of these very valuable African slaves, some of whom had mining experience, could be put on above-ground operations, safer operations. So they could be preserved, and you would funnel your more expendable, cheaper labor like Indian slaves into the more dangerous underground operations having to do with the refining of the silver by using toxic reagents.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Could you say a little bit about the kind of work involved in silver mining?

Andrés Reséndez: Yes, that's an excellent point. Gold mining involves some superficial digging and sifting through sand, especially along riverbeds. In contrast, silver mining was a lot more involved. Silver usually was amalgamated with other metals, a fact that made it a lot more challenging to extract. The way it worked is that you would find some outcroppings of silver, and then you would follow the vein. And these veins usually went way down, such that some of the big silver mines in northern Mexico at the time when they were completed, I'm thinking of the silver mines in Guanajuato, for example, turned out to be the deepest man-made shafts made in the world. If you consider that, at the very beginning of this process in the 16th and 17th centuries, there were no explosives, following the veins down had to be done with hand tools, no explosives, nothing else. So just digging up these shafts was enormously taxing. So the usual work day was from sunup to sundown. These tools, moils, crowbars, etc. were extremely heavy. It would be hard to imagine for us to carry one of those things, let alone wield that the entire day, a 12-hour day.

Andrés Reséndez: And digging the hole was just the beginning. Then you had to bring up the ore to the surface. Then you had to crush that to a fine powder, and then you had to mix that with other toxic reagents, and especially mercury. The way to isolate silver was by mixing it with mercury, which is a very heavy metal, and it would amalgamate with the silver. Crushing of the ore was another major task. And the purifying of the silver was a highly-toxic process that involved oftentimes in some of the mines that I have read, instead of using tools they used natives who were forced to walk on this toxic sludge in order to mix it thoroughly to get the silver to amalgamate with the mercury. And once that was done, the mercury was vaporized. Again, a very highly toxic process. So those prisoners or the slaves who were devoted to mixing the sludge, they would not last more than two or three years. Mercury attacks the nervous system, so they would die horrible deaths, shaking uncontrollably because of the action of the mercury on the nervous system.

Andrés Reséndez: There were other dangers along the way. So bringing the ore up from these deep shafts was always made by hand. So basically, a specialized kind of worker would fill up bags made out of fiber, and they would dangle these bags from their foreheads. And the idea was that the arms of the carrier would be free because they had to use them to climb through essentially logs that had notches—chicken ladder, so to speak. And so they would be climbing up through these logs, carrying bags full of stones weighing 50 or 70 pounds dangling from their foreheads all the way to the top. So that's a brief image of what that work entailed, lasting for 300 years with a method to process the silver that changed virtually very little from when it was introduced in the mid-16th century.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm really struck by, not only the physical intensity of the work that's being required of those who are trapped in this work environment, but then as you mentioned, the toxic sludge and the use of mercury that will have a lasting impact not only on the individuals but on the environment as well. I imagine these silver mines are really taking a toll not only on individuals, but on space and place as well.

Andrés Reséndez: Exactly. There were hundreds of these mines. Some of them were flash-in-the-pan activities, but others were very substantial mine concerns lasting for centuries. And they are all over what is now Mexico, and indeed all over the New World. They are the economic backbone of colonial Latin America.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And you can easily imagine, because this industry is so labor-dependent, is constantly tapping into and exhausting these populations of Indigenous people. What is silver being used for?

Andrés Reséndez: Well, that's an excellent question. Between 1500 and 1800, the silver mines of the New World produced about 80 percent of all the silver worldwide. The standard story is that, of course, this is flowing to Europe. After all, these are Spanish colonies or French colonies or British colonies. And that is true nominally, but the real magnate of silver was China at this time. China in the 15th and 16th centuries had abandoned its paper money, and had introduced a tax reform that required silver as a form of payment. And so China went on and basically exhausted all the silver that was being produced in nearby Japan, and then turned to the silver mines of the new world for additional silver for the payments. So a lot of the silver that initially flowed into Europe through intermediation ended up going to China. And of course, there was also the Manila galleon, so a yearly ship going straight from Mexico to Manila and from there on to China. So basically, it was China's enduring and massive demand for silver that sustained ultimately these enormous businesses. It is hard to imagine the scale and the duration of these silver mines without China's persistent demand. China in the 16th century already accounted for about 25 percent of the world's population. And by the 18th century, it accounted for an overwhelming 36 percent of the world's population. So whatever China wanted then, it had ripple effects in markets all over the world, as we know all too well today. But it's something that was very clear already in the 16, 17 and 18th centuries.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: An early version of globalization and markets and demand and shifting populations. That's pretty astounding. You know, when we think about Indigenous enslavement, and as you just described, a global demand and global trade and traffic, it can become a little bit hard to wrap our minds around. But if we look at a particular place and case study, here I'm thinking about the work that you've done around present-day New Mexico, I think it becomes a little bit easier to make sense of it all. Could you say a little bit about why looking at New Mexico as a case study is a useful endeavor for drilling down to understand Indigenous enslavement?

Andrés Reséndez: New Mexico is a fascinating example. As we had mentioned earlier, during the colonial period, they did not find silver mines in New Mexico. However, silver barons and silver entrepreneurs washed up in New Mexico and were attracted to New Mexico precisely because of its particular population. New Mexico had a very significant sedentary population in the 16th century. It had 70 some so-called Pueblo Indians, Indians living in individual settled agricultural communities. And beyond that, they were surrounded by other semi-nomadic or nomadic groups: Apaches and later on others, Comanches, Utes, Navajos, who were also a part of this human landscape in New Mexico. And all of them could be brought into the silver economy that was developing further south in the state of Chihuahua, which is the Mexican state directly to the south of New Mexico.

Andrés Reséndez: In fact, this is exactly what happened. A very large, very significant silver mine called Parral that remained in function for centuries, opened up in southern Chihuahua in 1631. Even though it was a months-long travel to get from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Parral, it was still much easier to supply that mine from New Mexico than from further south in Mexico City, etc. So as a result, New Mexico turned into something of a supply center for the miners of Parral. And what that meant was everything from goods that had been produced in workshops in New Mexico on the basis of coerced Indian labor to the actual shipping of Indian slaves out of New Mexico. And by that I mean both Pueblo Indians and Apache Indians and others, Utes, Navajos eventually, to the silver mines of Parral. We have baptism records, for example, in Parral, in which we find the traces of this trade. We find records of merchants from New Mexico spending that month-long voyage from Santa Fe to Parral, bringing these captives, feeding them all along the way and defying all the dangers and the elements, etc., because they knew that once they got to Parral, they would be able to sell their human cargo at a very significant markup, and they would be able to obtain silver for them, which was extremely difficult to come by in New Mexico proper.

Andrés Reséndez: Technically, Indian slavery had been forbidden since the new laws in the middle of the 16th century. So Parral could not technically have Indian slaves, yet there were many ways to get around this prohibition. First of all, the viceroys of New Spain sometimes pleaded with the Spanish king to try to get an exception. They realized that the wealth of this colony hinged on silver, and that was being held back by the lack of labor. Here's one example of Mexican viceroys pleading for a special exception from the Spanish king. Here's the way it reads in my book: "As early as 1572, the Viceroy of Mexico, Martín Enríquez de Almanza, a capable administrator with personal knowledge of the mines of northern Mexico, wrote to the King of Spain and presented the owner's quandary in a remarkably lucid manner." And I quote him. "'For the mine owners, the key is to have workers. And the Black slaves are not enough. I have written already to Your Majesty about the importance of sending Indians to the mines and paying good wages to them. Many of them go on their own accord and earn enough to eat well. But the natives are lazy by nature, and do not persevere in any kind of work unless they are compelled. Without a direct order from Your Majesty, I do not dare to give Indians to the miners because it is a practice that is forbidden, although it would be very suitable.'" End of quote.

Andrés Reséndez: So Viceroys emphasize the convenience of allowing Indian slaves, even though it was prohibited to be a part of the equation. But even without an express royal permission, it was possible to resort to other subterfuges. For example, the entire Apache nation was deemed an enemy of the Spanish crown, and therefore any Apache apprehended could be legally enslaved in the sense that they would be criminals. They would be tried and sentenced to 10 years or 15 years of forced labor. And so they would sell not the person, but the service to which this person had been condemned. That was another way to get around the legal prohibition against Indian slavery. Another way was through debts. Many of the miners had been originally brought in as salaried workers, but many of these workers, either because of gambling or because everything was outrageously expensive in the mines, from food to clothing to tools, had been forced to go into debt. And once they were indebted, then they became a part of the inventory of the mine. And so we have instances of mines, silver mines being sold in which the workers that are indebted to the mine are sold along with the mines. And in indeed, one of the greatest selling points of the mine is the availability of these workers who are clearly technically not slaves, but in practice, they are held in place and they need to work to work off their debt.

Meredith McCoy: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, and I’m your host, Meredith McCoy. Along with this podcast, you can find our new, first-of-its-kind K-5 framework for teaching slavery to elementary students, including: 20 age-appropriate essential knowledge sections, over 100 primary source texts, and six inquiry design models at Tolerance.org/hardhistory. Again, here is Andrés Reséndez.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In The Other Slavery, you also introduce us to people who are on the ground, involved in the silver economy. And one person is Juan de Oñate. Could you say a little bit about his story?

Andrés Reséndez: Sure. Juan de Oñate is normally presented as a generic Spanish conquistador of New Mexico. He arrived in 1598 and apportioned Indians to his fellow Spanish conquistadors, etc. Hidden from view really, are all the mining connections. Oñate went to New Mexico first and foremost as a mining baron. Oñate was the scion of the most important silver baron in Mexico. His father, Cristóbal de Oñate had been one of the founders of the very significant mine of Zacatecas which was, at the time, the most important silver mine in Mexico. And so his purpose in going to New Mexico was to open new lands to Christianity, as he claimed, but also for the more practical reason to look for precious metals and obtain Indian laborers. So instead of thinking of New Mexico as this godforsaken province in which Spanish conquistadors went there and missionaries went there to convert souls, we really should think about the early history of New Mexico as a place that had been in the sights of early miners who were interested in prospecting for additional silver mines, as well as getting ahold of Indigenous labor that they could use in their own going concerns. So Oñate was a very clear example of this. He's well-remembered in New Mexico because he settled New Mexico for the Spanish. Definitely he entered the pueblos and subjected them to the Spanish crown, the Spanish authority. He apportioned the pueblos as encomiendas. An encomienda is a grant of Indian laborers to a Spanish overlord known as an encomendero, and the encomendero would look after the needs of the entrusted Indians and make sure that they got a Christian education. And in return, the encomendero would be able to get labor or tribute from his entrusted Indians. So that's how you can imagine the system of New Mexico operating, and then later on furnishing the silver mines further south in Chihuahua.

Andrés Reséndez: Those who did not submit to Oñate were sentenced to harsher punishments. So he is very well-remembered because he entered the pueblo of Acoma, and they resisted. And so he decreed that a leg would be amputated of the adult population of the Acoma Pueblos. And people still remember that in New Mexico very vividly. But lost in the shuffle is in addition to that, Oñate sentenced non-adults, both boys and girls, to sentences ranging between 10 and 20 years to forced labor. And so again, those Indians from Acoma were traded, were apportioned to Spanish colonizers, conquerors. Some of them were taken out of New Mexico to the expanding silver economy. And so that was the beginning of a system that we can continue to trace through the 17th century as New Mexico became settled. Without these mining connections, the history of New Mexico becomes almost incomprehensible. So here you have a few Spaniards going to this godforsaken northernmost province of the Spanish Empire in North America. And if you overlook these mining connections, then it becomes very difficult to understand why this expedition is taking place, why these conquistadors going with Oñate are apportioning Indians amongst themselves. Why are they so desperately and fervently prospecting for precious metals, and why eventually the story unfolded the way it did.

Andrés Reséndez: We know that that the leading developers were New Mexican governors. It's tempting to think of them as really bad men, but we need to understand the financial pressures that they were under. New Mexican governors had to purchase their office. They had to pay upfront in order to be named governor of New Mexico. That was a general practice under Hapsburg, Spain: the buying and selling of posts. So these governors had to recoup their considerable investments by exploring every avenue of economic enrichment, and the buying and selling of Indians was just one more economic avenue that they really needed to explore. There is plenty of evidence of successive New Mexican governors doing just that. They started by enslaving Pueblo Indians, but New Mexican governors early on discovered that it was extremely disruptive to enslave the Pueblos on whom they depended on a day-to-day basis and amongst them amongst whom they lived. So early on, they largely stopped enslaving Pueblo Indians and redirected their slaving activities to the outlying Indigenous groups, nomadic or semi-nomadic groups like we talked about, the Apaches, Utes, Navajos and others. So that's how we have the system evolving over time.

Andrés Reséndez: There were wars between Pueblos and these groups and amongst these outlying groups, and all of that only served to furnish the other slavery, as I call it. And even though the governors had the leading role in this business, they also invited other merchants to participate in the Indian slave trades, oftentimes going into convoys out of New Mexico to the silver mines further south.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And when you describe the encomienda system, you're really talking about one of these core components that could and should be classified under that definition of the other slavery.

Andrés Reséndez: Right. So again, we get to these very difficult definitional problems here, because in fact, even though the Spanish used the encomiendas as a way to get around the prohibition against Indian slavery, the actual functioning of the encomienda worked differently in different parts of the Spanish Empire. In central Mexico, for example, there were encomiendas. Agricultural settled communities in central Mexico were apportioned to Spanish overlords. And in that case, often it just amounted to an extraction of tribute. In other words, these Indigenous communities remained under their own traditional leaders. They were just required to give a certain percentage of their crops or whatever they produce, 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent to the encomendero. And that was it. So you can think of the encomienda as a sort of a tax on the Indians of Central Mexico. But the encomiendas elsewhere, especially in less-agricultural and less-settled areas, became a subterfuge for naked enslavement. Spanish overlords would go and subdue some Indians, then they would request these Indians as encomienda Indians to be under their protection. And because these Indians did not have an agricultural surplus that they could surrender to the encomendero, the only thing they could give was their labor. So basically, these Spanish overlords would develop mining camps or agricultural estates, and they would resort to their encomienda Indians.

Andrés Reséndez: These encomienda Indians often, as I said, were nomadic or semi-nomadic, which does not mean that they just wandered off whichever way, they actually followed very predictable circuits that enabled them to take advantage of different food sources that became available at different types of times of the year. And so the encomenderos knew exactly where to find their Indians at every certain point in the year. When it came time to harvest or planting, they would go out, get there encomienda Indians at gunpoint, bring them to their estates, make them do the work, and then release them again until they they needed them again. So in that case, the encomienda was like a cyclical form of enslavement, if you will. There were slightly different ways in which the encomienda unfolded. In New Mexico in particular, which is the case that we're talking about, in theory encomienda Indians could not be sold by the Spanish owner, but we have some evidence that some of the encomienda owners sold some of their Indians further south. And even if abiding by the regulations of the encomienda and not selling Indians and not treating them as slaves, they were able to make them work in workshops in order to produce goods, especially harvest piñón nuts, or to make textiles to supply the silver mines.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In what ways did the Pueblo Indians respond to the encroachment of the Spanish into their territory in present-day New Mexico, and the imposition of these forced labor systems upon them?

Andrés Reséndez: Well, as we describe the human landscape of New Mexico as very intricate, so we have fiercely independent Pueblos. Each Pueblo oftentimes speaking different languages. So some Pueblos spoke linguistically-related languages, but interspersed between them, there were other Pueblos that spoke different languages from different linguistic families. So really, the diversity and the independence of the Pueblos was one important reason that facilitated their ultimate subjugation to the Spanish control. So we have early accounts of the Spanish entrada into New Mexico, and how they were able to appropriate food and appropriate the labor from the Pueblos. And that's how they were able to sell themselves in New Mexico initially, even if they didn't find any precious metals in the province. And once the silver economy of Chihuahua took off, then New Mexico became, as we said, a supply center for the silver mines further south. So that's how they were able to maintain control, and eventually participate in the wars between various nomadic Indians further north and further east and further west from the settlements of New Mexico.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So at a certain point, it seems as though the influence of the Spanish presence is manifest in the changing nature of warfare and conflict between the Pueblos?

Andrés Reséndez: Yes. So one of the most important factors to bear in mind is that the Spanish had an overwhelming warfare technological advantage over natives all over the New World. So they had both horses and firearms. And this was such an overwhelming advantage that they were able to prevail in just about any imaginable combat situation. You know, there are Spanish accounts of such feats all over the New World. But of course, eventually, as we will see, horses were diffused to native peoples and firearms as well. And so then the situation changed later on in the 18th and 19th centuries when we have the emergence of very powerful equestrian Indigenous societies.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And we see the fierce independent character of the different Pueblo groups. When I think about the Pueblo revolt, going into it with this sense of fierce independence as you characterized and described it, it makes the Pueblo revolt, this collection of diverse groups coming together to challenge to Spanish even more remarkable in my mind.

Andrés Reséndez: Right. Right. The Pueblo revolt of 1680 is the largest revolt that occurred in the American Southwest by far. It was a remarkable event. And it is usually explained as a result of Catholic zeal to convert the Pueblo Indians to Christianity. And there is certainly a point to that, and there is plenty of evidence about that, but in recent years, scholars have looked into other aspects of this story and more broadly have added perspective about Indian slavery. In many ways, we can recast that Pueblo revolt of 1680 and think of it as the greatest insurrection against what I call the other slavery. Even though these were over 70 independent communities, they had a clear numerical superiority over the Spanish presence. There were maybe 3,000 to 5,000 Spaniards. Because New Mexico remained a backwater, it failed to attract a significant Spanish presence. And in contrast, we had, I don't know, over 20,000 Pueblo Indians, and thousands more if we add other nomadic and semi-nomadic Indigenous peoples living in the area.

Andrés Reséndez: So the basic insight of the Pueblo revolt was if they could coordinate the different pueblos, and if they could organize and rise up on the same day, they would very easily overwhelm the much smaller Spanish presence and just completely get rid of the Spanish presence there. That's essentially what happened in the spring of 1680. The neural center of this movement was in the pueblo of Taos, which is in the far northeastern part of the New Mexican pueblo world. From inside Kivas, these are underground ceremonial centers, various Pueblos started holding secret meetings in order to put into place this audacious plan of liberation. They sent runners to Santa Fe, runners to Acama pueblo. We're talking about hundreds of miles. And they would basically negotiate with different pueblos. They would send messages. And finally, they would agree on a specific date in which they would all rise and topple their Spanish oppressors.

Andrés Reséndez: And so this is basically what happened. The Pueblo revolt succeeded. In some cases, it was very easy. Some pueblos had the bare minimum, maybe one or two Spanish friars, and overwhelming those friars and destroying their missions or churches was a foregone conclusion. In other places, there were a few Spanish families, ranches, in addition to the friars, and that would also be accomplished relatively easily. But in some of the pueblos, especially in southern New Mexico and above all in the Spanish capital of Santa Fe, this was a much more difficult, much more complicated situation, because Santa Fe had maybe a thousand Spanish people living in it. And in addition, there was a central plaza with a sturdy, you know, casas reales, a sturdy building capable of withstanding a siege. And this is exactly what happened. The local residents holed up in this structure and they were able to resist for a few days. Finally they were chased out by the Pueblo rebels and were allowed to go.

Andrés Reséndez: But what's really interesting about this whole episode is that before they left New Mexico, the Spanish authorities conducted a complete muster, a complete listing of all the different peoples that were retreating from New Mexico. And really, this is something that we don't have for any other Spanish province in the 17th century. In rough numbers, the muster includes 1,500 people. 1,000 Spanish holding about 500 servants. So that already, you know, the numbers already catch your your eye. What's really interesting is that the youth, maybe two-thirds of these were minors. And also the clans. So you had some very well-off New Mexicans who had four, five, two dozen, 40 servants, mostly Indian, but some African as well, and slaves. But even very poor New Mexicans also claimed one or two or three servants. And New Mexico was a place where convicts were sent to serve out their sentences. And some of these convicts also reported having one or two or three Indian slaves. Widows who took the muster, and the muster taker thought they were so poor that he had to record something to that effect. And the recorder noted that this widow was without shoes. And yet he also recorded her having three or four servants. You get a sense that the entire way of life of New Mexico in the 17th century revolved around or was very importantly concerned with the holding of Indians to service.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Which really speaks to the centrality of the other slavery, not just as a labor system, but as a social system as well.

Andrés Reséndez: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Explain to us the role that Po'pay plays in the Pueblo revolt?

Andrés Reséndez: As Pueblo Indians plotted their uprising in the spring of 1680, the figure that came the most to the fore was a man named Po'pay. Po'pay was a medicine man who had fled from the pueblo of San Juan and had found refuge in Taos, which had become the epicenter of this movement. But interestingly, he had a prior history, prior to the revolt of 1680. He had been imprisoned in 1675 during a witch hunt, literally. So the governor of New Mexico at the time was concerned that some Indigenous witches were using their power improperly. Several of them were rounded up, some of them were executed. One of them committed suicide pending his trial. Some others were given severe whippings and then turned loose. And one of them was Po'pay. Po'pay was originally from the San Juan pueblo, was accused of being a witch and tried and given lashes, and he returned to his pueblo for some time. But fearing for his life, he ended up going to the remote pueblo of Taos, where he plotted his revenge. He was the figure who became most associated with the Pueblo revolt five years later, in 1680.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's interesting that he had this prior history, because too often we think about resistance as being one or two incidents. We certainly do this in the context of the enslavement of African people, as opposed to something that is sort of ongoing. And that appears in the public record in different ways, but it is something that is really constant and consistent. And then those who find themselves in these various forms of bondage are probing for ways to ameliorate their experience, to find freedom, to lift the yoke of bondage off of their necks. And it sounds like we're seeing the same things in this Indigenous enslavement of native people, probing, finding, shifting and responding to the forms of unfreedom that they are being confronted with.

Andrés Reséndez: It's been very fascinating, because we have a very long history of trying to understand what prompted the Pueblo revolt. At the time of the revolt in the 17th and even in the 18th century, so in colonial years, the Spanish authorities had no doubt that the reason behind the Pueblo revolt had been the devil, basically. The devil was seen as this powerful presence that preyed on the weak all over the world. So it's not surprising also that there are many other witch hunts in Europe at the time in the 17th century, and of course, the Salem witch hunt would take place only a few years after the Pueblo revolts in the 1690s. The thought was that Satan was lurking around and he was tricking especially the most vulnerable members of society. So women, credulous women, as well as Indians. And so the Pueblo revolt was nothing but the wiles of the devil working their way through these figures like Po'pay. So that was the earliest explanation. Later on in the 19th century, when we have Americans coming into New Mexico and taking another look at the Pueblo revolt, they singled out the harsh treatment of the Spanish missionaries of the pueblos. They believe that the missionaries that came to New Mexico had been extraordinarily zealous and had essentially forced the pueblos into this massive rebellion.

Andrés Reséndez: But in recent years, we've come to reassess the reasons for this uprising. And certainly the religious motivation is there. At the time of the rebellion, it is very clear that the Pueblo Indians not only revolted in general, but there was a clear method. They destroyed churches. They defecated on altars. They destroyed images. They took new wives not given by God, but the ones that they desired. The idea was to do away with everything having to do with this Christian order. Clearly the religious motivation was there, but in the last few years, we've reassessed the role of labor coercion and how that may have played into the rebellion. And we have a few indications of that. For one thing, during the rebellion, for example, the Spanish had very few opportunities to learn about the causes behind the Pueblo revolt. They were able to interview some of the leaders even at the time of the revolt, and later on when the Spanish first tried to return to New Mexico, 11, 12 years later, they were able to apprehend some Pueblos and try them and ask them about the causes of the Pueblo revolt. And several of them stated specifically that the unbearable Spanish oppression and slavery had been one of the main or the main driver for this rebellion. So that's that's one additional indication that we have.

Andrés Reséndez: And we also have the interesting overlap between the regions where the Indigenous peoples revolted and the geography of enslavement. So typically, we call it the Pueblo revolt of 1680, but in fact, many other peoples beyond the Pueblos revolted. So there were basically two main regions that became involved in what some scholars call the Great Northern Rebellion. One area went from Taos and Santa Fe along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, all the way through what is now southern New Mexico, and right to the doorsteps of southern Chihuahua in what is now the mine of Parral. And there was another area of revolt in what is now northwestern Mexico in the state of Sonora. So if you look at a map and you trace the corridors of enslavement and then overlay the regions that became involved in this massive rebellion, you'll see that there is quite a bit of overlap. Of course, figuring out the mindset of peoples who revolted centuries ago is never an easy business, but clearly, all of these are indications that the enslavement of natives was one of the primary drivers behind this massive revolt.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The importance of connecting resistance, these revolts to the systems of labor in which Indigenous people found themselves trapped in, how they would understand those systems of labor and how exploitative they were and their desire to rebel against them, I think casts significant doubt on these sort of traditional explanations of the resistance of oppressed and marginalized people being sort of other-worldly. Whether it's the supernatural taking them over, or the hyper-religious, or in the case of many enslaved African Americans, some type of illness became them or overtook them that leads to them to resist. It seems that those explanations are consistent across these various cultures, and serve the useful purpose of saying that the problem isn't actually the system, the problem is these faulty people, if you will. As you were saying, the weakest among the population are susceptible to these outside undue influences.

Andrés Reséndez: Right. In contrast, what we see in the case of the Native Americans is that they are doing everything they can to extricate themselves from this terrible system, very quickly adapting to the legal system that the Spanish offered to them, and using the courts in order to gain a measure of relief, if not their outright freedom, to revolting in these massive uprisings as the Pueblo revolt. So we have a very empowered, very capable, very determined people trying to make the best of a really terrible situation, terrible system.

Meredith McCoy: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. Understanding resistance and resilience helps our students see a more complete picture of the experiences of enslaved people. To learn about the numerous ways that enslaved African Americans incorporated resistance into their daily lives listen to episode six from our first season: "Resistance Means More Than Rebellion" with historian Kenneth S. Greenberg. Once again, here’s Dr. Jeffries and Dr. Reséndez.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You mentioned earlier, the Spanish pushing up from present-day Mexico into present-day New Mexico. So they're moving north, if you will. But as we move into the 19th century, fast forwarding in time here, we begin to see white Americans pushing west. What are they encountering as they are moving from east to west in North America? And who are they encountering?

Andrés Reséndez: Well, this became a very important source of evidence for me as I was trying to chart the ebbs and flow of the other slavery as I call it, because here you have a group of Americans who are, by the 19th century, primarily familiar with African chattel slavery, and they are moving by the millions across the West. So that's a very significant percentage of the overall U.S. population. I think 40 percent are living in the Western states by 1850. So we have this massive spilling over of the Americans who were priorly confined to these coastal states, washing over the entire land. And again, we find very telling letters and records telling us about the operation of the other slavery in these new lands that they encountered. They are tested in their beliefs. They are tested in the human activities that they see in these new territories. And precisely because they had been so used to the African chattel slavery, I find some of their commentaries very interesting, because sometimes they compare very specifically what they grew up with at home with what they encountered in the West.

Andrés Reséndez: One of the individuals that I follow closely is a man called James Calhoun. He was appointed the first Indian agent of the territory of New Mexico. And he had grown up in Georgia, where he combined a successful career in the shipping business along with a successful political career. And he had never set foot in the West when he was appointed Indian agent of the territory of New Mexico. Even before going to New Mexico, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to see the superintendent of Indian affairs to learn a little bit about the Indians that he would encounter in the territory of New Mexico. And the superintendent told him that really they know precious little about the Indians that he would encounter, and that basically they would be relying on him to furnish any information he would have. And so he traveled to New Mexico. He very quickly realized that the job that he had been appointed for was far more formidable than he had ever imagined. There were tens of thousands of Indians in New Mexico, some of them openly hostile to the United States. And yet there were just a few hundred U.S. soldiers stationed in New Mexico. And so his job was quite formidable.

Andrés Reséndez: But he came to understand these systems. You know, earlier we were discussing about the particular human landscape of New Mexico. Calhoun was one of the first to describe it very clearly. He said that there are there is a people in a circle consisting of Pueblo Indians, American residents and Spanish residents, and they were surrounded by what he called the four wild tribes. So Utes, Navajos, Comanches and Apaches. So he very clearly laid out the system. He also believed that, of the four wild tribes as he called them, the Navajos were the ones who would be able to live on their own. The Navajos had very thriving crops. They also had sheep. They wove some of the finest fabrics in the west. And so they could make a living on their own. But the other three wild tribes, as he call them, his estimation was that they basically lived off of plundering, as he called it. Plundering both horses from each other and captives and selling captives from each other. So it would take a major military U.S. build-up in the region in order for the United States to stop these three wild tribes from their plundering ways, so to speak. So that was his very initial assessment of New Mexico.

Andrés Reséndez: And Calhoun also had very telling passages about the system of bondage that he encountered in New Mexico. He very early on noticed that New Mexicans didn't call their slaves "slaves," they called them peons. But he went on to note that really what these people called peons is what we in the old South know as slaves. It's just a matter of terminology, and if there is any difference is that Southern slaves are confined to one race of the human family, whereas peons encompass everybody. It could be different Indian groups or it could be even Mexicans. He even noted that Mexicans could have other Mexicans as slaves, and this didn't cause any problems. Or some Indians would have other Indians, and this didn't seem to have any problems. So anyways, we have a very rich description of the system that operated in New Mexico, and indeed in many other places of the American West.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And it seems that persons like James Calhoun, who have this experience in the American South, have an experience with enslavement of African people, when they journey west, they recognize what they see.

Andrés Reséndez: Yes. Calhoun wrote a lot about the system. He was taken aback by the sophistication of the slave system in New Mexico. He was one of the first to note how female peons or female Indian slaves were worth 50 or 60 percent more than adult males, for example. And he interviewed many children who had been held as peons or slaves in New Mexico, and wrote pithy notes about them. Now interestingly enough, he documented the practice widely, but he never did anything to stop it. His main problem was that, by virtue of the treaty between Mexico and the United States at the end of the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-48, the United States had to return any Mexican slaves held unlawfully in the United States by Indian tribes or by other peoples in the United States. And when he encountered that situation, he would try to procure those slaves and return them to Mexico. But notice that he basically would pay the owners in order to get these slaves to return to Mexico, thus validating the system ultimately. So in other words, he never questioned that this was illegal or anything like that, this was just the way it worked. And just worked with the system in order to abide by the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The perceptions of people like Calhoun, white Americans who are venturing west, white Americans who had been out west for a while, their perceptions aren't merely attitudes. They become part of the way in which the West becomes governed. Could you say a little bit about how, in 1850, for example, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians passed by California's state legislature complicates the history of the West during this moment?

Andrés Reséndez: The canonical history of the West is that California joined the union as a quote unquote, "free soil state." But early American authorities in California warned that there were Indians held to service, and exhorted the population not to view California Indians in the light of slaves. But none of that really mattered. As you were mentioning, the coalition of Americans living in California, along with old Mexican ranchers who came to dominate the early politics of California, drafted this act of 1850 that essentially, I call it in my book a piñata of laws that enable people to exploit natives in different ways. So one of the most obvious provisions of that so-called Act for the Protection of Indians of 1850 was that any native who is able to work and yet has no visible means to support themselves could be denounced by a white settler, and then he would need to be imprisoned and sold to the best bidder for a term that could not exceed four months. So essentially, natives who didn't have any visible means to support themselves could be turned into slaves for a period of four months. This was one way to do it. Another way to do it was that Indigenous children could be inducted into apprenticeships, as they were called. That is, a white person could go before the justice of the peace, and with the agreement of either the child's parents or a friend, quote-unquote "friend," and this is a technical term here, that that child could be inducted into this apprenticeship system, which essentially was servitude for multiple years. So there are different scholarly estimates, but the numbers are in the thousands, maybe 20,000 Indigenous Californians affected by this act of 1850, mostly used as domestic servants or also in agricultural enterprises.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: As we move from mid-1800s to the Civil War, 1861-1865, and then eventually to emancipation, 13th Amendment, I'm really struck by the descriptions of what is allowable under California law, and what would be allowable in many of the Southern states for the treatment of freed men and freed women, formerly enslaved African people. So the apprenticeships, I mean, we see that happening immediately after emancipation of children who are of young age. And of course, this also mirrors what would happen with gradual abolition in the Northern states after the American Revolution. But then you also have vagrancy laws. The same thing: sweeping up able-bodied men and women, arresting them and then leasing them out for periods that sometimes will be four months, very often even longer to mines, not the silver mines that we described earlier, but the iron mines the ore mines in Birmingham or the turpentine fields in Florida. So you really see, in a sense, as we move towards emancipation, particularly on the emancipation side of ending African enslavement, it can also be seen not solely as an end, but as a beginning; replicating the experience moving forward, something that was existing at the same time. And that is this other slavery, the enslavement of Indigenous people.

Andrés Reséndez: That's right. That's a fascinating observation. The end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments are often seen as the end of slavery in the South. But as you point out, the system evolved in such a way that it came to resemble very similar to the kinds of bondage systems that existed in the West. So that many of the natives of the Western states of the United States would find very familiar the practices that took hold in Reconstruction-era South. And so if slavery ended in the aftermath of the Civil War, the other slavery just got started there.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And it's not something that's new. I mean, it's new in terms of its applicability to this particular population group, but it's something as you point out, that's centuries old, that then becomes adopted as you have white Southerners desperate to replicate labor control systems as close to the former slavery as possible. They obviously know they can't do having lost the Civil War, but what we see with the other slavery is that it provides this model, and certainly becomes replicated in many ways to a large degree in many of these places. I think it's an interesting, fascinating and historically-relevant point of intersection and overlap between the enslaved African experience and the enslaved Indigenous experience.

Andrés Reséndez: And it also points to the enormous difficulty of ending slavery more broadly. I mean, in the course of this conversation, we've seen how the Spanish crown tried to end Indian slavery as early as 1541-42, and it couldn't be done. It went into this anti-slavery crusade in the late 17th century and it failed. The Mexican government made Indians born within the territory of Mexico technically free and liberated everyone, yet Indian slavery remained in Mexico after that, and in some ways intensified. And in the aftermath of the Civil War, we find the 13th Amendment that ended slavery as well as involuntary servitude, a formulation that was deemed broad enough to end things like Indian slavery or Chinese coolies or peonage, etc., and yet it did not do so. It remained a vibrant institution in many places through the rest of the 19th century, and in remote places well into the 20th century.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So thinking about the ways that this system of the other slavery is shifting and responding to legal space and legal limits, which would include, for example, the criminalization of whole groups of people, like outlawing the Apache, for example, right? You are then able to put them into coercive labor systems. Thinking as a historian, is there an end point? Is there a time, a chronological moment when we can say on the back end that this other form of slavery sort of comes to an end? Knowing that coercive labor systems would still be in play, but is there a moment where we can say, okay, this looks like now an end point, and that something different is beginning afterward?

Andrés Reséndez: That's a very fascinating question, and an extraordinarily difficult one to answer. In some ways, the other slavery continues to this very day. We see reports about the so-called "new slavery," which I don't think it's anything new, but telling us that there are 40 million people around the world in more than 160 countries subjected to some quote-unquote, "New forms of slavery." The emphasis here is that no longer are we really dealing with a particular race, but we are really dealing with a host of mechanisms very compatible with what we are talking about: debt systems, debt peonage or convict leasing, prostitution, etc. So in some ways, the system never went away, and you can trace a line that is ongoing to this day.

Andrés Reséndez: In some other ways however, you can look, for example, at the overall percentage of slaves in the world. So when I say 40 million people today, that is a very high absolute number. But in relative terms it's—given that we have billions of people, this is a relatively small percentage that we are talking about. And so the question is, when did the percentage of people held in all kinds of bondage systems decline? If you believe that, say, in the Roman times, there were 25 percent of people were slaves, etc., again, this is something that I did not actively research in my book, but it seems that the percentage comes down sometime in the late 19th century, around that time. And again, I don't know exactly why, I have not actively researched that, but it might be an interesting turning point to look into.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, it gives us more food for thought, and especially around these notions of the continuation, even into the modern moment of coercive forms of labor. And that which we see today certainly isn't new, but is a lengthy part of human history and the human experience. Andrés, I can't thank you enough for joining us for this second episode and really bringing us into the modern moment, and helping us better understand the scale and scope but then also the importance and significance of what you term the other slavery, the enslavement of Indigenous people. Thank you so much, Andrés.

Andrés Reséndez: Thank you so much, Hasan. It's been a pleasure being here with you.

Meredith McCoy: Andrés Reséndez is a professor of History at the University of California-Davis. He is the author or several books—including A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, and The Other Slavery, which was National Book Award finalist and winner of the Bancroft Prize.

Meredith McCoy: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare their students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance offers free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find these online at Tolerance.org.

Meredith McCoy: Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of what is currently the United States, or how its legacies still influence us today. Now in our second season, this podcast is part of an effort to provide comprehensive tools for learning and teaching this critical topic. Teaching Tolerance provides free teaching materials that include over 100 texts, sample inquiries, and a detailed K-12 framework for teaching the history of American slavery. You can also find these online at Tolerance.org/hardhistory.

Meredith McCoy: Thanks to Dr. Reséndez for sharing his insights with us. This podcast is produced by Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer, with additional support from Robin Wise and Barrett Golding. Gabriel Smith provides content guidance, and Kate Shuster is our executive producer. Our theme song is "Different Heroes" by A Tribe Called Red (featuring Northern Voice), who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie.

Meredith McCoy: If what you heard today was helpful to you, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And then let us know what you thought. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Meredith McCoy: I’m Dr. Meredith McCoy, assistant professor of American Studies and History at Carleton College.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University.

Meredith McCoy and Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And we’re your hosts for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

 

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Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” He did it again in 1493. But when he returned, he brought slavery with him—introducing distinctly European practices of human bondage. He captured hundreds of people and carried them back to Spain and sold the survivors into slavery. They were the first of millions of Indigenous peoples enslaved by European invaders, settlers and their descendants over the next four centuries in the Americas. 

Andrés Reséndez is the author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. His work has changed conventional wisdom about the institution of slavery in the Atlantic World. 

Andrés Reséndez: I think this is a key missing piece of the history of the Americas. But only now are we beginning to put it all together in a more comprehensive understanding of the scope of this phenomenon, of the importance of this phenomenon.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Over the next two episodes, I’m going to speak with Dr. Reséndez. We will discuss key turning points in this history and explore how Indigenous enslavement expands our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery itself. 

Andrés Reséndez: Two-point-five [million] to 5 million human beings from Columbus to 1900 that took place in the entirety of the continent. Not a single region was spared from this scourge. The Spanish did it. The Portuguese did it. The English did it. The Dutch did it. The French did it. The Mexicans did it. The Americans did it. And eventually, various Indigenous groups became part of the system. It involved everybody who was a colonizer. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We’ll look beyond the British colonies to examine colonialism across the Americas and talk about why emancipation took so long to complete. And we will discuss the lasting legacy of colonialism, which continues to reverberate in our communities.

Andrés Reséndez: It really should open your eyes about the geographic scope, about the involvement of the actors and about the continuities all the way until today. We are finally coming to grip with a vast phenomenon involving millions of human beings that had been obscured before. And that is a very dynamic system that was able to operate in covert and clandestine ways. It never really went away, and it continued well past the formal abolition and the passing of the 13th and 14th Amendments.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m really excited to share this conversation with you, so stay tuned. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

Resources and Readings

• Learning for Justice, "Lies My Bookshelf Told Me"
• Learning for Justice, "Hercules’ Daughter"
• Rethinking Schools, Teaching for Black Lives

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

• University of Pennsylvania, Literacy, Culture, and International Education
• Twitter, @Ebonyteach
• The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games

References:

• Virginia Hamilton, The House of Dies Drear
• Walter Dean Myers, The Legend of Tariq
• John Steptoe, Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters
• Tonya Bolden, Searching for Sarah Rector
• PBS Africans in America, Benjamin Banneker
• National Archives, "To Thomas Jefferson from Benjamin Banneker, 1791"
• Chinua Achebe (Wikipedia)
• Imani Perry, May We Forever Stand:A History of the Black National Anthem
• James Weldon Johnson (Wikipedia)
• Learning for Justice, Black History Month: Teaching Beyond Slavery
• N. K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?
• Rudine S Bishop, Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children's Literature
• Glenda Armand, Love Twelve Miles Long
• Ashley Bryan, Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams
• Learning for Justice, Meet Frederick Douglass
• Detroit History, Frederick Douglass and John Brown Meeting Place
• Manumission (Wikipedia)
• Amma Asante film, Belle (Wikipedia)
• Emily Jenkins, A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat
• The New York Times, “Scholastic Halts Distribution of ‘A Birthday Cake for George Washington’”
• Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge

Hasan Kwame Jeffries

• Ohio State University, African-American History
• All Sides with Ann Fisher (radio), Black History Is American History
• Ohio State University, United Black World Month
   

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Transcript

Asha Jeffries: Here are some fun facts about George Washington. One, George Washington didn’t have a middle name. Two, George Washington’s birthday was not February 22, 1732. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wait, wait—Asha, why are you listing facts about George Washington?

Asha Jeffries: I have to make a list of fun facts about myself for school.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Okay …?

Asha Jeffries: Since Presidents day just went by, I have to read fun facts about American presidents like Lincoln and Washington. 

Asha Jeffries: Three, George Washington loved pets and owned rabbits. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And he owned people too, lots of them!

Asha Jeffries: Daddy!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Let’s rewind for a minute. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It had been a long day. That morning, I dropped my daughters off at school and headed to WOSU Studios to participate in a Black History Month discussion on All Sides with Ann Fisher, a public affairs talk show that airs on one of Central Ohio's NPR stations. That afternoon was filled with faculty meetings back to back to back. And, that evening, I delivered the keynote address at Ohio State's 2019 United Black World Month Celebration, pinch-hitting for CNN political commentator and fellow Morehouse man, Bakari Sellers, who had to cancel at the last minute because of bad weather.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When the day was done, and I was driving home, I reflected on all that had transpired. The radio program had been engaging. Ann Fisher always asks great questions. The faculty meetings were actually productive or at least as productive as faculty meetings can be, and the keynote address was favorably received. The students were fired up and ready to go. And, that night, I swear, when I saw the police, they rolled right past me. The day was a good day. But, as I neared my home and the adrenaline from being on the move began to wear off, all I could think about was getting some sleep.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When I entered my house, I beat a path straight for the bedroom. I heard my kids say something, and my wife, Rashida, say something else. But I was determined to lay down, even if only for a few minutes, so I mumbled something in return and kept right on moving. My grand plan was to rest my eyes for a hot second. Then get up and do some work around the house and maybe a little bit of work for school before turning in for good. But if sleep took me, I wasn't going to fight it. Dishes and laundry would have to wait and so would emails.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I plopped down on my bed relieved to finally be off of my feet. But no sooner had my head hit the pillow than my eight-year-old daughter, Asha, who was in the third grade at the time, burst into the room.

Asha Jeffries: Daddy, you have to help me with my homework.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What?

Asha Jeffries: Daddy, you have to help me with my homework.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I heard what you said the first time. I just don't know why you said it. Go ask your mom.

Asha Jeffries: She told me to ask you!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What?

Asha Jeffries: She told me-

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: “I heard what you said.” Still laying down, I shut my eyes, massaged my temples and surrendered to the inevitable. Fine. “What's your homework?”

Asha Jeffries: I have to come up with seven fun facts about myself.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: "Geez. That's the assignment," I thought to myself. "And your mom couldn't help you with that?" But before I could give voice to my incredulity, Asha explained that since Presidents Day had just passed, she first had to read a set of fun facts about American presidents. And that got my attention. I opened my eyes. "Which presidents?"

Asha Jeffries: Well, there's Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, too.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: "George Washington, huh?" Asha looked at me suspiciously as I sat up. I was all in now. "Okay. Let's start with Washington."

Asha Jeffries: George Washington loved pets and owned rabbits.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And he owned people, too!

Asha Jeffries: Daddy!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: "What?" Asha was giving me the side eye.

Asha Jeffries: George Washington had only one tooth when he became president.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And he took teeth from the people he enslaved to create a set for himself.

Asha Jeffries: Daddy, stop!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: "No, you stop." We stared at each other in silence, neither willing to yield. But soon, she continued with fun facts numbers three through seven, and I continued with my historical addendums. Asha and I eventually completed the assignment, and I eventually got some sleep. But the idea that so-called fun facts about early American presidents is how our children are introduced to enslavers troubled me then and troubles me now. Because when students are finally taught about slavery, which in most places doesn't really take place until the eighth grade, they have already been conditioned to believe that those who held others in bondage were good people, the kind of people who owned pets and bunny rabbits no less.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The fun facts approach to teaching slavery predisposes students to accept as true the lie that slavery was a benign if not a benevolent system. But if fun facts about enslavers isn't the right way to introduce slavery to young learners, then what should we be doing? And how should we be introducing slavery to children? Well, let's find out. I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises. In our second season, we are expanding our focus to better support elementary school educators to spend more time with teachers who are doing this work in the classroom and to understand the often hidden history of the enslavement of indigenous people in what is currently the United States.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery. Children's books are often the primary way that young students are exposed to the history of American slavery. Young people can and need to understand this country's founding injustices. But many books about slavery are harmful. Some sugarcoat oppression with pictures depicting so called happy slaves. Others only talk about successful escape stories as if slavery had a happy ending. And then there's the near total omission of the enslavement of indigenous people. This means that teachers and librarians need to consider the ways that the books they choose portray African Americans and indigenous people, as well as their cultures and the effects of enslavement.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In this episode, we're going to examine what teachers and families should consider when selecting children's books about slavery and teaching about marginalized identities. I had the chance to talk with Professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas at the Second Annual Teaching Black History Education Conference at the University of Missouri Columbia where she was giving a talk about teaching slavery through children's literature. In our conversation, she offered advice for helping teachers navigate and build around the limitations of books for young readers. She also explains why it's so important to create a balance of narratives when selecting books about marginalized and underrepresented communities. I'll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm really excited to welcome to this episode of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. We're actually in studio together in Missouri. So this is really fantastic, Ebony. I'm so glad that you are with us, and welcome.

Ebony Thomas: Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You look at, in your work and in your research, depictions of slavery in children's literature. Could you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in that subject, both professionally as well as personally.

Ebony Thomas: I first got interested in thinking about the presence of black children in kids' books as a kid myself searching for any traces of myself amid the pages of everything I was reading. I was reading Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. I noticed quite quickly that black children only showed up in some genres. We showed up lots in historical books, books about slavery or civil rights. Of course, there were the exceptions that proved the rules. So, Virginia Hamilton's mystery stories, The House of Dies Drear, Walter Dean Myers, The Legend of Tarik. I think about Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters even as a picture book from my childhood. So there were exceptions to that rule. But most of the time, when a black child showed up in a children's book, K-12, the book was trying to teach me something.

Ebony Thomas: I longed for magical escape. I longed for adventure. I longed to be taken out of 1980s Detroit. So, I have to say it's a lifelong interest that only became more acute when I started teaching kids in Detroit.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So, you didn't go directly from graduate school to the ivory tower. I mean, you spent some time in the classroom back in your hometown of Detroit teaching what grade level?

Ebony Thomas: I began by teaching fifth grade for two years. Then I taught high school English and creative writing for five years in Detroit and Ann Arbor. I noticed that, even with the books that we did have on the shelf, the books that I was presented with as a child in the 80s and early 90s and that I had for my students in the early 2000s, there were very limited scopes of what a black child character could do in those books. Enslaved children or children who are something less than free haunt all of English language children's literature because of the inception of the genre.

Ebony Thomas: I've been joking with audiences that there are only five kinds of black characters and/or black story people in books for children and teens. The first is the enslaved character. The second is the character who's fighting against Jim Crow or dealing with segregation during the nadir period of American history. The third is the character fighting for civil rights during the mid-20th century. The fourth is a character who's trying to survive life in the ghetto. If it's a boy, he's usually wrestling with whether to join a gang or not. Then there's the black best friend in suburbia.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So how does the enslaved character fit into that?

Ebony Thomas: Among all those characters, I think the enslaved character is the foundational trope for how black children exist in our literate imaginations. Because when children's literature itself as a genre first arose during the late Enlightenment and then really in the 19th century with the rise of this literate middle class with this idea of Victorian motherhood. These were mothers who could read books to their children. Or, if you were exceptionally wealthy, you could afford a nanny or governess who could read these tales to your young charges. This is a very small set of women, even among white English women, that they became idealized.

Ebony Thomas: I find that during that period enslavement and the question of black freedom was foremost on everyone's mind. So, during the same period that we begin getting the first children's books in the late 18th and early 19th century, this was the question around the British Empire. Slavery was the question in first the North American colonies and then the fledgling United States. So really the enslaved child of African descent, the enslaved black child, haunts to borrow a term from Toni Morrison, haunts the whole of U.S. and U.K. children's literature. Of course, there are exceptions to that rule, but those exceptions are notable because of their very exceptionality.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You mentioned that there are exceptions-

Ebony Thomas: Yes.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But there's also a running theme of exceptionalism in children's lit—really but all literature—when it comes to the African-American experience. How does that color the imagination of children about what slavery was, and what was possible or not possible in it?

Ebony Thomas: The problem with slavery is that it does not fit very neatly within either children's literature as a genre, as a category. There are many things about enslavement that are simply and fundamentally not representable within what we think about as children's books. Then it also doesn't fit the American exceptionalist meta narrative at all that we are trying to inculcate in children from their very earliest year. I think the result is that it sits on easily within the body of children's literature that we have especially post-civil rights movement. We're not really sure what to do with it. It's something that kids ought to know about. Very often, a picture book is how we introduce enslavement to children, but we don't do it very well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Because of this discomfort, this uneasiness with what to do with slavery, what do we wind up doing in the picture books themselves?

Ebony Thomas: I think a number of things end up happening because in a picture book, you only have 32 pages, generally very limited text and the book itself is meant to be chaperoned by an adult reader. So, someone is generally at first reading alongside the child. One of the challenges of slotting slavery within that format is that so much of the information being conveyed in the picture book is done through pictures. So many of the harsh realities of enslavement simply are not seen as appropriate for any child between the ages of four and eight. You can't depict most of it. Of course, there are some great picture books about enslavement that depict the joy of it. So, there's a focus on holidays, heroes and crafts. It means that the first information that young people get about enslavement tends to be incoherent without a lot of adult intervention around those books.

Ebony Thomas: What I believe that authors and illustrators have been doing since the close of the civil rights movement and the rise of multicultural education and publishing is they have nobly tried to rehabilitate the image of the black child, which before the civil rights movement had just been caricaturized, erased, marginalized or set aside as a helper throughout most of the history of children's literature. There just weren't very many agentive black children in those books. So, for the first 30 or 40 years after the civil rights movement, you're just doing repair. There has been this tendency to focus on heroes like set up Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman to be a hero that is equal to the founders so we can put Harriet Tubman alongside Abraham Lincoln. Some of this is because, in the United States, we really love our heroes.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I love the way you framed it as putting it into not just historical context, but into the context of the times in which we are living coming out of the civil rights era and the need to do this repair because so much psychic damage had been done. So, in a very well-meaning intentional, purposeful and needed and necessary way, you're going to have these authors who are consciously saying, "Listen, we need to show the heroism and the humanity of enslaved folk." So you get the smiling character of the enslaved person. But that can be problematic as I hear you saying, right? Because in a sense, certainly, there were moments of joy, but there's also moments of pain. There's great suffering in slavery. It's a challenge to try to thread that needle to show the humanity and to show through the ability to find the joy, but then not to minimize, erase or ignore the pain.

Ebony Thomas: That's it. You've hit the nail on the head because one of the challenges of enslavement is that this is almost impossible to do because so much of enslavement was so horrific that our ancestors didn't want to pass on the story. So, I never understood Toni Morrison's famous quote from Beloved, that this was not a story to pass on, until it came up in a K-5 classroom context. I'm not saying we shouldn't tell the story of enslavement to young children. They need to be introduced to the true nature of the country early on. I wonder about how we introduce it through these children's books.

Ebony Thomas: Generally, and I cannot prove it, I have not done a national survey to find out if this is the case, I believe that many people first learn that slavery was a thing that existed in this country from encountering a book about Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth when they were very young. As you notice on, those were exceptionalities because they were not only transcendent and heroic, it's almost as if the vast majority of white characters in early children's books were all Abraham Lincolns or Thomas Jeffersons. But no, we get a variety of white child life. We don't just get historical figures. We just don't get exceptional heroes.

Ebony Thomas: Yet, there are very few picture books, or relatively few picture books, about people who just, and I'm not trying to be flip with this at all, happened to be enslaved. Slavery was a legal condition. It didn't take one iota of our ancestors' humanity away from them. So, showing the joy, even within this horrific condition, is something that's so difficult because if you're showing them smiling, then people object that you're caricaturizing black people for smiling in a picture book. I think it's the context of the emotion. There was a controversy around two picture books that appeared in late 2015 and early 2016 that showed black people who were enslaved smiling while servicing white folks.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Not just any white folk. I mean, George Washington.

Ebony Thomas: Right. George Washington. [chuckles]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Which speaks to what you were saying about the sort of idealized heroes in American past, but go ahead.

Ebony Thomas: Absolutely. I think that the context of the emotion or this affective domain needs to be considered. It would have been fine to show enslaved people smiling if they weren't serving and smiling. They could have been having a party in the quarters, which happened. Or they could have been sewing a quilt to pass on—one of the few items that enslaved women were sometimes allowed to pass down. They could be smiling anticipating a new child. There were so many other ways of thinking about the context of that smile in those books. So, I want teachers and parents and caregivers and especially these children's publishers to understand that context is everything.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That's such a great point because one of the challenges that teachers have and parents, too, when they pick up these books, they have to do some analysis themselves. If you see the enslaved person smiling, that in itself is not necessarily problematic. But, like you said, what is the context? Is it serving and smiling? Or, is it resisting in some social way away from white folk where you're finding the joy, not in service to white folk, but joy in where they would have actually found it amongst their own. We're not necessarily conditioned to do that. Let me ask you this. What is the impact, either drawing on your research or even speculating or theorizing, what is the impact that this then has on that third grader when they're introduced even to the good stuff, even to the exceptional, right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Let's talk about Harriet Tubman but you haven't talked about anything else with regard to slavery. What impact does that then have on children for how they then will understand and engage with historical instruction with regard to slavery later on?

Ebony Thomas: I think that the challenges, even though our ancestors were just as human, just as noble, just as worthy, just as deserving as anyone else, slavery inherently tends to be a subjugated position. Children are acutely aware that an enslaved person is not a princess or a knight or a superhero or even just a kid down the street.

Ebony Thomas: Children pick up clues that to be enslaved means that you are not free. Humans long for freedom. I mean, we all do across all cultures, across all space and time. Because of the reality that our country was built on enslavement, the black child then has this dilemma of double consciousness quite early on, far earlier than I think we give it credit for. They end up being like my nephew. When he was four years old, he has gorgeous, dark chocolate skin. He was the only little black boy in his suburban class in Michigan. He came to me and said, "Auntie, you know what? I'm dark-skinned." Just that earliest awareness, that skin color in the United States has not only historically but in contemporary times meant something about whether you were free or not, or as free as other people.

Ebony Thomas: Children are picking up clues from their very earliest ages. So, I would submit that, as amazingly radiant as Mother Harriet was, as heroic as she is, some black girls still long to see themselves as a Disney Princess because a Disney princess doesn't have the same weight And I think even as an enslaved real-life character. We keep telling teachers, "You need diverse books. We need more diverse books. We need more diverse books." But, because of the genre disparity in children's literature, when a teacher, often a white teacher, grabs a book off the shelf, it usually is in one of those five categories I've named and very often it's about slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So I wonder if, and speaking about context, you have to understand and recognize and teach the context for things that are happening within the book. But I wonder, and listening to you, if we are too dependent on picture books to teach history. That what we should be doing is teaching it in history classes and social studies classes. Then using literature and children's literature to dig deeper as opposed to saying, "We're going to let that do all of the work for it."

Ebony Thomas: Absolutely. I agree 110 percent. If I had my way, we would add back social studies and science curriculum for our younger kids. So, of course, in primary grades, we're teaching them letter and number skills. We're teaching them how to read. We're teaching basic math. But once the kid gets to second or third grade, we absolutely need to push social studies instruction earlier. So having people who are subject experts thinking about how best do we introduce this topic to young children. So perhaps instead of a narrative, there are very early informational texts that we could give. We do have some, a small but growing number of informational texts for very young readers where they can get some introduction to primary source document, even if it's just a picture of the young person. Or a picture of Frederick Douglass, great orator Frederick Douglass. We do have some of that. But typically, kids do not get that until they're in the upper elementary grades, but more commonly in middle school.

Ebony Thomas: This is not happening because of the testing regime in the country right now. I must call the name of a couple of amazing African-American women children's writers who are doing incredible work and that I would like to see happen more for the younger grades. There's Tonya Bolden. So, I've been asking for more books about the late 19th century in black children's literature because right now, we don't have very much at all. She's done an amazing book among many, all her books are wonderful, about Sarah Rector, who was a late 19th century Gilded Age black millionaire, child millionaire. She was black and native, I believe. She did all this research, historical research, but the book is probably most appropriate for kids in grades six through eight, maybe fifth-graders who are really great readers.

Ebony Thomas: I'm wondering if we can have picture books about books like that because this is a notable figure, but we just don't introduce those kinds of kids to young audiences very early on. Usually it's the heroes. But, again, it's just as if the whole of picture books for all children were just notable presidents and world leaders. It's very distancing for kids. Then you layer slavery on top of that. Once a kid grapples with what slavery is, it's very difficult to deal with. They don't want to think about it. So, we'll hear by middle or high school, "I don't want to think about slavery. You're always shoving slavery down my throat," because they've just been inundated with that when they ask for books that are about their people.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I hear you saying that not only do we need books that portray the diversity of African-American experiences in slavery, for example, but books that display the diversity of the African-American experience over time. That by simply having your slavery and then civil rights books, and then books centered around Barack Obama-

Ebony Thomas: [laughter]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You miss the full scope of the African-American experience. You need that for children to see themselves in these characters. You just gave this wonderful presentation, and you were talking about how our children are often stereotyped about their reading scores and what the usual narrative is about their reading scores. Could you just say just briefly what you were saying?

Ebony Thomas: Oh, absolutely. [chuckles]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It was a wonderful point.

Ebony Thomas: This is a quote from my book, The Dark Fantastic, which is not specifically about slavery. It's about thinking about race in the imagination and how the imagination forms through fantasy tropes. But I noted that maybe it's not that black kids can't read. Maybe it's we adults have not really considered what we are giving them to read. Because, if most of the books that a child reads between preschool and kindergarten and grade 12 feature really difficult topics in history, hard history, then after a while, they're not going to want to read that.

Ebony Thomas: This is what we hear from kids. I mean, this is what I hear from my nieces and nephews. We already know that. I'll never forget when I was working on this project and my niece was about 11, my eldest niece. I have three of them, but the eldest one. I asked her what she knew about slavery. The way that she narrated it to me, she's very animated type-A personality, bubbly, friendly, just like me. She went into a flat monotone and sounded like a Wikipedia article. The way that she just depersonalized it was uncharacteristic for her. That was not her. It's like, "Yeah. A long time ago, people went over in ships and... " So it's almost like she was parroting whatever she had learned in school by sixth grade about enslavement.

Ebony Thomas: The seven years I spent teaching K-12 absolutely inform everything else that I have done during and since. So, I think that getting my students to want to engage with the past was extremely and incredibly challenging unless the past was showing resistance. One of my most popular lessons when I taught ninth grade English, so this is not little kids, but ninth grade English was when I taught the exchanges between Benjamin Banneker and Thomas Jefferson. So they corresponded. We read excerpts of those letters back and forth. My students, particularly my boys, loved Banneker's responses to Thomas Jefferson. I'd have them read it out loud, reader's theater, and they would just go, "Sir, sir, sir." They turned Banneker into a hip hop verse because he was going back on Thomas Jefferson's prejudices about people of African descent. He was just really going in on the critique.

Ebony Thomas: I just think that there are ways in which kids, my kids in particular, were really trying their best to stay in the present. I call it presentism on Twitter sometimes, but I think that the imperatives of embodied black existence in the here and now drew a lot about Detroit kids into reality, keeping it real. Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm struck, too, as you were commenting on the conversations between, exchanges between Jefferson and Banneker, and that the students, especially the young black boys, keyed in and connected to Banneker. I'm very much of the mind, and we've talked about it here in early episodes of the podcast, about the power of resistance as a tool for getting students, especially black students, to engage in this subject so they don't get turned off. Part of the reason why they get turned off is because how they would understand in the simplest way, if somebody is treating you badly, you fight back. So why aren't these people fighting back? If they're not fighting back, I don't want to have anything to do to deal with them. It's somewhat ahistorical because you're usually saying, "Okay, you got to build context and then build a context for why people..." Look, slavery's bad. Kids understand that. Right? Period.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So, then you can say, okay, this is how people fought back because in fighting back, they are able to recognize the thread, the humanity of the enslaved. Once you see the humanity of the enslaved, you do not push back against connecting with them. Then it's like, "Oh, okay. Now let me figure out what was going on." I mean, even thinking about children's books, I think even the best of them, it creates that tension because, well, are you just doing the exceptionalism again? It's like, "Yeah, but if you're doing it and not leaving it there." They're doing and then using it as a door, a portal through which to explore this greater experience and say, "Okay, this was one experience. I understand that people fought back. I understand that everybody wanted to fight back but didn't necessarily have these opportunities or ways to do it in this way, but they fought back in these different ways."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If we have books that... Or look for those books that touch upon those themes, I think our students would be better served by them.

Ebony Thomas: Yeah. I get excited. Yeah. A children's literature of black resistance is what we really-

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Is what we need.

Ebony Thomas: Is what we need. I'm just thinking about pitching this to my friends at Scholastic and Harper Collins. We need resistance books. We really do. Our kids need them; all kids need them. Because when they see us clapping back, it'll be other people. These books are teaching people how to treat us or teaching everybody what black people are in the imagination. I'm with you 100 percent there. Yeah, we need books of resistance way, way more. So, we're still focused on closing the achievement gap, raising test scores because that is the true measure of equity. We have not asked many questions about the kinds of reading and writing that we are presenting our children with, or the kinds of literacy benchmarks that we're asking them to achieve when some of this literature may be inherently traumatic.

Ebony Thomas: Again, getting into trauma, I'm a literacy scholar. I'm not a child psychologist. But what does it mean when so many of the books that children encounter in classrooms deal with things that many adults don't want to talk about, that many adults feel are best left in the past. But we require little kids to think about it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Some would then say that, "Well, then we shouldn't talk about slavery in the classroom and certainly not at these early ages." But I actually hear you saying something different. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I hear you saying, "No, we need to talk about it. We need to teach it." But we have to do it with balance that we don't want... We just recreate or create new traumas if that's the only thing that we focus on. In our curriculums, we also have to look for children's books and children's literature and picture books that show the African-American experience and African-American people in their full breadth and depth. Is that an accurate assessment?

Ebony Thomas: Absolutely accurate. Absolutely accurate. I keep thinking about Chinua Achebe's... I hope I pronounced that correctly. But Chinua Achebe's quote about wanting a balance of stories for Africa. The late great Nigerian writer, but that's true across the pond, too. That's true in the diaspora, too. We need stories about that hard history of the... I'm thinking about “Lift Every Voice and Sing” because of Imani Perry's amazing May We Forever Stand. So that's a great book about the Negro national anthem, or the black national anthem, written by James Weldon Johnson and his brother.

Ebony Thomas: But here's the thing I think about that line "Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us." It's important for us to know about the darkness of that past. Again, dark as metaphor is also something that I think about in my scholarly work and how we use dark in the West. Point taken. But the other half of the line is what the Johnson brothers, a generation removed from slavery, taught us back in the day. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. That is so important. We need both to know about the past. Our people have come from, as my grandmother used to say, a mighty long way. But our people also have hope for the future. Quoting N. K. Jemisin, "How Long 'til Black Future Month?" Although I do think we still...

Ebony Thomas: Black History Month is important, but that's why it's so important to make sure even from the very earliest ages, from board books, we give children images of the black past but also black presents and futures so that we can begin to break out of these boxes and these cages that trap black people. Not only in narratives but as whatever happens in stories is sort of a dress rehearsal for what happens in real life. I just want us to really think about these images and the kinds of subconscious messaging that not only our kids are getting, because I haven't gotten to all kids because I'm... Of course, first to our children thinking about what they're going through, but these books travel where we do not.

Ebony Thomas: When there are children who do not encounter many black people or families or kids like them, but they're reading these books about slavery and civil rights and the ghetto. Of course, those books are augmented with multimedia and digital media and social media. They're getting an idea of who black people are. Then they have to deal with people of African descent in the real world. So far, that has not been working very well for all of us.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In thinking about these books, in particular, in the books that deal with slavery, and knowing that taken in isolation, they can be problematic. The depictions of the African-American experience dependent upon the context can be problematic. But they can be useful, the books themselves can be useful for helping to get our children, our students, our young people to understand what slavery was and its centrality not only to the African-American experience in this earlier period, but to the centrality of the American experience.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In our school libraries, these books are on the shelves. There's picture books that deal with slavery. And, there are new books being published all the time. What are two or three elements that teachers should be looking at when they pull these books from the shelves and are considering using them in the classroom to teach about slavery?

Ebony Thomas: Okay. Here are a few criteria. The first is the teacher or the caregiver who's pulling that book from the shelf needs to figure out who's telling the story. The story might be about the helpful white character. Where enslaved characters might not be telling their own stories or they’re seen as beside the point. While I'm not saying all those stories are terrible, I would question whether or not that's actually a story about enslavement at all. It's about something else. It's about the construction of U.S. whiteness or white society or something like that. Who is telling the story is one of the criteria. Look at the narration or the focalizer. How is the story being narrated. Where's the focus of it?

Ebony Thomas: Another criteria that I would want teachers or caregivers to use while evaluating this kind of literature is for them to not look at the words for a moment and just flip through the illustrations in that book and to see what the enslaved characters look like or other characters of African descent. Where are they on the page? Are they centered? When you open up a picture book, it's a double-page spread. Is that character centered? Are they off to the side? Do you see their faces? Are the drawings lifelike or otherwise stylized? Now, this is very subjective here. But there's a thin line between artistic license and caricature. Because of our long U.S. history of caricature, and unfortunately blackface minstrelsy, look very carefully at the illustrator's technique. How are they drawing those features.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The features.

Ebony Thomas: Yeah, the features of the people in the books. Then I think, finally, this is a more subjective category, I would think about the prosody of the text in the story, the prosody of the emotion. Thinking about how emotions are being construed throughout the text and just being very sensitive to who is in your classroom or who is around that circle. These books we know from anecdotal evidence and hopefully from research soon, young adults or adults coming of age have told us heartbreaking stories of being the only black child in a classroom when slavery comes up. Or for older children, they always talk about To Kill a Mockingbird and having to deal with that.

Ebony Thomas: I myself had a classroom experience where my only black girl in a class in Ann Arbor, I read Crooks. She was offended by a young white boy reading African-American vernacular English. Being very sensitive to any emotional issues that arise in that book and thinking about the ways in which you handle that issue depending upon who the children are in your class. Only you can do that. You know your children best. So I think I'll close with just know the children in front of you. Know what they're ready for, know what they're prepared for and proceed with courage and good faith because we need you doing this good work.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Know where they're coming from.

Ebony Thomas: Absolutely.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Know their communities.

Ebony Thomas: Know their backgrounds.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Know their background, know their families. That's great. That's great. So, you've looked at all of these books, you and your research team. What are some of the books that do a good job? Certainly want to leave our listeners with some useful information. But then even some of the common characteristics that you see across some of the books. In other words, things that our teachers, the listeners here, should be looking for when they're thinking about using a picture book in the classroom.

Ebony Thomas: I always go back to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop's work. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop is Professor Emerita at The Ohio State University. She is one of the founders or perhaps one of the first preeminent multicultural children's literature scholars. She's the one who came up with the metaphor of the windows, mirrors and doors of children's literature. In her book, Free Within Ourselves, she has a five-point rubric for evaluating culturally authentic African-American literature.

Ebony Thomas: One of her criteria that I love is thinking about the role of family and community. Because without our families and communities, we would not have survived any of it. We wouldn't have survived the middle passage. We would not have survived the plantations. We would not have survived Jim Crow. We certainly wouldn't have survived what we're going through now with mass incarceration and police brutality.

Ebony Thomas: One of the things that I look for in picture books about enslavement is how they are portraying black family and community survival even during tough times. The best children's books do that. For instance, one book that I love and I talk about in my presentations is Glenda Armand's Love Twelve Miles Long about Frederick Douglass and his mother. We all know that Douglass' mother was sold away from her son very early on. She walked 12 miles to see him. I think was it every other week? It's been a long time since I've read the narrative, so please forgive me for that. We read it a lot when I was in high school and then undergrad at FAMU.

Ebony Thomas: I like that because although some of it is... We're not getting the full horror of a mother being sold away from her baby. It still shows the profound love that this woman had for her baby where she's walking... After she's tired and she has worked, she's in enslaved labor and she's walking to see her son and how excited he gets for the visits of his mother, I think that's humanizing. I like Ashley Bryan's Freedom Over Me. Ashley Bryan is one of our... I had the pleasure of meeting him. Penn just acquired his collection of papers, but Mr. Bryan is 95 years old. So, he is a living legend, living griot. He is a living griot. Freedom Over Me presents different stories of enslaved people.

Ebony Thomas: Along with family and community, anytime we can think about the strength of the collective, which you're not allowed to talk about the people or the collective in the United States, because then you're a stinking communist or a socialist. But thinking about collective action--I think that's important. Maybe picture books where we get more than one person. We break up the hero narrative. Or we look at the people who Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were in conversation with. Here's a picture book I'd like to see—because I'll say this and then stop because I could just go on and on.

Ebony Thomas: Here's a picture I'd like to see that we won't get. I'd like to see more picture books about interracial coalitions and how interracial coalitions have both succeeded and failed throughout U.S. history. Because it's always been something that the powers that be don't want to see because of the way in which the United States is constructed. So Frederick Douglass and John Brown had a very important conversation in Detroit, Michigan, back in the 1850s. I see Dr. Jeffries, he's a historian, he's nodding. That conversation you don't learn about until you are in college or university. [chuckles]

Ebony Thomas: So, we don't have many picture books about John Brown. What I learned about John Brown when I was a kid was that he was crazy. This important conversation that Douglass and Brown had was in my hometown of Detroit. There was a historical marker there. I would like to see... There is a way you can tell that story, maybe not to four-year-olds but to 7 or 8-year-olds where you can talk about maybe not the whole... You don't carry the story out to the bloody end of Harpers Ferry, but there were people thinking about abolition. Oh, one more. I know I get...

Ebony Thomas: Another story I'd like to think about is the fact that enslavement, we give ourselves credit. The way that enslavement exists in the early literacy curriculum is that the United States was misguided around things like… There were some people who were... They held people, it's a bad thing, but there was a civil war. There were these black heroes that either self-liberated or they freed others. Then there was a civil war, yay Abraham Lincoln, yay heroes. The march toward freedom and progress and equality kept keeping on.

Ebony Thomas: What I love to see is more books about how the British Empire pretty much manumitted their slaves. Now, I'm not giving the British Empire any credit for anything. Worst empire in human history. Just period. I mean, I'm not a historian but as a history fan girl, I mean, they make Rome look like they were playing patty-cake with people. Britain was horrible. But there was manumission. So, it's not that Great Britain was any better than United States, but just thinking about the road to manumission over in the U.K. and in the Empire, and then thinking about why the United States chose specifically not to do it that way. There are so many little stories you could tell.

Ebony Thomas: Okay. I promise I'll be quiet after this one.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No, you're good.

Ebony Thomas: I'll tell you. I'm a history fan girl. I'm not a historian, but I love historical fiction, especially for young people. There was a lovely film by Afro-British filmmaker, Amma Asante, called Belle by a historical figure who was instrumental at the beginning of the conversations around ending slavery in the British Empire. Her name was Dido Elizabeth Belle. She was a biracial daughter of a peer and a black slave. Her grandfather was Lord Mansfield who presided over the Zong case.

Ebony Thomas: I have been asking children's literature to give me a book. I asked for a white or a middle grades book, be a picture book. I said, "This is a woman who was so beautiful. She's depicted in a very famous painting and you can't have a picture..." We still don't have a picture book about Belle. Why not? There are so many stories that we could have and don't. I think that's what really strikes me. We get the same story over and over again. Black authors keep telling me, "I am so tired of writing about the same 12 black historical figures," when you get them off the record because, of course, they're trying to eat. But the black authors and illustrators are telling me, I hope they don't stop talking to me now, but they're telling me, "I am so tired."

Ebony Thomas: They want to do these innovative projects and then the publishers, they look at what teachers around the country, particularly in places where there aren't a lot of black people, and they have a Black History Month program or curriculum or unit to put together. That's what sells. Oh, we'll take another book about King and God bless King. I feel like I always have to love my ancestors, love on my ancestors while I'm doing this critique of the contemporary industry. I'm thankful to those 12 figures because they were transcendent. However, there was thousands about the stories we're missing.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So, there are some good books out there. There are a couple of fantastic books, but a lot of the books that are out there are problematic. But even problematic books can be useful in the classroom. 

Ebony Thomas: Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But you really got to know what you're doing. What are some of the tropes that can be critically analyzed by teachers and used effectively in the classroom with young people?

Ebony Thomas: I think that one way that teachers can help their students develop a critical lens around children's literature is to actually do the historical reading themselves. I'm not saying that you have to go become an expert on enslavement in order to teach slavery and children's literature. However, I do think that coupling your unit around a children's picture book with some of the actual history, even if you know it, and your knowledge informs what it is that you do is very helpful.

Ebony Thomas: For instance, during the smiling slaves controversy... Okay, let me explain what that was. In late 2015 and early 2016, there were two picture books that were published that featured smiling enslaved people who were serving. They were in a service capacity. The first was called A Fine Dessert. It was written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. Sophie Blackall has gone on to become a two-time Caldecott winner. So, I have to note that here on this podcast and every time I get a mic because people have said that sometimes protests on social media hurt someone's career. In Sophie's case, it may have helped her career because people felt like there was pile on.

Ebony Thomas: So anyway, that team was all white. So, you had a white author, white illustrator, white editor, I believe the art director. So, everybody involved, and I don't know about everybody around the table. The stakeholders there were white. About three months after that protest, another book came out that Dr. Jeffries mentioned, Hasan, you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, A Birthday Cake for George Washington. Unfortunately, everyone responsible for that book, and I won't call their names, but everyone responsible for that book was a woman of color. A couple were black women.

Ebony Thomas: Here's the thing. Some people were appalled and wanted to cancel them. I didn't feel that way because I felt as if we grow up here just like everybody else and we're affected by the same images as everyone else. But then this is what you do with a book like A Birthday Cake for George Washington where you have people happily baking an anachronistic cake for... Because the kind of cake they even made, that's just 20th century cake and they would have made something different in the late 18th century. But anyway, neither here nor there.

Ebony Thomas: What you do is you pair that with a read of a wonderful book—you should read this—Erica Armstrong Dunbar's Never Caught. Then you read about how George and Martha Washington actually treated their enslaved people. Then you are able to hack that lesson or hack the book for the kids. So, you can have them read the picture book, use it with older elementary kids, so upper elementary kids. Then you can have them look at the Mount Vernon website. There are resources on Teaching Tolerance, Teaching for Change and other historical websites. You can have them see what is accurate about the book, what's good about the book, what do we like about it?

Ebony Thomas: But then how might you change the story given this new information? So, there are ways that we can help our students develop a critical lens around the story. Then at the end of that, you all can have fun together. If they're younger, you guide them through it. If they're older, certainly middle school kids, you can just... if you have any kind of web access, they can just go to town. You can have them write letters even if they don't send the letters to the publisher, although maybe that would be a good idea. They could write how they might revise the book. Then that helps them take ownership of the story. How might I have written the story differently now that I know what actually happened? That Hercules wasn't exactly pleased to make the Washingtons’ food while his family were in chains or he was in chains. That's how I think we can use even bad books.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thinking about the quote unquote "bad books," they focus on, perhaps more so than some of the other subjects, the question of the founders. There's something going on there because this is a birthday cake for George Washington. If you were to ask that same team and pitch the idea of, do a book about a birthday cake for George Washington, they're like, "Oh, okay." Clearly, they thought that was okay. But if you would have said, "Do a birthday cake for an enslaver,"—

Ebony Thomas: [laughter] Oh, no.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: They might have been like, "Oh, what y'all talking about?" Right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But the association or there was no association in that sense that George Washington is as much a person holding people in bondage as he is the first president of the United States. There's a dissociation, but that's something that we see.

Ebony Thomas: There is something about the founding... I kept trying to find picture books that accurately depicted the Washington's cruel treatment of the Mount Vernon enslaved folk, or the people in Philadelphia, which black Philadelphians told me about when I moved there seven years ago. They said, "You need to go down to Independence Mall. You can see Washington chained up his enslaved folk in the basement." I was like, "What?" Because you don't hear that. So, my student and I, we have an article out in Social Education that came out last year. We spent over a year trying to find… Okay. We even said let's just look at the 21st century, picture books from the 21st century. Do they depict Washington slaveholding? The answer is no.

Ebony Thomas: When they do, and I know you know this, Hasan, they want to give him a pass. They say it was Martha. Those were Martha’s slaves. She was cruel. So, there's something about... We have whitewashed Washington and certainly many of the other founders we don't talk about or think about. There's something there that bears more examining than I've had the capacity to do.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I think part of what we're doing in portraying and depicting, particularly the founders because the founders will serve as the stand-in because if you can absolve the founders of their enslavement of other people, then what can you say about others who were enslaving? So, it really bleeds over. But I think what we're actually doing, and this can become the danger of treating these enslavers, treating the founders in this particular way, is what we're actually doing is rationalizing evil. 

Ebony Thomas: [sighs—lets out breath] Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What are the implications of that for how we want to then study slavery and the American experience and how we understand racism and the harmful effects of white supremacy and continuing discrimination a century and a half after slavery ends if we've rationalized the way and muted the harm that slavery does beginning with the very moment that we introduce the issue through children's literature most likely in the second, third and fourth grades.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I think we kind of got at this, but I want to ask it just very pointedly if you will. So, here's the question: Why is it important to teach slavery to children?

Ebony Thomas: Oh, my goodness. [chuckles] It is important to teach slavery to children because if you do not understand slavery in the United States, you will not understand not only racism in the contemporary United States, you will not understand the contemporary United States. It's stitched into the very fabric of even our current political culture. You won't understand the Electoral College. You won't understand everything being talked about at Washington, D.C. You won't understand why we don't have universal healthcare. There's just so much about the U.S. that is impossible to understand without understanding that we were once a slave society.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: As I listened to you answer, I'm struck by the realization that we will teach American history so we can pull out... If we don't teach slavery to children, it's not like we're not going to teach some version of American history then. So then, when we do eventually circle back around and want to introduce slavery, it makes no sense-

Ebony Thomas: That’s it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And its impact and the lasting legacy of it doesn't make any sense-

Ebony Thomas: That’s it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And doesn't gel and jive with the version of history that we have been teaching from the very beginning of their education.

Ebony Thomas: That's it. You and I know as professors, as educators and as scholars what human beings do with contradictory information. Something's got to give or give way. Something has got to give way. Either the United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave or else we are a recovering slave society. We know that the two can exist in tension and have existed in tension. But that's really hard for people. We see an increasing number of people who are rejecting the latter completely. Like, you know, “No, we don't want to think about this. Slavery was a long time ago, and the Native Americans were conquered.” That's another kettle of fish. That's another episode, but those are the twin founding sins of the country that we have to wrestle with. So, yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. Ebony Thomas, thank you so much for taking the time. It's been a long day. It's been a wonderful and powerful conference. You did great work this morning, this afternoon. Thank you so much for taking the time out this evening to carry on the conversation and share your insights and your wisdom and your knowledge and your suggestions about how to use children's picture books effectively to accurately teach the history of American slavery. So thank you very much.

Ebony Thomas: Anytime. It's been a pleasure.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. She is a former Detroit Public School teacher and past chair of the National Council of Teachers of English Standing Committee on Research. Her most recent book is The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games from NYU Press. Dr. Thomas is also an advisory board member and consultant for the Teaching Hard History project.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center helping teachers and schools prepare their students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance offers free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at tolerance.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of what is currently the United States or how its legacy still influences us today. Now in our second season, this podcast is part of an effort to provide comprehensive tools for learning and teaching this critical topic. Teaching Tolerance provides free teaching materials that include over 100 texts, sample inquiries and a detailed K-12 framework for teaching the history of American slavery. You can find these online at tolerance.org/hardhistory.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks to Dr. Thomas for sharing some insights with us. Thanks to LaGarrett King for making my interview with Dr. Thomas possible, and a special thanks to Asha Jeffries for playing herself in the introduction. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford with production assistance from Russell Gragg. Kate Shuster is our executive producer. Our theme song is “Different Heroes” by A Tribe Called Red featuring Northern Voice who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If you like what we're doing, please let your friends and colleagues know. Tell us what you think on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate the feedback.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. 

Resources and Readings

• Teaching Tolerance magazine, "We Are Our Ancestors' Wildest Dreams"
• James Madison's Montpelier, The Mere Distinction of Colour (exhibition)

Kate Shuster

• Learning for Justice articles
• Learning for Justice, Teaching the Movement
• Teaching Hard History, K-5 Framework: Essential Knowledge

Bria Wright
Fifth grade, Raleigh, North Carolina, Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board

References:

• Teaching Hard History, K-5 Framework: Essential Knowledge #1
• Beyoncé, Freedom feat. Kendrick Lamar (video)
• Glenn E. Singleton, Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools
• Learning for Justice, My Multicultural Self

Marvin Reed
Third grade, Berkeley, California, Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board

References:

• Learning for Justice, Remembering My Four Friends 50 Years Later
• Teaching Hard History, K-5 Framework: Essential Knowledge #5
• Learning for Justice, The Story of César Chávez, Dolores Huerta and a Great Movement for Social Justice
• Teaching Hard History, K-5 Framework: Essential Knowledge #7
• English Language Arts (ELA) Standards
• Learning for Justice: Lesson, The Little Rock Battle for School Integration
• Sharon Draper, Fire from the Rock
• Learning for Justice: Feature, Beyond the Little Rock Nine
• Langston Hughes
• Maya Angelou

Alice Mitchell
Fifth grade, Boston, Massachusetts, Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board

References:

• Teaching Hard History, K-5 Framework: Essential Knowledge #12
• Teaching Hard History, K-5 Framework: Essential Knowledge #14
• Learning for Justice, Poster Warning Blacks in Boston: Kidnappers

Marian Dingle
Fourth grade, Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board

References:

• Teaching Hard History, K-5 Framework: Essential Knowledge #15
• The New York Times: Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project
• U.S. Supreme Court, Dred Scott v. Sandford
• PBS/WGBH, Africans in America: The Middle Passage
   

Return to Episode Listing

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Montpelier is the former home of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, the father of the Constitution and the architect of the Bill of Rights. Montpelier is also a former slave labor camp. James Madison held more than 100 African Americans in bondage at Montpelier. Never freeing a single soul, not even upon his death. Historic preservationists have been busy at Montpelier, telling the story of slavery and freedom. They have reconstructed portions of the enslaved quarter, rebuilt the cabin of the freedman George Gilmore and re-created a Jim Crow‒era railroad station.

Meanwhile, archeologists have conducted ongoing digs at the property that have uncovered remarkable remnants of the material culture of the enslaved people who lived there. Two years ago, museum curators unveiled a permanent exhibition about slavery at Madison’s plantation and beyond called “The Mere Distinction of Colour.” In 2018, I took 10 Ohio State students to Montpelier to explore the evolution of the color line from the nation’s founding through the present. For four days, we absorbed all that Montpelier had to offer.

We even spent an evening in Charlottesville with a community activist who shared her personal account of the tragic events of the summer before, when white nationalists descended on the city intent on terrorizing African Americans, Jews and Muslims. Before all that, we began our Montpelier experience with a tour of Madison’s mansion. The high point of the Montpelier house tour is Madison’s library. When standing in Madison’s library, it is easy to imagine him sitting at his desk, gazing out of the window that faces the front yard of the mansion, taking in the sweeping view of the rich, verdant, rolling hills, made productive and profitable by the people he enslaved, while he crafted the core elements of the Constitution.

We completed the house tour by walking the grounds surrounding the mansion. This part of the tour was especially significant as the docent discussed the architecture of the house. She noted that the bricks used to construct the building were all made by hand, on-site by enslaved African Americans. “If you look closely,” she said, “in some of the bricks, you can see the handprints left by the enslaved people who made them.”

I urged the students to move closer, to get a good look at the handprints. I also encouraged them to reach out and touch them. As they did, they noticed something odd. The handprints were much smaller than theirs are. That’s because the handprints were those of children. On James Madison’s plantation, the bricks used to build his mansion were made by the African American children he enslaved. In a couple of weeks, I’m taking a second group of Ohio State students to Montpelier. I want them to visit Madison’s library to see where American history happened.

I want them to touch the bricks made by the children Madison enslaved, to see how American history happened. You see, the students need to understand that the library in which Madison conceived of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights rests on a foundation of bricks made by the African American children he enslaved. Teaching hard history means helping students understand that Americans don’t just stand on the shoulders of mythological giants like those who wrote the U.S. Constitution. They also stand on the shoulders of enslaved African American children.

Because these children were among those who made it possible for enslavers to construct the nation we live in today. This process of helping students understand the hard history of American slavery has to begin in the elementary grades. Young learners need to be inoculated against the myths about American history—myths that perpetuate falsehoods about the past and the present. This is no easy task, but it is doable. It is also necessary. I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. A special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises. In our second season, we are expanding our focus to better support elementary school educators to spend more time with teachers who are doing this work in the classroom. To understand the often-hidden history of the enslavement of Indigenous people in what would become the United States.

Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery. Teaching about slavery is challenging, especially in elementary school classrooms. Children encounter slavery in one form or another as soon as they begin school. It can be tempting to focus only on heroes and avoid explaining oppression. Our omissions speak as loudly as what we choose to include. What children learn in the early grades has broad consequences for the rest of their education.

We’ve been thinking a lot about how to do a better job. In this episode, we’re going to take a closer look at a first-of-its-kind framework that Teaching Tolerance has created to introduce slavery to elementary students. Kate Shuster is the project director for the Teaching Hard History initiative. She’s going to explain what’s in the new framework for K‒5 educators, including useful source materials. We’re also going to hear from four elementary school teachers about how and why they’re beginning to use the framework in their classrooms. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

I’m really excited to welcome to the podcast, Kate Shuster. Kate, how are you doing?

Kate Shuster: I’m great, Hasan. I’m a long-time listener, first-time caller.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Much more than that. We actually get to pull the curtain back on the Teaching Hard History: American Slavery podcast. What’s revealed behind the curtain is Kate. Kate is really a magician. She is the one that has done so much work in leading this team and putting not just the podcast together but the framework and the material and the resources. We don’t have any of this stuff without you, Kate. It’s good to have the mic in front of you so everybody gets to hear about your wisdom and knowledge.

Kate Shuster: It’s really great to be here. I always like when I get to have a chat with you about anything. Thanks for having me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Of course. Tell us about the new K‒5 framework for teaching American slavery.

Kate Shuster: Okay. It is a project that was about 18 months in the making. I had the honor of leading the framework-construction process. There were dozens and dozens of sets of eyes of reviewers and educators and people that we consulted from across the education spectrum to try to build an architecture for teachers that they could use to teach about slavery in meaningful ways that would be appropriately structured throughout the K–5 ecosystem. I was the lead author, but there are several other authors that I just want to mention. Our listeners will hear from all of these folks this season on the podcast.

There’s you, Meredith McCoy, who’s your co-host. Margaret Newell, Sarah Shear, Christina Snyder and Ebony Thomas are all folks that worked very hard on this document. The process really was beginning by asking teachers at different grade levels throughout K–5 what they did, what they wanted to see and what would help them to support instruction. There were a lot of challenges there. The idea of the framework was to create a diversity of access points for teachers. The elementary education system is very different from the way that we teach history in secondary grades.

Elementary teachers, they have a diverse skillset; they teach all of the subjects usually. They will have a classroom where they can easily integrate literature as well as history instruction, math and science. In many ways, they have these opportunities as educators to weave subjects in seamlessly but it also means that sometimes, they don’t have dedicated time or strategies for specific content. The idea of what we wanted to do was create something that would go with lessons that teachers already had.

It wasn’t like we were trying to have a giant footprint in their classrooms and crowd out valuable time for all the other stuff that young students need. Also, to meet students where they are in age-appropriate and culturally sustaining ways and to have diversities of situations where teachers could begin to integrate instruction about slavery into the classroom. The framework, the way that it’s structured, what we settled on was a set of 20 Essential Knowledge items. There’s 10 for each grade band. In elementary education, we talk about the K–2 grade band and then the 3–5 grade band.

Each of those grade bands in the framework has we’ve identified 10 items of Essential Knowledge that are roughly chronological but more so conceptual. Beginning with talking about the nature of freedom and power and moving through a history sequence so that by the time they get to the end of fifth grade, they’re really talking about the Civil War and beginning to talk about the aftermath of the Civil War. We’re trying to create a way for teachers to set up this history education that will easily transition students into a secondary history context.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There was an incredible amount of work that I know went into crafting the framework. A lot of thought went into how to structure it; what Essential Knowledge points go into which of the bands. I’m really intrigued by what teachers will be saying not only about what they wanted to use from the framework, what they wanted to take out of the frameworks. Let me repeat that part. I’m really interested and intrigued by what teachers will have to say about the framework when we put it in their hands. I know we’ve already shared it with a small handful of teachers who teach slavery and want to teach slavery.

We’re going to hear from them in this episode. Can you say a little bit about what they thought or are going to talk about that we’ll hear here?

Kate Shuster: Yeah. We had started taping the teachers before school had started because we wanted to catch them and get their input. We knew that sometimes, once school started, it’s more difficult and challenging to schedule teachers for recording. What we did is we found some elementary school teachers who wanted to participate. We asked them some questions about the framework. We asked them to identify an Essential Knowledge area that really spoke to them. We asked them what they would do in their classroom to use it. We asked them why they really thought that it was important to cover that material with their students.

We also asked them to talk about the challenges they thought they might face and what strategies they would use to overcome those.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Kate, you explained that the framework contains and consists of these Essential Knowledge points: 10 for each of the two grade bands. Could you describe for us what is contained within or how each of these Essential Knowledge points are structured?

Kate Shuster: Yeah, definitely. Each Essential Knowledge point is an entryway for a teacher to explore the content. For example, Essential Knowledge 1 starts with saying that “Students should be encouraged to think and talk about the meaning of freedom.” That’s really a learning goal for a teacher to have in their classroom. There’s much more in the framework than just those declarative sentences. When a teacher opens the framework and looks at Essential Knowledge 1, what they’ll see is first, is a section that says, “What else should my students know?” There are several items underneath Essential Knowledge 1 that support that instruction.

For example, “Being free means being able to choose what your life looks like without interference from others.” There are several details under there that are things that students should know in support of comprehension of these main Essential Knowledge topics. If you think of an Essential Knowledge, it’s like a topic sentence. There are supporting details under there that will help teachers get students to understand the Essential Knowledge item itself. Under those details, there’s a whole other section for each of the Essential Knowledge items that says, “How can I teach this?”

In there, there are strategies for teachers to use in their classrooms. Sometimes, we are recommending specific texts that are grade-appropriate. Sometimes, we’re recommending strategies for teachers to group students and discussion strategies. Sometimes, we’re recommending activities for the classroom that will all support that specific Essential Knowledge item. The Essential Knowledge is a gateway. Teachers, once they enter the gateway, will find selected suite of resources and strategies that will allow them to accomplish that learning goal.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wow.

Kate Shuster: Under the “How can I teach this?” part, which is attached to each Essential Knowledge item, there are strategies and examples for teachers. For example, in EK1, we suggest that teachers begin with examples from their classroom, families and communities to have students examine how power is gained and used and explained. They should describe what it means to have power and identify ways that people can use power to help, harm and influence situations. What that is is a fairly specific advice or guidance for teachers. Another example in there is that we’re encouraging students to contrast equity and equality.

Think about current problems where there’s a need to fight for equity and equality. Also, in that Essential Knowledge, we’re encouraging teachers to use many books, including those books that they might otherwise just be using to teach reading as springboards for these conversations. Emphasizing that teachers don’t need to have texts that are specific to slavery to begin the discussion about these underlying ideas but freedom, power, equity, equality and choice with young students.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Kate, as you know, teaching American slavery to young children, to elementary school students, is extremely challenging. But this framework is really exciting. Are there elements within it that really have you excited about the potential for this in the classroom?

Kate Shuster: Yeah, definitely. The big idea that I’m really excited about is the idea of giving tools to teachers to help students think like historians. Critically examining the way that history is often presented and looking for hidden histories that sometimes won’t be in the text or they encounter or the stories that they read. I’m also really excited that the framework has a broad and inclusive approach. Really hoping that teachers will be inspired to work on their own practice and find new ways to teach history in their classrooms moving beyond, for example, British colony centric story of American history.

Talking about connecting the dots between the theft of Indigenous land and the growth of the plantation system. Thinking about incorporating histories of Native nations more extensively into the story that they’re telling about American history. I hope that educators will look at this framework and see opportunity to tell new and exciting and engaging stories in their classrooms.

That’s really what we’ve tried to do here is collect interesting, engaging, solid history together in one place so that teachers won’t have to do so much work themselves and instead can enjoy the vocation of teaching, which is why they do it. I don’t think they do it for the money, is my suspicion.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I don’t think you would get too much disagreement on that last point in particular. I’m excited to hear what the teachers who have already seen the framework have to think about it. First, we’re going to hear from Bria Wright. Bria is a fifth-grade teacher in Wake County, North Carolina. She’s going to talk a little bit about why she’s trying to incorporate Essential Knowledge Number 1 into her lessons, which is that students should be encouraged to think and talk about the meaning of freedom.

Bria Wright: This Essential Knowledge really spoke to me personally because I think freedom means different things to different people depending on who you are, your background, what you believe in. Freedom can look differently for different people. Especially for children, they have come in with us with all these different ideas of what freedom looks like. What being free looks like based on their backgrounds and their beliefs. It’s really cool to be able to talk about that and see what kids think are their different ideas of what freedom is. This is really important because in the news, we see lots of different issues of freedom.

We think specifically like the border crisis. Who’s getting freedom? Who’s not able to have freedom? Who’s able to freely be in this country? Who’s not, just based off of where they were born? Is that okay? Absolutely, it’s not okay. You should be able to go somewhere and live somewhere and be able to be free. To love and to get a job and support your family. That piece of what freedom looks like and what it means really just means something different to different people. That’s what really spoke to me about it.

Something that also really spoke to me was thinking about how has freedom historically not been afforded to people of color. We go all the way back before even the slave trade if we think about Native Americans that were here first. This was their land. We were on stolen land. How come they had people come over from Europe and had their land taken away from them? Some of them were then enslaved and so they had their freedoms taken away but this was their space. Then we think about moving on in history. We think about the Africans folks that were brought over and then taken to be enslaved. How are they limited to freedom?

We still see these things over and over as we continue on in history. As we continue on in life, we still see these things today. How come people of color still have these limited freedoms? That’s really why it spoke to me because it’s not just like this happened in our history. It’s still reoccurring to this day. When we think about education, who is passing standardized tests? Who is able to live wherever they want? Who is not able to live wherever they want?

Who is caught up in the criminal justice system and can’t access freedoms because of historically oppressive rules, laws and things that are keeping people from being the best they can be? That’s really what spoke to me because I think about how freedoms have been limited and how that history continues to come up today. When I think about how to actually teach freedom and making this really abstract concept concrete for fifth graders, it can be overwhelming. Also, it can be really empowering for us to think about and explore together. The first place that I would start would be for them to explore their own definition of freedom.

What does that mean to you? What does that mean in different spaces? What does freedom look like as a student? What does it look like as a child? What does it look like on a sports team or whatever you’re a part of? Just different parts of their identity but what does that actually look like? Having them to interview their family, their peers and their friends to really figure out what does freedom look like to them so that they can come up with their own definition before we, as a group talk about freedom and what it looks like. Of course, we’d have to be mindful that that will be very abstract for some students.

Being able to specifically give them concrete ideas of, Does freedom look like this? Yes or no? They can get their own definitions but having that scaffold will help to figure out what does freedom look like. We have to be mindful that students will also need to be instructed of what it looks like to not have freedoms. When we think about the border crisis I had mentioned earlier, these people are trying to come to our country and to have a better life. They’re being stopped from doing so. They’re being stopped from having a freedom. That is a problem. How can we help solve that?

Other lack of freedom that we’ve seen historically whether we’ve seen it in our country or other countries. How has freedom been taken away or stopped or how people not been able to access freedom. These are all things that we should help students understand so that they can see. Not everybody has been afforded freedom. Not everybody still is free. How can we help that as we move forward? When we think specifically about with American enslavement, what freedoms were withheld from folks that were enslaved? How does that continue to manifest today?

All of these things will be questions that I would definitely pose to students but they would be grounded in reading. They’d be grounded in some type of nonfiction texts that we’ve read together and we dissected together so they have a basis to go off of. I don’t want them just to pull, “My mom said this. My dad said this.” Let’s ground what we’re saying in the actual facts and the texts. This all comes from carefully selecting texts. As teachers, we have to be critical about what kind of resources we bring into the classroom, which is why I really like the Teaching Tolerance resources because I know they already have been highly vetted.

They’re going to make the students think critically. They’re not going to be part of this problematic text that we schools use. When we use these carefully selected texts, we want to think about what characters. If we think about fiction texts, can we find texts that people are experiencing freedoms or having their freedoms taken away so that kids can think about, “Okay. How are their freedoms being taken away? What systems are stopping people from being free?” We know that racism is systems put in place to stop folks of color from advancing. How can we have the kids to think about how these systems work together?

Typically, systems are made up of people. How are these people stopping others from being free? Another way to think about teaching this would be thinking about specifically an essential question for a unit could be, What freedoms were withheld from enslaved Africans? How does that still continue and manifest today? When I think about things, freedoms that were withheld, specifically land ownership, education and wealth development or wealth accumulation. These things were all withheld. We still see these things manifesting today. When we think about education, where is our achievement gap?

It’s between our black students and our white students. Enslaved folks, it was illegal for them to even learn how to read. That’s horrible. We still see these things manifesting today. What I think is important to note, too on that note even though that freedom was withheld, there were still enslaved folks that were still like, “Nope. Still going to do it.” They were fighting that resistance. They were still out here actively trying to learn to read, which I think is a very great counternarrative to what education has written for black folks. Saying that black folks don’t care about education.

They don’t care about learning. I love that counternarrative when we learn about different folks that were enslaved. They were like, “No. We’re still going to learn to read.” Of course, not everybody was able to learn to read. You had to have someone that could read to teach you to read. Again, that was a freedom. That was an obstacle to overcome. Not everybody was able to overcome that. Land ownership. Enslaved folks were counted as pieces of property and land. The folks that owned the enslaved people, they had plenty of land. Of course, that’s why: they had folks that were enslaved to do the labor for them.

The folks that were enslaved, were they able to get land? No. We all know that after slavery ended, folks were promised 40 acres and a mule and that was not 100 percent upheld. Again, we have a huge gap. Okay. We can free those that were enslaved. Now, you are “free” but you have no land or nothing to go off of. The white people that had land were already a step ahead: people take care of your land. Generationally, that land goes down the line generations. We still see a gap between black landowners and white landowners. Again, another way that manifests and then wealth. Who has money and who doesn’t?

Who’s able to come to neighborhoods that are predominantly black? Who’s able to come in and buy out whole entire areas and then push black folks out? The issues of things or how it’s still maintained today, we can see these if we just look at the news. You can see lots of information about gentrification. You can find any kind of data that shows the different gaps between land ownership and the wealth gap. That’s a great way to tie in social studies and math. You can look at the gaps. You can look analyze the data and see. Wow. That’s a huge gap. That’s a great way just for the kids to be able to visually see. Okay.

How much land do white people own versus black people then, and then even still now? Of course, it has continued to rise. Black folks have accumulated wealth and gained land but is it at the same rate that their white peers are able to have land and able to accumulate wealth? The biggest things I want my kids to walk away after they leave my classroom in fifth grade is to know that systems are made of people. People can change. People are malleable. We can help people understand. We can help people make changes and think about doing things differently from an equity lens.

Sometimes, I think my kids get caught up in thinking that, “Oh, systems are just machines. They just run and they run and run because the way they’ve been doing it for forever. That’s how they run.” I’m like, “No.” These are made of people. We know that people can be changed so why not just get in those systems and we can be part of those systems to help change? I tell my kids. I’m like, “That’s why it’s so important that you make sure you vote.” When they’re of age, of course. Make sure that their family votes and make sure that the people they care about vote. They know that when they’re of age, you can be part of this political system.

You can really disrupt some stuff. You can really get in there and change. This is how things have been forever, but why can’t we change? Why can’t we do things different? Because, again, systems are made of people. That’s my biggest thing I want kids to know. These systems aren’t just there and just floating in outer space and just keep going because of nothing. No. They continue because we’re maintaining the status quo. These systems maintain the status quo. It’s our job to disrupt it. My biggest thing is I want my kids to know that systems are made of people but it’s up to us to really challenge the status quo.

I believe it’s important for us to introduce our kids to the concept of freedom and its relationship to equity and equality. Because we have to understand that power is tied up into all of this. We can’t be free if there are systems not in place to help people be free. We can’t help people be free if people don’t have the access. When we think about power, when we think about racism, racism is made of systems. These systems are not equitable, and we know that. If those in power are not willing to take a step back or to adjust these systems, we’re never going to achieve freedom.

We have to think about who’s in power. Are the people that are in power… do they reflect the ideals of those they are representing? If not, then we’re not going to ever see freedom for all people because these systems are going to continue to maintain and manifest. Until these systems are really broken up, we’re not going to see freedom. Not everybody is going to achieve complete freedom because, again, the systems are made up of people. If the people don’t want to give up that power, then we’re not going to be able to see any progress to move forward.

Any time as a teacher, you’re going to start engaging in conversations about anything to do with American enslavement, anything to do with identities or to challenge the status quo, there’s always going to be pushback. What I’ve encountered is there’s sometimes pushback from parents or from district officials about teaching these things because we want to make sure we’re not attacking anybody’s identity. If I ever receive that feedback, I’m always very open.

Say, “Well, you know, we’re not challenging anybody’s specific identities, but we’re thinking about how these different systems have played out over time. How can we change it?” I like to overcome this with common language and understanding. We start off with using protocol. I use the “Courageous Conversations” protocol. Glenn Singleton wrote a really great book about having courageous conversations about race. That’s a starting place for me. We have common language. We know that it’s okay saying that someone is black is not a curse word. That’s not a mean thing to say.

We’re just identifying identities. Saying someone’s white is not racist either. It’s okay. It’s identifying identities but setting up the protocol really sets up the four corners of the room and sets up the walls for the room to be able to have these conversations. Whenever I receive the pushback, any time I’ve had a conversation with someone that’s pushed back like, “I don’t know. I don’t know if fifth-graders are ready for that.” I’m like, “Well, they’re experiencing the world around us. They’re ready for it. They’re experiencing these microaggressions, macroaggressions.”

They’re experiencing racism. They’re seeing these things.” It’s part of our curriculum in North Carolina to teach about American history. We need to teach these things. We need to also make sure we’re being critical about it and making sure we are developing students that can think critically about it. Think about how they can help make the world even better. The hard part, even as a teacher, is it’s hard for me to teach sometimes because some of these things are really triggering for me to think about American enslavement. My ancestors were subjected to this horrible treatment.

What also empowers me is to continue to do this work so we don’t go back to a place like that — so we can make sure we’re continuing to always move forward. It can also be hard for students to understand that these systems are continuing to manifest. I’ve had pushback sometimes where people are like, “Well, we are post-racial society.” I’m like, “Unfortunately, that’s not true. I can tell you specifically as a black woman, that’s 100 percent not true.” Those obstacles are hard but I always like to overcome them by helping parents or whoever understand we’re doing this to help students move forward.

I’m not presenting them information to say, “You need to vote for a certain candidate. Make sure you think like this.” Giving the kids the facts on the table and then they can then make their own decisions moving forward, of course. I think this is really important work because I call this “heart work” because a lot of what we’re doing, we think about freedom. We think about American enslavement or those who have not experienced freedom. It makes us reflect on who we are and are we experiencing freedoms ourself? Have we stopped others from being free? As a teacher, ourselves, that’s the beginning of the school year.

We have lots of rules posted. We print all these rules out and these beautiful posters and post it up for the kids get there without even having their voice of what freedom looks like in our classroom space. Yes. It’s hard to have these conversations about freedom with kids. It’s hard to talk about American enslavement. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean we got to not do it. We definitely still have to do it because this is how we move the work forward. We move this work forward by engaging and leaning into those tough conversations so that we can continue to progress as a society.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It’s really obvious to me that Bria Wright is taking seriously not only enslaved people as thinkers about the life condition in which they find themselves but that she’s taking her students seriously about thinkers, about the life condition in which they find themselves. That allows, I think, and I think she’s right here, for her to guide the students in really substantive conversation about what freedom means. Drawing not only on their own life experiences but then circling it back to how that would apply to the past so that they could better understand the experience of enslaved people. Really remarkable.

Kate Shuster: Yeah. I think there’s some really great stuff going on there. I’m really impressed by her approach. One thing that really stands out to me is the way that she’s explicitly figuring out how to talk to her students about systemic racism and systemic oppression. I think that a lot of times, having students come into classrooms and so do adults come into life with this idea that racism, for example, is about bad people behaving badly. There certainly are a lot of bad people who behave badly. That does not explain the existence and perpetuation of systems of oppression.

Kate Shuster: We have to start that instruction early with students and help to guide them to that understanding. Otherwise, it becomes very difficult for them to understand the trajectory of history and why it is that oppression continues in polyvalent ways for all kinds of people throughout history and in the present day. I think that it’s really important that she’s embedding that instruction in the early grades.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. No. You’re right. It’s so critical to move beyond individual behavior, to look at systems and structures and the way they operate and have operated in the past so that they can, even at this young age, can see how they operate in the present. You can do that. I think that’s one of the great values of talking about how slavery operated. Not just one or two bad people who chose to participate in this heinous activity but the way in which the entire system was to benefit individuals and to build a nation. When she added those key terms in there, not only talk about freedom but power and systems.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That was really a good way, I think, to build off of this key point of Essential Knowledge.

Kate Shuster: Yeah. One last thing is just to circle back from where you started, which is this question of agency. The reason that this framework starts with freedom is because we want to center agency of people and too often, when we talk about slavery, for example, we don’t center the humanity of people who were enslaved. If we start with freedom instead of starting with oppression, I think it really encourages us to see enslaved people as humans, which is something we need to start with young.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Start with young because it’s something that traditionally, we don’t do. You’re absolutely right. Every opportunity that we can to highlight, underscore, point to the humanity of the people who are being held in bondage, we absolutely need to do that. Because that will help, I think, students, as they move through the grades, keep that focus and attention, especially when the emphasis might shift to depersonalizing as well as dehumanizing the institution as a whole.

Kate Shuster: Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re right about that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bria Wright talked to us about Essential Knowledge Point Number 1. Now, we’re going to hear from Marvin Reed. What does he focus on?

Kate Shuster: He is a third-grade teacher in Berkeley, California. He’s going to be talking about Essential Knowledge Number 7, which is still in that K–2 grade band. That Essential Knowledge reads like this: “Students should know that enslavers exploited the many types of highly skilled labor of enslaved people for their own profit.”

Marvin Reed: The power of representation in the classroom matters. It matters because our students of color need to see that they are successful. They need to see that they’re just not getting killed on the TV or in prisons. Our people of color have done great things. But the representation―as far as in the literature, the history, the media―it’s not where it should be. And this is why I teach the way that I teach. Because if I can change this master narrative in my classroom, my students can be scientists. They can go out in the world and make a difference. But students can’t be it if they don’t see it, which means that I, and all of us educators, need to make sure that we are doing our jobs to provide those students that vision.

Something I really enjoy doing in my classroom are “gallery walks,” whether it be in math or it be in ELA, but gallery walks in history. I’ll take pictures, images, sometimes videos. And I’ll have those in a gallery walk setting. So with a gallery walk, you could have different stations. And at every station, there’s a different activity. So at one station, you would have a piece of butcher paper and maybe glue or staple a picture to there. And I’ve done this for Black History Month. I laid out a bunch of photos of African Americans. So I’m holding achievements. I had me in there graduating from school. And then within their group, you’d say, “All right, I want you to write down whatever comes to your mind, whether it can be words, pictures.” So that way you’re giving students different opportunities and different ways to show their learning, whether it’s to writing or drawing. “Well how does this make you feel? What do you see here?” So that would be one station.

Then to station two: I had “Mother to Son,” the Langston Hughes poem, playing. And I gave… the lyrics were there. So I’m using different forms of media for them to be able to listen to this poem by Langston Hughes, the great poet. And I had the students write down, “What words are sticking out to you? What do you think those words mean?”

The third station I had the students go to was a research corner. And in the research corner, it was a bunch of literature, whether from Frederick Douglass to Little Rock Nine, Fire from the Rock by Sharon Draper. I had a whole bunch of literature [and] I had sticky-noted certain parts of them that I wanted to see and find common patterns, like, “What do you notice within all these books? What’s the common thing that you’re seeing?” Some students wrote, “Oh, I see signs. I see no blacks, only whites. I’m seeing people being treated bad.” Okay. So you’re seeing that for that station.

And the last station was my most powerful station. I took a newspaper from the bombing of Birmingham. And it said, “Four girls killed in church bombing.” And I had them write on this butcher paper, “What do you see here? How does this make you feel?” So now I’m teaching the kids empathy. “How does it make you feel knowing that kids your age, about your age, were killed? And they didn’t do anything wrong?” And having them think, like, “Wow, like that’s not right. And what can we do different?”

So then, after we’ve collected all that data, I come back, and I pretty much plug in common themes about what they noticed. “So group four, what did you notice?” “We noticed this. Uh, we heard this in the video. Um, we saw this.” “Okay. Group three, what did you notice from your station?”

So I’m having students collaborate. I’m having them getting up and moving around the room. And I’m also collecting data for me to gauge my instruction. Okay, so my students don’t know who Harriet Tubman is; my students don’t know who Dolores Huerta is. So, I need to go back and amp up my history and make sure that it’s also developmentally appropriate. And then for the whole month, I just plan out, “Okay. We’re gonna cover achievements of people of color. We’re gonna talk about the bombing of Birmingham, but I’m going to make it developmentally appropriate. We’re going to learn about Langston Hughes. We’re going to learn about Maya Angelou poetry. So all of this, it’s all tied together with the ELA/ELD standards. But you got to be creative with it. Just really reflect and think, “Looking at all of this, what’s going to help the students?”

And I want my students to understand that people of color did a lot for this country. But a lot of times, we don’t get credit for it. So, I had to do more research and connect with my librarian to bring in more books, especially books like biographies and books that highlighted people of color and their achievements. I mean, honestly, I didn’t even know George Washington Carver worked with paint or any other agricultural kind of things. I just knew him for peanut butter. And so, when I was able to bring in these books and share them with my students, a lot of their other parents didn’t know! So now, I’m also building relations with my parents through strengthening and providing my students more knowledge on their history. And so after we’ve done this little gallery walk, from there, I think I would do something where “Okay, I want this person to do research.” And I would say, “Okay, you’re in charge of researching this person. You’re in charge of researching this person, and give each person a figure for them to research. And then present on it. So now you’re tying in biographies, which is another genre of writing the students should know. So it’s a lot of just embedding, in a creative way, to make sure that students are engaged in their history.

A lot of times within, especially the third-grade curriculum, we talk a lot about the missions and Indigenous people, and we don’t hear so much about, you know, what happened if somebody resisted at a mission and what happened to these people. It was just more like, “Oh, this was a great place. And they learned language. They met new people. And they were...”  It was all of this happy times, when in reality, missions were not a happy place for people.

So, when we were learning about Indigenous people, and we had gotten to about mid-part of the unit, I decided to use one of the mid-unit little quizzes. They’re quick and easy to print, and they test the kids on vocabulary. So I was like, “Okay, I’ll use it.” And they’re going through the questions. So, as we were reviewing them, one of the questions had asked the students, “Missions were (blank).” And their answers were, “A) A good place for Indigenous people to be, and it supported community; B) A place where they learned language, and how to be a citizen”; or something like that. And then, “C) A place where they were mistreated, and it was a horrible place to be.” Or, ”D) None of the above.”

So when I asked, “Okay. Clap if you think the answer is A.” People started to clap. I was like, “Okay. Clap if you think the answer is B.” Had some claps here and there. “Clap for C.” One or two. And D, no one clapped for that one, so I was like, “Interesting.” I was like, “You know what, class? The answer says that it’s A. But I’m going to tell you, it really... It’s C, like, it wasn’t a good place for them to be. And I... I want you to understand this as I’m talking to you that history — it’s told a lot of times from... from one side. And this story right now, it’s only being told from one side. And I want you to understand that this land that we’re on, you know, do you think that this belonged to us?”

A perfect example, we’re in Berkeley. We’re on a lot of Ohlone land. U.C. Berkeley is right down the street from my school. And in the book, the chapter was “In our backyard.” And it was like, “The Ohlone people, they paved this land, and they grew lots of crops.” And then all of a sudden, the next paragraph was, “U.C. Berkeley is now on Ohlone land.” And I asked them, I was like, “I want you to think about that phrase. Do you think that the Ohlone people gave up their land? What we’re on now? Or do you think it was taken away? What do you think?” And they were like, “Well, I thought that they gave the land, but now I don’t think they did anymore, Mr. Reed.” 

I’m like, “Would you want to give up your land if you worked hard for that and your family was there?” And, [they’re] like, “No! I wouldn’t!” I was like, “Exactly. These people didn’t want to give up their land. It was taken from them. And I want you to understand that. The missions weren’t a good place. People were mistreated there. And land was not just surrendered. It wasn’t just given, you know. “Here you go.” It was taken.

I then changed up my instruction. I went back to the framework, and the Essential Knowledge that stuck out to me was Essential Knowledge Number Five. And it says, “Students should know that enslaved people hated being enslaved and resisted bondage in many ways.” So now with this framework, you’re not just hitting the Common Core State Standards, you’re hitting ELD, you’re supporting all students. And you’re differentiating throughout the whole lessons.

We are a school community and we got to make sure that we know our students before we can serve them. And I can’t stress that enough. What intrigues them? What history do they need to know? Then going forward, communication. What are you teaching? How are you teaching it? Talking to your principal, talking to your colleagues. That’s the only way that we’re going to change this system of misrepresentation and the master narrative.

How are you teaching César Chávez and the Latinx month? How are you teaching about Hmong students or Asian Pacific Islanders? We gotta get on the same page. And it may not necessarily be within your chapters, but if you had a unit on “Who’s in my community and symbols,” talk about symbols from different cultures. “What do you think those mean?” Expose your students to that. That’s the only way that they’re going to grow and be those lifelong learners with those 21st-century learning skills: critically thinking, collaborating, cooperating and critically thinking about what they’re learning in history.

And using the resources that Teaching Tolerance has to offer. And there’s so much that goes to that framework. There’s lesson plans on there. You can modify them and make them yours. So it’s already there, and if you want to differentiate it, all you have to do is click on third grade, or if you’re going to second grade, making sure that no student’s left... no student left behind ... or no students left out of this opportunity to learn about this history; that it’s all of our history. But we have to go forward and make sure that we don’t repeat those negative traumatic experiences. It really starts with a teacher. It starts with you doing your research to make sure that you are doing justice to the history.

Kate Shuster: Marvin’s doing a lot there. I really like that he’s modeling the gallery walk, which is something the teachers do a lot in their classrooms, and talking about the specific connections that he’s wanting students to make. I like that he’s mixing up Essential Knowledge 7 and Essential Knowledge 5, which is about resistance to enslavement. Making those connections to California history with the mission system. It feels to me that he’s really taking seriously the idea that students should be making connections across historical periods while still digging deep into the details of history.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the things that really stuck out to me was how he was moving through time with the students and making these connections. He was also allowing them to make judgments based on historical evidence, which I think is really critical. Not just simply telling them how they should assess these historical phenomena but allowing them to make their own assessments. Those assessments, as he was pointing out with the example of the missions, often differ from the usual narrative that is told about race and power and enslavement in America.

Kate Shuster: One of the things that Marvin is really illustrating is how interdisciplinary thinking can be effective at weaving content and across the curriculum. For many teachers, that will actually lighten their load so you’re not trying to carve out a bunch of new time for new subject so much as bringing it in across the curriculum.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Next, we’re going to hear from Alice Mitchell. She teaches fifth grade in Boston, Massachusetts. She’s working on incorporating Essential Knowledge Point Number 12, which is “Slavery in all the places that are now the United States began with the enslavement of Indigenous people.” Here’s Alice Mitchell.

Alice Mitchell: I’m going to be really vulnerable here. My scope and understanding of the history of Indigenous people is very, very limited, which is sad because I went to school in the United States. College, graduate school in the United States and I have never received any formal education around the enslavement of Native people. I learned a lot about enslavement of African people, not a lot. I learned about the enslavement of African people and when I got old enough to seek on my own resources, I sought out more information. My understanding of what this same history looks like for the First Peoples in this nation was nonexistent.

This is something that my kids deserve to know. It’s part of their history, especially living in Massachusetts. That was where I made the decision that I was bringing in some history of Native people even though it wasn’t in my mandated curriculum. The first time I decided to try an activity with my class, I decided to use our morning meeting time. It was the Tuesday before we’re going off for Thanksgiving break. Usually, our morning meetings, we greet each other and we play a game. They share about what they’re going to do over the weekend.

I was like, “Hey, everyone. We’re going to do something a little different today. You know, we’re not going to be at school for the rest of the week because it’s Thanksgiving break. I’ve really been reflecting on what Thanksgiving means.” I asked them, “Why do we have Thanksgiving? What is it supposed to celebrate?” A lot of them had ideas because they did a unit on Native Americans and pilgrims, your traditional unit in third grade. I think they talked a little bit about it in fourth grade. We live in Boston so we’re pretty close to Plymouth Rock and everything.

They’re like, “The pilgrims came over and they had a meal with Native Americans and that turned into Thanksgiving.” The traditional answer that I’m sure if you ask your kids, a lot of them are going to say. I was like, “You know, that’s really interesting. Let’s just do a quick Google search.” I’m really, really, really lucky because I work at a school that’s one-to-one so everybody in my classroom has access to their own Chrome Books. I think you can do this activity if there’s just one computer. They can look on to the projector.

I was like, “Okay. Everybody on your computers, type in ‘white people.’ Turn to the person next to you and talk to them about what you see.” I also typed in “white people” on my computer. My computer is projected and they were looking over at each other’s computers and just sharing what they noticed. For this part, I did let them just talk to each other. I was circulating and eavesdropping and listening to their responses. I heard some pairs say like, “Oh, there’s a lot of people in business suits.” Somebody was like, “Oh, there’s Taylor Swift.” I was like, “Okay. What did we notice when we put in ‘white people’”?

They shared, “Oh, you know there was a lot of pictures. The people looked really professional.” They also said there were a lot of men in the pictures. While they were talking, I wrote all of that down. I was like, “Okay. Let’s put in a search for ‘black people.’” I circulated, paying attention to the things they were noticing. If I remember correctly, there was athletes. There was musicians. Beyonce was one of the options. When I brought them back together, basically their observations, when they put in “black people,” we can summarize it into photographs of athletes, entertainers and Barrack Obama.

I jotted down their responses to that. The last one we put in was Native American. Being transparent with my students about my journey and my level of understanding is really important. I wanted them to know that I’m still trying to figure out the best identifiers to use for this community. It’s still something that I’m learning about and so I wanted them to know. I knew that putting in “Native American” would bring in more Google images. I also talked to the kids about using “Indigenous people” when speaking about them. I told them we’re going to use “Native American” just because I think we’ll get more images.

Anyway, I put in “Native American.” They put in “Native American.” The mood of the class ... How do I say this? Their excitement change more to confusion and curiosity. Because there was a clear shift in what images had been presented. This time, the kids were saying, “Oh, there’s not as many photographs. The only color there is is from a painting.” A lot of groups are like, “These pictures are so old.” When I brought them back together, I wrote down what they said like “old” in all caps because pretty much every group was like, “These are old images.” I wrote down “a lot of paintings.”

Prior to this conversation, we have been talking a lot about how authors are very intentional about the words that they use and the sentences that they use to portray a certain message. Authors craft, that’s one of the fifth-grade ELA standards. We had a little Snapchat situation. We started talking about how technology can also portray a message. We looked at the three chart and I was like, “Okay. Just so we talk about authors, they make intentional choices about the words and the sentences that they use to portray a message. What do these images tell us about the history of people in our country?”

The conversation led to kids saying, “When we put in ‘Native American,’ they were all old pictures.” One student was like, “Well, if we didn’t know any better, we would think they weren’t any left in the United States.” That was the key point I wanted my kids to get. That a lot of people still think that the Native people, the Indigenous population, is no longer thriving, is no longer part of the fabric of the United States, which is just not true. We look at the Google images, based on just what’s presented, you would think that this is ancient history. That’s how I launched the conversation.

We just saw that there were two Native congresswomen who were elected. This is a population that’s still thriving, that’s still part of modern, present-day United States of America. We have to educate ourselves to make sure that we’re not spreading these stereotypes. This I did not plan. I’m not going to take credit. This was all the kids. Fifth-graders are very passionate. The conversation turned into a debate between should we still celebrate Thanksgiving or should we not if this holiday isn’t fully recognizing the true history of Native peoples and is not truly recognizing that they’re still a thriving community today? Yeah.

They had a very spirited debate about that. A lot of kids were very concerned with the food. One student was like, “I have to tell my brother,” and his brother was four. “Because I don't want him to get to fifth grade and think that all the Native Americans were killed and they’re not alive anymore because that’s what I thought.” That was really satisfying for me — just some questioning, “Is this something we should celebrate? Why haven’t we learned anything about this up until this point?” Just that curiosity in them being piqued, I was very excited about.

Now, in this upcoming school year, using that as my foundation, I really want to build on their background knowledge from the enslavement of African people to connect it to a whole history of the enslavement of Indigenous people and how they’re connected. How the effect of some Indigenous slavery we’re still seeing today, especially in that community and be more intentional about starting it earlier in the year and keeping it, not just a Thanksgiving conversation. Another thing that I was thinking of doing was I really want to figure out how I can connect with people from different Indigenous communities close to our home.

We already started school. I did a land acknowledgment with my grade-level team. Because I just thought it was so powerful just to ground us in the work that we do. I think doing some sort of acknowledging of the tribal nations with my classroom would be an excellent way just to bring that “past history” — make it alive and make it something that they see as current and modern. I just want to make sure that I’m not offending and I’m not overstepping my bounds. I know that’s a fear that a lot of us have in teaching. We’re trying to learn and grapple with new information.

How can we act on it? How can we share it and teach about it without making mistakes? I always think it’s so funny because we tell our kids, “It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to be messy.” We don’t give ourselves that grace as teachers. I think for me, I’ve tried to reach out to a lot of people; do a lot of reading. Try to come up with understanding before I present it to my kids. Even though I know it’s going to be messy and I know I’m afraid of offending, I still don’t let that keep me from doing what I know is right.

Alice Mitchell: I just found this resource. It’s called tribal.nation.ca. It is a resource that helps you identify what tribal nations are on the land that you are currently on. I just really appreciate this resource because it helps bring what we view as the past. It helps bring it to the present. It just changed my perspective. There’s just so much history with Native peoples in Boston and Massachusetts. When I found out what tribal nations are on the land that we are currently on, talk about relevancy and talk about making connections. I was like, “This is definitely something I want my students to know.”

Connect it to the Google searches, a lot of them are like, “Oh, this is ancient history. This isn’t anything we have to think about.” Just grounding them in knowing these are people who lived and thrived on the land we’re currently walking on that’s been completely stolen and transformed. I really want them to understand that their neighborhoods, as beautiful and unique as they are, not losing sight of the land and the people that came before us. This is going to help change the perspective of my students, which they’re the ones who are going to go out into the world and make these changes.

One thing that I especially want to work on this year is how can I make this relevant? How can I take whatever we learned about in class and charge my students so they feel empowered to take it into their communities? Teach somebody else about it and actually do something. When they hear about injustices or oppression or unfairness, innately, kids they want to do something. Like my one student who was like, “I’m going to tell my brother because he needs to know.”

Something as small as just telling somebody the new information you learned and spreading more of the truth, I think is a great way for me to encourage my students to go home and tell your parents, your families, whoever their caregivers are. Ask them what they learned when they’re growing up and teach them about what you’ve learned. Spreading that new information with them at home. I plan on reaching out to the tribal nation that was originally on the land that we’re currently on. I really want to connect with people in this community and ask what their needs and desires are.

Instead of me assuming this is what we can do to help. Having a way to get that information from them and so, I think one way we can do that is through letters and email. Just having the kids ask, creating a letter campaign because knowing them, after we talk about this, they’re going to say, “What can we do? How can we change this?” I think helping them see when you do want to help out a group, it’s not your responsibility to decide what that group needs but figuring out the tools and the methods you can use to reach out and get their voice and hear from them directly. So they can do something about this.

We’re not just sitting around talking but we’re actually engaging in action. That’s also coupled with not just doing what I think is best and what I think is appropriate, but teaching kids to ask what people need and then supporting them that way. I think that would help bring home the point of what I’m trying to teach them: that this is a thriving modern community and so, their voices are still growing and loud and government and all different entities in bringing them in will help people see that more.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the things that really leapt out at me about what Alice just said was the situation that she found herself in as a teacher when thinking about how to go about teaching this history. That is, it’s history that she herself was not taught. She has to do some deep diving and preparation in order to bring this material to the classroom. It’s one of the things that I think is really helpful about the framework and the resources that are provided is that it helps teachers learn this material as well. So that they can bring it to their students in an informed way.

Kate Shuster: Yeah. I think that we have to “support and scaffold,” as we would say in education, teachers’ learning in the same way that we support and scaffold student learning. The reality is that there is very little if any coverage of the enslavement of Indigenous people and the emerging scholarship on this is really shocking that the scope, extent and duration of enslavement of Indigenous people. I know it’s something that is frankly not just going to be in a lot of textbooks. Teachers shouldn’t feel blamed or shamed that they themselves don’t have this knowledge.

I think Alice is exactly modeling what we hope that other teachers will do is say, “Okay. Here are some resources that Teaching Tolerance is giving us.” Bringing their students into that conversation. The other thing I want to lift up about Alice’s approach and what her students found is an illustration of this idea of the vanishing Indian that is a very common myth. It’s a real problem that Indigenous people are often discussed in the past tense and portrayed in the past tense, as Alice’s students found out. I think this is a good and useful approach to contrast those representations for students.

We’ll be talking more about how to counter the vanishing Indian myth in future episodes. One more thing that Alice is doing that I think is great and other teachers should do is to try to figure out whose land they’re on. Reach out to Native nations and leaders, communities that are around them. I think that she will find, as many teachers do, that the leadership in Native nations and their cultural and interpretative institutions are very welcoming and interested in talking to folks and helping understand their rich cultural and historical traditions as well as contemporary practices.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I think that’s a great way to make the past, present. Next, we’re going to hear from Marian Dingle, who teaches fourth grade in Atlanta, Georgia. She’s working on incorporating two Essential Knowledge points within her classroom instruction. Knowledge Point 15, which states that “In every place and time, enslaved people sought freedom.” Essential Knowledge 14 that “Enslavers adopted and spread false beliefs about racial inferiority, including many that still impact us today.” Here’s Marian Dingle.

Marian Dingle: When it comes to slavery, I think the story of resistance and resilience is the one that doesn’t get told. I think that’s the story that impacts our kids the most. When kids start to see themselves in ways that are powerful and they see themselves as intelligent and capable of resisting and capable of thinking their way out of problems, they begin to see their world and their circumstances differently. They begin to see themselves differently. I think many black kids have internalized shame around slavery. I don’t think that is their fault.

I think it’s just the way in which we are socialized because there’s so many historical facts that we don’t know. We don’t know the insidiousness and the planning that went into slavery and all the things that were done to us. We naturally, I think, internalize maybe there was something wrong with us. Maybe there’s a reason why we were enslaved for so long. Maybe it’s something that we didn’t do, something that we didn’t know. I think that shame for a lot of students will manifest itself in different ways. Sometimes, that shame may look like a behavior problem.

A lot of times, it may look like anger. For children, especially at this age, they have a lot of feelings that they can’t quite articulate. Talking to them about this is extremely important. I think from what I’ve seen in children, that once we start peeling back those layers and they start learning about themselves, that those feelings start to change. Once students know their history and they start knowing little pieces and you see that “aha moment,” then you see their chest punch out with pride. You can see it. I see this in my kids every day. I also know that deeply because it’s exactly how I felt.

I felt this newfound pride that I had in myself and in my family and my ancestors because I knew that I was a survivor. I was one of the ones that was fortunate enough, yes, to survive the horrors but also smart enough and resilient enough. I resisted enough so that I could be here. This is my 21st year as an educator. I think a lot of what drives me is that I’m trying to right the wrongs of how I was taught myself. I want them to have textbook knowledge, evidence upon evidence upon evidence that what they have been through, through their history of their ancestry and who they are, matters.

That they are absolutely a huge part of the fabric of this country because of what their ancestors have given through being enslaved. That part is what I didn’t get. That’s what I’m trying to pass on now. I should say, too, it’s not just that it’s important for black kids learn about slavery. I think all kids need to understand what actually happened. Because as I learn more and more, I’m realizing that almost every facet of our lives now have everything to do with what happened in slavery. I’ve been thinking a lot about how exactly I’m going to incorporate this history into our curriculum, thinking especially about resistance.

Resistance can take many different forms and on the face, it may not look like resistance at all. One of the ways I want to teach the story of resistance and resilience is through music. I remember my parents always teaching me that. There were a lot of codes and messages that were embedded in Negro spirituals. I remember one, in particular, that spoke to me because I think maybe I had seen it as a child. Maybe I was watching Roots or something. It’s “Wade in the Water.”

The message that my parents told me was that enslaved people would tell themselves or remember to remind each other that if you are in fact, trying to escape, that the moment that you see water, you should always go through it. You should wade in the water. That is your ticket to your liberation. Because when you go through the water, your scent can’t be tracked by dogs. That just still sends goosebumps through me. It’s little things like that. The resistance, the intellectual power that the enslaved people had, those things aren’t really brought to the forefront.

I think that’s also very much tied to that Essential Knowledge about how enslavers adopted false beliefs. Because we are taught in textbooks that enslaved people weren’t very smart. That they were docile. They may even be lazy and they were forced to work. When in fact, the opposite is true. It’s important to teach about the misrepresentation of black people throughout history. Another important source that I’m going to use is The 1619 Project. One thing that I discovered from The 1619 Project was that when enslavers would come to the auction block, some of the enslaved people were marketed as coming from a certain region.

That was because the enslavers knew that Africans coming from certain regions had certain knowledge that they would need to make their plantations profitable, to make their businesses profitable. There was this knowledge that enslaved people were in fact intelligent, on one hand. On the other hand, there’s this marketing that actually the opposite is true. I’m thinking about how to talk about that duality, that hypocrisy, with my students. How to show them that this is, in fact, gaslighting. Meaning, a practice in which people try to persuade you that what you see, the reality that you know to be true, is, in fact, not true at all.

That that has happened historically and is still happening. I’m also thinking about current events and other stories of resistance and how to talk about those daily. Perhaps in morning meeting and how to connect the dots between how some of the things that are happening now are manifestations of things that happened historically in slavery. For example, my students are now in fourth grade but in third grade, in our state, they study Harriet Tubman. I’m thinking of taking a deeper dive into her life. It wasn’t just that she decided one day that she was going to help 400 or so enslaved people escape.

There was actually planning involved. Another example is that Harriet had a blow to the head when she was a child. That that resulted in her having seizures throughout her life. She was able to plan out and help people escape while doing this around the seizures that she knew that she would have. I think that speaks to a lot of kids that may have physical disabilities or physical shortcomings, that they can do great things. Because even now, even though we probably don’t know the whole story about Harriet, we’re still celebrating that part.

We still know that she’s responsible for hundreds and hundreds of enslaved people receiving their freedom and convincing them that they actually should escape and they should trust her and having this incredible mind that was able to have all these maps in her head and to have a knowledge of all these different plantations and landscapes and how to actually pull this off. I think that part is also important. Still another example is of course, Dred Scott. Dred Scott decided to actually sue the government because of the displacement of their children. He, at the time, was living in a free state.

At the encouragement and probably, much more than encouragement, maybe nagging of his wife, he decided to sue. Because she knew that the future is in the family. If they didn’t sue, they didn’t pursue this, that their family could likely be separated, which happened to many, many enslaved people. I just think it’s fascinating. It’s just absolutely fascinating to me that families were still intact. That families even though they were torn apart, ripped apart, I think about the Middle Passage and how enslaved people were packed into slave ships.

They were intentionally put with people that were not from their villages on purpose so they couldn’t communicate with each other. All these things were done, and still we have a very strong communal spirit. We have this commitment to family. You just see so many different examples of that throughout history. I think that’s the part that kids need to know. That’s the part that I needed to know as a child. When I think about adding these new things into my curriculum, I want to be mindful about what types of challenges I may face and how I can be proactive in addressing those.

I realize that there may be a lot of educators out there that are hesitant to engage in this. Maybe there is a bit of fear about what may happen to them, any resistance they may face. What I think is important to do really early, as early as possible, is not just to jump in this with students but to engage your parents and your families, the caregivers of your students because once you have them on board, you’ll get so much more out of it. Honestly, it’s not just the students that need to learn this; it’s the families as well.

The dinner table conversations and the things that happen at home are going to reinforce what you do in the classroom in the first place. For example, when I decided that this is what I was going to do in my classroom, I invited parents to a parent meeting at the beginning of the school year where we can actually talk about what it is that I’m planning to do. I just put it out there. I gave my reasons for doing this. I cited different things that were happening in history and how, in my opinion, they were affecting their children. The things that I saw and I addressed fears that my parents had. We got pretty vulnerable.

Parents were honest. They said that they hadn’t had conversations at home because they didn’t know what to say. They didn’t know how to address it, how far to go, what to say, what not to say. These were from parents of different racial groups that had the same fears. I think just having the conversation and acknowledging to each other that this was difficult was pretty transformative. From the beginning, it felt like not just my agenda but it felt like a co-creation.

That I, as the educator and the caregivers that were responsible for these children’s well-being, we were coming together and finding a solution of how we were going to enlighten them. Because in the end, we all agree that this was important for them to know. Parents also were pretty honest about saying that there was a lot about this history that they didn’t know either. They welcomed the information and I think they appreciated that we were having this conversation and that there was going to be a thoughtful approach to how we did this.

We started doing it in morning meeting and students would say, “Oh, Mrs. Dingle, we talked about this last night. This is what my family is saying.” So that the parents knew that we had a morning meeting every day. They knew that it would come up. Students felt comfortable enough to bring home into the classroom. It was really obvious that what was happening in the classroom was also getting into the home. I love teaching. I love mathematics. Anybody that knows me knows that. This, having the experience that this history, this hard history was getting home and it was coming back to the classroom — like I said, it was absolutely transformative.

I would suggest to any educator who’s feeling a little hesitant: talk to your parents about it. Ask them how they would like to participate. There’s a lot of different ways to get this done. I think what we absolutely shouldn’t do is continue to be silent. We’ve got to at least try. I know it’s cliché, but as they say, the children are the future. If we aspire to a better world, we’ve got to be able to trust the children with the truth.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Marian really touches on a critical point that speaks directly to our students in the classroom and particularly, the students of color and how they have been socialized in this world. How they have been taught and why there is often a pushback when we introduce the subject of slavery. Because it’s so often taught in such a way, as she points out, that induces shame, which is unfortunate, which is wrong, which shouldn’t be the case. Which also is why we have to teach resistance.

Because as she points out, resistance really lets students and young people, especially students of color and African American children, see not only enslaved people in a different light but also see themselves in a different light. That is one of the great advantages of teaching this history in a way that is accurate and truthful.

Kate Shuster: Yeah, absolutely agreed. Teachers should be teaching resistance; that it wasn’t just one rebellion that people who were enslaved were constantly thinking about and trying to get freedom. It was very difficult to get freedom, but it’s something that every enslaved person wanted and was constantly thinking about. I think as we started this episode, embed this idea of agency early and often. I think it’s very touching to hear that this idea of teaching can be itself an active reparation.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That is so true. I couldn’t agree more. Even framed like that and it’s not teaching a false history. It’s actually just teaching the truth. Teaching what we are supposed to be teaching all along. That really is a wonderful way of thinking of it.

Kate Shuster: One thing she’s doing that is really important is engaging families early and often in knowing and being active participants in their children’s education so that these conversations can happen at home. I’ve heard you talk before about how teachers really need to know their community in order to teach hard history.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. That’s a critical point because communities and the families and the members of the communities have a history with teaching this history of slavery very poorly. It is really important for teachers to reach out to community members to share with community members not only the subject matter but how they are approaching it. What they are approaching specifically and what their expected outcomes are so that you get community buy-in and support.

That happens not only with what is going on in the classroom but then that carries beyond the classroom, as she points out, into people’s homes, into people’s living rooms, into the dining room, across the kitchen table so that family members can have these discussions which reinforce the importance of studying this history. Which then adds extra encouragement for students to sit, listen and learn. 

Kate, it was so good to have you on this episode. I’m so glad that we are continuing to partner on this project. I’m so glad that you’re doing this wonderful work with teachers themselves. We’re making a real difference here and I’m looking forward to continuing to do it with you going forward.

Kate Shuster: Thanks for having me, Hasan. It’s such a pleasure to be able to work with you, and it’s a real joy to listen to these teachers bringing the stuff to life in their classrooms.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: All right.

Kate Shuster: All right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks a lot.

Kate Shuster: Thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bria Wright has been a teacher in the Wake County, North Carolina Public Schools system for four years. She currently teaches fifth grade, her favorite grade. 

Marvin Reed teachers third grade at the Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley, California. This is his second year teaching in the Bay Area. He is also the Equity Teacher Leader at his school. 

Alice Mitchell is a fifth-grade teacher in Boston, Massachusetts. This is her seventh year as a teacher. She is also on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee at her school. 
Marian Dingle is a proud daughter of an educator and has been an elementary educator herself for 21 years. She currently teaches fourth grade in Atlanta, Georgia, and is passionate about both social justice and mathematics. We’re proud to say that all of the teachers who participated in this episode serve on the Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board. 
Kate Shuster is an education researcher and author based in Montgomery, Alabama. She is the project director for the Teaching Hard History initiative. Dr. Shuster is also the author of Teaching Tolerance’s “Teaching the Movement” report, evaluating the state of national education about the civil rights movement. 

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Helping teachers and schools prepare their students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance offers free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find these online at tolerance.org. Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of what would become the United States or how its legacy still influences us today.

Now, in our second season, this podcast is part of an effort to provide comprehensive tools for learning and teaching this critical topic. Teaching Tolerance provides free materials that include over 100 texts, sample inquiries and a detailed K‒12 framework for teaching the history of American slavery. You can also find these online at tolerance.org/hardhistory. Thanks to Ms. Wright, Mr. Reed, Ms. Mitchell, Ms. Dingle and Dr. Shuster for sharing their insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford with production assistance from Russell Gragg and content support from Gabriel Smith.

Of course, Kate Shuster is our executive producer. Our theme song is “Different Heroes” by A Tribe Called Red featuring Northern Voice, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie. If you like what we’re doing, please let your friends and colleagues know. Tell us what you think on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate the feedback. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. I’m your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

Resources and Readings

• Teaching Hard History, K-5 Framework: Essential Knowledge #18
• Teaching Hard History, 6-12 Framework: Objective #8
• Teaching Hard History, 6-12 Framework: Objective #16
• National Museum of the American Indian, Native Knowledge 360°
• Minnesota Historical Society, Dakota War of 1862

Christina Snyder
McCabe Greer Professor of History, Penn State University

• Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America
• Great Crossings; Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson

References:

• Learning for Justice, The Underground Railroad
• U.S. Supreme Court, Worcester v. Georgia
• Smithsonian film, The “Indian Problem”
• Malinda Maynor Lowery, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle
• University of Minnesota, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
• Learning for Justice, Emancipation Proclamation
• Time, How a Court Answered a Forgotten Question of Slavery’s Legacy
• WNET, Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)
• Crooked Media podcast, This Land
   

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Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When I teach slavery at The Ohio State University, I’ll often begin by asking my students, who are overwhelmingly white, to raise a hand if they have heard of the Underground Railroad. Without fail, nearly every hand goes up. And then I asked them, Who would have supported the Underground Railroad had they lived in Ohio during the era of slavery? And without fail, nearly every hand goes up again. Ohioans are proud of their state’s involvement in the Underground Railroad. That loose network of activists that helped untold numbers of enslaved African Americans escape freedom. Down in Ripley, Ohio, the homes of abolitionists John Parker and John Rankin are well preserved. One can even visit the purported spot where freedom seeker, Eliza Harris, whose bold bid to escape slavery was immortalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where she crossed the Ohio River.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And throughout the state, there are historical markers pointing out places where Underground Railroad safe houses and way stations once stood. There’s one such marker right here on the campus of Ohio State. And although Ohio social studies standards don’t say much about slavery, when it’s first taught, which is in the fourth grade, the Underground Railroad is the suggested focus. And Ohioans should be proud of their state’s role in the Underground Railroad. But failing to put the rich history of the Underground Railroad in the broader context of American slavery and settler colonialism does far more harm than good.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Contrary to what my students and most Ohioans have come to believe, the Underground Railroad, even in Ohio, was not widely supported. So at that moment when my students all had their hands up, I have to explain a little hard history: “Sorry, all of you would not have supported the Underground Railroad because if white people supported the Underground Railroad then, like you all are saying you would have, there would have been no need for the thing to be underground.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I understand that people want to be on the right side of history, but the sobering reality is that the vast majority of white people in Ohio wanted nothing to do with the Underground Railroad or abolition; they just wanted to keep African Americans out of the state. But we teach slavery and abolition as fundamentally a conflict between Northern white egalitarians and Southern white racists. So our students don’t understand that Northern whites from small farmers to Abraham Lincoln believed just as deeply in white supremacy as Southern whites. And you can’t understand American history, either during or after slavery, if you don’t understand that racism was a national phenomenon and not a regional one; that it guided the actions of enslavers and non-enslavers alike. That it informed the policies of federal officials, whether they were dealing with African Americans or Indigenous people.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It’s why freed men and women never received 40 acres and a mule. It’s why there are no federally recognized Native nations in Ohio. Land that once belonged to nations like the Shawnee, Seneca, Miami, Ottawa’ and others. Hard history is sobering. It’s disappointing to learn that not every white person outside the South was a conductor on the Underground Railroad or opposed forcibly removing Indigenous people from their ancestral land. It’s disappointing to learn that white Northerners believed in white supremacy too. But hard history is also profoundly instructive because it explains history the way it actually happened, not the way we wish it happened.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material, and offering practical classroom exercises. In our second season, we are expanding our focus to better support elementary school educators, to spend more time with teachers who are doing this work in the classroom. And to understand the often-hidden history of the enslavement of Indigenous people in what would become the United States.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery. I’d like to welcome back my cohost for this season, Dr. Meredith McCoy. Meredith, it’s great to talk with you again.

Meredith McCoy: Hasan, it’s great to be here with you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It’s clear that to fully understand the institution of slavery in America, we really have to dig deep. A growing number of historians have increasingly encouraged us to expand our thinking behind the Atlantic slave trade, looking at the roots of American slavery in the era of Columbus. And also thinking about not just the oppression that was the institution of slavery, but the ways in which African Americans resisted it.

Meredith McCoy: I think that’s right, Hasan. And we also have to think about how every Native nation is operating within its own context. And therefore every Native nation is going to engage with the slave trade in a different way. And then lastly, we also have to think about the sort of ideological conflict that we get between Native nations who have their own pre-existing understandings of bondage and captivity, and European notions of bondage that are really incorporating Indigenous peoples into this increasingly global understanding of capitalism and the commodification of individual people.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But, you know, that’s the conflict that we almost never focus on. This land just simply wasn’t empty. The conflict that garners the most attention in the classroom when discussing American slavery is usually the Civil War. When we talk about the impact of the war on the institution of slavery, and really on American society, we often dig up this history of plantation slavery. But when we turn our attention to plantation slavery and the reasons for the conflict, we pretend as though that land that is being fought over wasn’t occupied previously by Indigenous people. That’s a big piece of the story.

Meredith McCoy: Right. The idea that there was a sort of terra nullius or an empty land is core to this idea of Manifest Destiny. The United States has to deal with a lot less guilt about its dispossession of Indigenous peoples if it just imagines that the land was vacant. Instead, what we have to do as teachers is go back several decades before the Civil War to understand the history of Indigenous removal. Now, removal was not just in the Southeast, it was all over the Midwest and the Southeast and the Northeast. But in particular, the story that gets tied into the Civil War is often that of the Southeast. Now, what we know is that increasingly as white settlers and colonizers populated the Eastern seaboard. There was an increased demand for Native lands and resources. And by the 1830s, this demand for Indigenous lands had support in the White House from a president named Andrew Jackson.

Meredith McCoy: In 1830, Andrew Jackson and the Congress pushed a law called the Removal Act that allowed the president to offer lands out West in exchange for Indigenous lands in the East. Now, the Supreme Court in 1832 in a case called Worcester v. Georgia affirmed Indigenous nations’ sovereignty. But the president famously responded to that law by saying something to the extent of, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Pointed his own military ability to push Indigenous peoples west regardless of what the Supreme Court said. Now, it’s important that we understand that Indigenous peoples were strategizing around the situation. They read it for what it was. Some Indigenous people signed relocation treaties in hopes of mitigating the impact of white violence against their communities. They were hoping to preserve their nations and maybe even preserve some of their land base. And while this often gets referred to colloquially as a “voluntary relocation,” we have to understand they’re operating under extreme duress.

Meredith McCoy: They are coerced in a sense by the changing social landscape around them. Other nations refuse to leave their homelands and then they’re relocated by military force. Now, all of this is undergirded by an absolutely wild implication that Indigenous peoples are all the same and that Indigenous lands are interchangeable as though we don’t, in each of our nations, have a very specific knowledge base of how we work with our land in our own territories and how we steward that land and how it sustains us. This would be as though someone invaded London and told Londoners, “We will exchange your homelands here in London for new lands in Warsaw that you’ve never seen,” and ignoring the Polish people who already live in Warsaw. It’s a ludicrous assumption about how Native people are, and it tries to homogenize Native peoples into one controllable group.

Meredith McCoy: Over the course of removal from the 1830s up through several decades, tens of thousands of Native people are marched from their homelands to what’s then called Indian Territory. This is supposed to be a new permanent home for Native people that will be theirs for as long as the grass grows. Now, that promise is quickly violated. If teachers are interested in connecting the Civil War and removal with their students, there are great resources for them from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Teachers can show the 12-minute film, The Indian Problem, which was produced for the exhibit, “Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indians.” And they can also engage with several NMAI Native Knowledge 360 modules about removal that are linked to the Teaching Hard History framework online. This is a really wonderful opportunity for them to expand how they represent the causes that led up to the Civil War, including the fight for Indigenous lands and the future of slavery in what had then become Indian country and is currently understood as Oklahoma.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, too often we do overlook the displacement of Native nations leading up to the Civil War, but we’re not going to do that here. Meredith, in this episode we’re going to continue listening to your conversation with Dr. Christina Snyder, picking up where the two of you discussed the impact of the Civil War and emancipation on Indigenous people. So what do you think is important for us to understand about this critical moment, from the perspective of Indigenous people?

Meredith McCoy: Hasan, that’s a great question. And I turned to Christina to find out really what the Civil War meant for Indigenous peoples. And so I asked her, how did that war, which is really a war between factions of the United States, appear to Native nations across the continent?

Christina Snyder: This is such a watershed event in U.S. history, and it’s often how we break up the U.S. history survey. We see it as the most pivotal event in American history. And if you look at it from the perspective of Native history, it actually looks quite differently. For many Native people, it’s actually a non-event. It’s something they don’t want to be involved in or not interested in. And particularly for Native people living in the far West, something that they were not directly involved in or involved in only tangentially. So that’s one important thing to remember is that it doesn’t carry the same weight everywhere. And especially from the West, it looks different.

Christina Snyder: When we think about the war itself, we first have to remember that the Civil War started because Americans had a disagreement about what would happen to slavery in the West; would slavery expand into the West? So from the very origin of this conversation, we have to realize that this was an argument about U.S. imperialism, about what was going to be the shape of the West. Both Northerners and Southerners wanted to expand there. By and large, this is an extremely popular idea of Manifest Destiny. But they just disagreed about what the nature of that colonization is going to look like. And so of course, this does have tremendous consequences for Native people because they’re the people who were actually living in the West. And at that time, many parts of the West are still dominated by Native people. It’s still a very Native space.

Christina Snyder: And for Native people, they had to make strategic decisions about how best to preserve their sovereignty and their territory during this period. And it affects some Native nations a lot more than others. If we, for example, look at Indian territory, Indian territory is largely occupied now by the state of Oklahoma. And it’s the place that Native peoples who were forced to walk the Trail of Tears had to go to after Indian removal. Native peoples of the Southeast, the people that I’ve mostly been talking about today, they are forced into Indian territory along with some removed Midwestern peoples, and eventually, peoples from the plains. So you have all these different Native nations who are being forced into this tighter and tighter space.

Christina Snyder: Indian territory is an important strategic place for both the Union and the Confederacy, partially because they want to control the Mississippi River Valley. They are both very interested in Indian territory’s proximity to Texas. In terms of looking west, Indian territory is a strategically important place. Many of the nations there actually still try to remain neutral; many of them want to stay out of the war. They’ve had enough of the violence of colonial wars. They’re all still recovering from Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy, which had uprooted them from their homes just a few decades earlier. And within all of these nations, there are significant factions who were kind of arguing to join one side or the other. And eventually, Native people in Indian territory feel like they have to make a choice. They really have no choice because if they don’t make some kind of a choice, then the Confederates of Texas are going to invade and overwhelm them.

Christina Snyder: So eventually, the five large Southern nations and also a few plains peoples sign treaties and ally with the Confederacy. Most of the leaders of those factions, their interests were aligned with the South. Some of the leaders of those nations had adopted the enslavement of African Americans, had developed plantations, so they felt that their economic interests are aligned. And the important thing to understand though is that there is a larger context here where the Confederacy is also trying to offer much more generous terms than the Union. So it does things like agree to pay back treaty annuities, so treaty monies that the Union had not been paying. They also agree to seat an Indian delegate in the Confederate Congress, which they actually did. And that was something that many of these nations had really been searching for for a long time: to seat a delegate in the U.S. Congress.

Christina Snyder: They also get to form their own Indian troops and elect their own officers, which again, something that the Union wasn’t offering. So eventually, they do side with the Confederacy even though there are factions of each of those nations that join the Union. And so it really becomes a Civil War itself in Indian territory that is partially about slavery, but is also partially about these issues of sovereignty and territory and thinking about how to protect that. So that’s one kind of view of the war. And if we look at another region that’s really profoundly affected by the Civil War is Native peoples who remained in the South. So the removal policy forced about 90 percent of Eastern Indians to live west of the Mississippi. But there’s still a significant population of Indigenous people in parts of the East Coast and particularly in North Carolina.

Christina Snyder: So the largest Native nation there, the Lumbees, they live in eastern North Carolina obviously in the midst of the Confederacy, some of them joined the Confederacy. Some of them do enlist, but many more decide to fight for the Union, which, of course, would have been an unpopular choice in that state. But it is probably they made that decision because of the Confederacy’s conscription policy. So what the Confederacy was doing was forcing Native men to work in really difficult labor situations. And particularly what the Lumbee men were being forced to do was to work at Fort Fisher in Wilmington. This was the Confederacy’s most important seaport. And it was really terrible work, it was building earthworks. It’s made even more deadly by a yellow fever epidemic that strikes two different times during the war.

Christina Snyder: And so some Lumbees to protest this fight for the Union, others began to fight in different ways. So there’s a gang that’s formed under the leadership of a man named Henry Berry Lowrie. It’s a multiracial gang of Native people, some people of African descent, some white people who are resisting conscription. Then they also fight the home guard. It’s a military organization that is supposed to enforce conscription. Part of the leadership of that becomes some of the early leadership also for the KKK. So they’re resisting some of these forms of coercion and white supremacy that are developing around them. And the story of Henry Berry Lowrie and his gang is really an interesting story. It’s almost a kind of Robin Hood story of resistance and survival and trying to fight oppression in a really difficult environment.

Christina Snyder: So if you’re interested in learning more about that story, I’d recommend a recent book by Malinda Maynor Lowery called The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, which has a great chapter about the Lowrie gang in the broader context of the Civil War. I’ve just given you a few different examples of Native people who get caught up in the war. And you can see all these different pressures at play and how people chose different sides. And we can also talk about some of the consequences that the war had for people.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m really struck by what Christina Snyder just said in terms of the different perspectives that Indigenous people had when it came to the Civil War. Of course, in the minds of most white Americans, the Civil War is sort of the end-all be-all, the great conflict in America. For African Americans, the Civil War is the important dividing point between slavery and freedom, life and slavery, life and freedom. But in many instances, as Christina Snyder pointed out, depending upon who you are in terms of your Native American affiliation depends upon where you were. It either meant everything in terms of who you’re going to side with if you’re a Lumbee. But if you were out West already, it meant very little. In fact, you try to stay out of it. I think when we shift the angle of view and look at this great American conflict from the perspective of Native Americans, we get a new idea of what it meant to all of the parties involved.

Meredith McCoy: That’s so true. I think that that shifting of perspective is an important exercise for teachers to do with their students. Teachers can ask their students, “Okay, so we know the way that the Civil War is normally taught in U.S. history textbooks, but what happens if we shift our perspective and we ask: What did the war mean to you if you were living in Indian territory or what did the war mean to you if you were out on the West Coast?” And those answers are going to be very different. And so helping students to sort of de-center that core national narrative that the Civil War is this end-all be-all of U.S. history and remembering that it’s just one thing. A very important historical moment, but very important for a certain subset of people. This is also an interesting question about leadership and how leaders are making strategic choices for their nations given the different contexts in which they operate and the different social pressures being put on them. And so we have to think about the leadership of Indigenous nations making equally strategic choices to the leadership of what was then the United States.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that’s a really important point too because when we think about leadership when it comes to the Civil War and thinking here specifically about Abraham Lincoln, there is also a core national narrative that frames Lincoln as the great emancipator. Somebody who went into the war trying to make this a war about abolishing slavery, somebody who rejected white supremacy, was a racial egalitarian. When in fact we know that wasn’t the case, that Abraham Lincoln believed as deeply as any white Southerner in white supremacy, which is important to understand because it helps us understand why he refused to make this a war about abolishing slavery, even though folk like Frederick Douglass and others are chiding him to do so. Which shines an important light on, why does it become a war to end slavery? And the military necessity and military developments that had occurred between 1861, 62 and 63 so that it finally becomes an absolute war to end slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This question of leadership is really important, and I think that exercise of shifting perspectives is equally important and useful when thinking about these leadership questions because depending upon who you are and your group interest, you will approach the same problem and seek solutions to that problem differently depending upon if you are a Lumbee or if you are Abraham Lincoln.

Meredith McCoy: Raising the issue of leadership allows us to really closely examine Abraham Lincoln and particularly his relationship to Native nations. Abraham Lincoln is a particularly complicated figure for a lot of Native people. And to understand Lincoln, it’s helpful for students to understand the history of the Dakota War and also of the Dakota 38. It’s important to remember that the Civil War was not the only major conflict happening in the 1860s in North America. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, there had been significant white encroachment pushing west into Dakota territory in what’s currently understood as Minnesota. And under duress from military threat and pressure from traders who alleged that Dakota people owed them massive amounts of money, Dakota peoples signed a treaty with the United States in the 1850s. They would exchange some of their lands for cash annuities and also for a permanent reservation base.

Meredith McCoy: But the reservation land that they were given was poor and didn’t yield sufficient food, and the U.S. government consistently failed to deliver its annuities on time. That was in part due to government corruption and also once the Civil War ramped up, due to the Civil War making cash tight for the Union. And so food was scarce and Dakota people were starving and looking for this fulfillment of a promise from the United States that never came. So facing desperate circumstances, four Dakota men attacked five white settlers. This set off a six-week war in which Dakota people tried to reclaim their homelands from the whites who had taken their lands without keeping their promises for resources. By the end of the six-week war, 303 Dakota people were ordered to be executed. This is where Abraham Lincoln enters the story. Lincoln, in evaluating how many executions to carry out, is looking at Congress and talking to them about how such a mass execution might look to the public.

Meredith McCoy: And so he considers initially only hanging two people, but then goes back and re-evaluate and says, “To really make sure that Native nations are scared into never rising up again, let’s make this a much larger mass hanging.” And so Lincoln orders the mass execution of 38 Dakota people. And then there are subsequent bounties put on the scalps of Dakota leaders who had escaped imprisonment and execution. After the Dakota 38 were hung, the United States declared the remaining Dakota treaties invalid and marched thousands of Dakota people west out of Minnesota. Now, a teacher might initially ask, “What is the relationship between the Dakota War and the Civil War? Just because they’re both happening in 1862, do we have to discuss them together?”

Meredith McCoy: Well, I think that the Dakota War helps us to understand Lincoln in a much more complex way because we see how he’s thinking about public impressions of the war and public ideas about the future of the United States. The Dakota War also links conflicts along the Eastern Seaboard during the Civil War, conflicts that were about land and the future of the United States with debates further west about how far the United States would actually stretch and what it would look like. And the fact that these Dakota people were fighting for the return of their homelands reminds us that the coast-to-coast model of the United States was never inevitable.

Meredith McCoy: As teachers are thinking about how to teach the Dakota 38, they can draw upon the videos and class resources that were developed by the Minnesota Historical Society at usdakotawar.org, including about a 10-minute broken promises treaty that allows students to think through the thought processes that led to the development of the war and how Dakota people were navigating an incredibly difficult social landscape. Teachers can also examine resources from the University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies as they’re thinking about what it looks like to explain the Dakota War and its relationship to the Civil War to their students. So understanding the history of the Dakota War and the mass execution ordered by Lincoln of the Dakota 38 helps us to understand that Lincoln was both executioner and, with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, also a liberator. It’s important to ask ourselves, Why in our history textbooks only one of those two stories gets recorded, and what that is telling students about the narrative of the United States?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The emphasis on the great emancipator and not the great executioner certainly reinforces that normative narrative of United States of perpetual progress, that Abraham Lincoln is the answer to the conflict that is about to tear the American nation apart. And he’s the person that we are to look to during this time of turmoil from the perspective of the 20th and the 21st century. But when you put in the fact that the great emancipator is also this great executioner, then you have to question, Well, is even the great emancipator narrative true and accurate? And when we begin to peel back the layers, we realize that Lincoln isn’t coming into the Civil War as someone who is wholly committed to abolition or emancipation. He isn’t coming into this conflict as a racial egalitarian.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: He’s coming into this conflict as somebody who believes in white supremacy, he’s coming into this conflict as someone who is willing to allow slavery to exist in order to preserve the Union. So bringing in the Dakota 38, talking about these decisions and choices to take Native lives to invalidate treaties, I think gives us the whole picture of Abraham Lincoln and not the rosy picture of Abraham Lincoln that we choose to look to because it fits nicely with this myth of American progress.

Meredith McCoy: Hasan, that is a really beautiful way of putting all of that history. And lest teachers or students become tempted to think about executioner and liberator or as a binary, let’s remember what Lincoln was doing. He was attempting to build a Union based on white supremacy or that would uphold and buttress the white social, political and economic power of land-owning men. And Native eraser is part and parcel of that. So the largest mass execution in U.S. history was not somehow diametrically opposed to Lincoln’s image as a liberator. Instead, all of this is working towards the same end goal, which is ultimate domination of Indigenous lands and resources moving west across the continent.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I wonder then about the Emancipation Proclamation because one of the great myths about the Civil War and about the Emancipation Proclamation is that it in fact frees enslaved people. When in truth, the reality is it only declares free those who were living in territories, states controlled by the Confederacy. But the broader point that the Civil War with the Emancipation Proclamation, with the 13th Amendment, ends slavery in America. What are the implications for the Civil War and the ending of the enslavement of African people in America for the enslavement of Indigenous people?

Meredith McCoy: Yeah. It’s important that we talk about the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s such a center part of how we’re expected to teach slavery and the end of the Civil War in our social studies classrooms. And yet, it totally obscures that Indigenous peoples were not protected by the Emancipation Proclamation and that the Emancipation Proclamation also did not apply to African slaves held in slavery by Indigenous peoples in Indian territory. So I turned this question over to Christina and she clarified how the emancipation works for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous peoples who were slave holders in this time.

Christina Snyder: When we think about the end of slavery, we tend to think about it in terms of presidential actions and legal actions. So the short answer is that, no, the Emancipation Proclamation does not apply to the West. And in fact, it doesn’t even apply to Indian territory where those nations are allied with the Confederacy because, again, they’re independent nations. They’re merely allies of the Confederacy, they’re not part of the Confederacy. So the Emancipation Proclamation really only applied to Confederate territories. And we might add too that there are certain places in the U.S. where slavery was still persisting up to that point, like in Kentucky, for example, where it doesn’t apply either. So the reality of it is that the Emancipation Proclamation has a limited reach, and it has no reach on the West or Indian territory.

Christina Snyder: The U.S. tries to come up with a more forceful and clear articulation of the abolition of slavery, which comes with the 13th Amendment, which is ratified in 1865. And that’s supposed to end slavery more clearly and definitively. But again, that does not apply to Indian territory. And the U.S. has a very limited control over the West. So that’s really not what ends Indigenous slavery in the West either. And so I think part of the challenge of telling this story, particularly when we come to this part of talking about abolition is that it’s not nearly as neat as saying the Civil War ended Indian slavery, because it did not. To try to end slavery in Indian territory, the United States had to sign a series of separate treaties with Southern Indian nations. And those are collectively called the Treaty of 1866, that forced those nations to give up about half of their land to also allow the U.S. to build railroads and roads and forts throughout Indian territory. And also to abolish slavery and incorporate free people as citizens.

Christina Snyder: I should say that some of those nations had actually done that for themselves during the war, meaning abolished slavery, the Creeks and Seminoles and Cherokees had all done so of their own volition during the war. The Choctaws and Chickasaws did not, and so slavery persisted in those places. In the West, the colonizers themselves are somewhat different in the Mississippi Valley and in New France, what’s now Canada. You have the French, and in the farther west you have from the Spanish. And even the Russians have colonized Alaska and parts of the Northwest all the way down into California. All of these different imperial regimes employ enslaved Indigenous labor. They do so in different ways. When it comes to the Spanish realm, they are also tapping into Indigenous warfare and really encouraging and amplifying that warfare.

Christina Snyder: You have some Indigenous people on the plains who really benefit or try to make the most out of the tools that colonial trade gives them access to. It’s interesting to think about Native history in that period in the West because really before the colonial period, the plains is a very different place. It’s a place mostly of farmers, and it’s not a place that relied very heavily on bison hunting because bison hunting is extremely hard before horses and guns come to the plains. And so it’s really only with the convergence of the acquisition of horses from the Spanish, and that mostly is coming out of New Mexico. And then guns, which are often coming out of French Louisiana. And so in the early 1700s, plain societies start to gain access to these. And it is a powerful kind of convergence that allows people to live a totally different lifestyle than they had led before.

Christina Snyder: So really the heyday of what we think of as kind of the mounted plains warrior exists from about 1700 until the late 1800s. And that’s it, it’s actually kind of a blip in the broader history of North America. But part of what these people are engaging with is also the buying and selling of captives. And a very popular destination for those captives are various colonial settlements in New Mexico, so Santa Fe, Albuquerque. Some of them are traveling on the Santa Fe Trail, which becomes a major human trafficking route. And again, what you see in New Spain and the area that we think of as New Mexico is a kind of convergence of different kinds of forced labor. So there is Indigenous enslavement. There are also forms of peonage that developed there. And peonage often ensnares Native people in that region.

Christina Snyder: It’s something that we may also be familiar with in the context of Southern history after the Civil War. And basically what happens is that a person who’s poor engages in a labor contract with the landowner, often accepts goods on credit. The landowner is often the only source of those goods. And the landowner can also charge whatever he or she wishes in terms of interest, room and board such that this person is trapped in peonage over the course of his or her lifetime. And that condition can even pass down to children. So peonage is a kind of slippery condition of forced labor that actually shares many of the same aspects of slavery in the sense that people are doing work for free. They’re often in these abusive situations. Those contracts, those labor contracts can even be transferred to other landowners so they and their children can be subject to that shifting around of contracts.

Christina Snyder: So there are other kinds of forced labor systems that Indigenous people in the West become caught up in. After the Civil War, even after the passage of the 13th Amendment, it was only when the Treaty of 1866 was enforced, in 1866, 1867 that the enslavement of African Americans was really ended in Indian territory. And if we look further west, the process is even longer and more fraught. Shortly before the 13th Amendment was ratified, President Johnson actually was thinking about Indian slavery in the West. And it’s interesting because federal officials don’t always have a good handle on what’s happening in the West because the forms of enslavement can look different. They can sometimes really struggle to understand it or to develop policies around it. But interestingly, Johnson is thinking about it. And so what he does is to use federal agents appointed by the U.S. to try to free all Indian slaves that came to their attention.

Christina Snyder: So these are essentially personnel working in Indian Affairs who were supposed to seek out and free Indian slaves that they find. But in reality, this is really hard to execute. This is a really difficult policy to execute because these federal officials, they tend to have a difficult time locating Indian slaves, understanding what that slavery looks like, again, because it’s not what they’re seeing in the American South. They’re used to thinking about slavery in a very narrow sense. But the other part of why it’s so hard is that masters do everything in their power to conceal, evade and resist that emancipation. It’s in the master’s interest to try to perpetuate that exploitative relationship as long as they can. So even after the Civil War, federal officials report that the slave population just of New Mexico is at least 1,000 and maybe as many as 4,000.

Christina Snyder: And there are these ongoing anxieties about how to apply the 13th Amendment in the West. And in a series of Supreme Court cases, which are called “the Slaughterhouse cases” that are decided in 1873; they actually ruled that the 13th Amendment, the Civil Rights bill and other Reconstruction legislation was really conceived of in the context of the South and not of the West. And so it should be narrowly applied to a kind of Southern context. And so what you see here really is the federal government abdicating its authority as liberator. So the story of what happens to these Indian people held in bondage is essentially is that those forms of bondage persist in different places to different times, sometimes until the 1880s. Sometimes even into the 20th century. And again, masters try to evade the laws by masking what they’re doing by trying to depict Indian children as adoptees or indentured servants or, again, holding people in peonage in a situation where they can’t really get out of. And so it gets really messy in the West and persists well beyond the 13th Amendment, certainly well beyond the Emancipation Proclamation.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What really stands out to me is the continuity of forms of involuntary servitude. We think about the Civil War ending slavery as a hard break. But on the African- American side, we certainly know that slavery existed in different forms. And with Indigenous folk, we see that slavery existed in different forms. And the through line I think is very much that the war did not necessarily change attitudes. When thinking about enslavers, the attitude, the reason for enslaving people, to exploit their labor for personal gain and profit, was still there. And so naturally, there would be this desire if they’re forced to give up the institution in a particular way to search for alternative means of exploiting people’s labor. I think it’s so critically important that we think about the Civil War and abolition and the end of slavery and the 13th Amendment. And we’re ready to sort of wash our hands of the institution of slavery rather than saying that there are these multiple ways in which involuntary servitude existed before the war and there will be and are multiple ways in which involuntary servitude would exist after the war.

Meredith McCoy: The imperative for profit in a capitalist system does mean that people continue to find ways to evolve the institution of slavery to make sure that they could continue to make as much profit as they could, ignoring the basic dignity and rights of other peoples. When Christina was talking to us about how this persists over time, she also talked to us about how legality of enslavement was different for Indigenous peoples and African people. It’s helpful for students to both understand how each impacted the other and also to compare how each of them operated.

Christina Snyder: If we think about the differences between the enslavement of African Americans and the enslavement of Indians, one of the key features is legality. Throughout the course of the colonial period, Europeans increasingly protected the enslavement of African Americans really robustly in law. I’m sure in our classrooms we’re used to thinking about many of these laws. Whereas in contrast, in terms of Indigenous slavery, many imperial powers resisted that or tried to put restrictions on it. The colonies themselves, many people still tried to hold Indian slaves, but it operated in a legal gray area or in an extra-legal way.

Christina Snyder: Again, one of the differences that we see between these different forms of bondage is one that’s very rigidly protected by law and one that is much harder sometimes to see in the historical record because it’s often in this legal gray area.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Given the history that was just laid out, when would you say that the enslavement of Indigenous people actually ended?

Meredith McCoy: To answer that question, we first have to ask, what happened to Native nations who had allied with the Confederacy and how the Union responded to those nations after they came out on the losing side of the war?

Christina Snyder: The Union rules that all previous treaties were null and void because these were treaties that were signed between the United States and Indian nations, and that Indian nations had violated those treaties by allying with the Confederacy. And treaties are such an important part of a Native history and they still really structure relationships between Native nations and the federal government today. So it’s important in our classrooms to maybe take an example of a treaty to read or read excerpts from it because we often think about them as kind of one sided and highly exploitative, and they certainly could be that way. But they also acknowledge certain Native rights to land and self-government and other kinds of sovereign rights. And those are still the legal basis of Native peoples’ fights for autonomy today. So they’re very foundational. And the treaties themselves were one of the things that led some of these Southern nations to ally with the Confederacy in the first place because they argued that the United States had not honored the treaties.

Christina Snyder: When the U.S. forced Native people to Indian territory, if you look at the treaties of removal, they’ll have really poetic language saying that Native nations will have access to this land forever; that it will be theirs as long as the water flows and the grass grows. But that came to an end pretty quickly. The U.S. abrogates those treaties and demands back about half of the land of Indian territory. So making and breaking treaties has tremendous consequences for Native nations. You see some really difficult consequences. The Seminoles, who had suffered a lot during the war because of things like famine and disease, are forced to move in with the Creek Nation people that they had had traditional historical conflicts with because they lost all of their land. And the lands of the other nations are really contracted quite a bit. And as the U.S. pivots from the Civil War, it looks to the West, and Northerners and Southerners think about the conquest of the West as a way to reconcile their sectional differences.

Christina Snyder: So the Civil War really bleeds into the Plains Wars. What happens to that land in Indian territory that the removed tribes were forced to give up is that it becomes reservations for plains peoples that are forced there. So what you get is a kind of smaller and smaller contraction of people in this place. And for those who had allied with the Confederacy, it’s not only this loss of land, but there’s going to be a significant assault on their autonomy and their remaining treaty rights really until the end of the 19th century when the U.S. pursues the Dawes Act and the Curtis Act, which disbands their tribal governments and dissolves their national territories.

Meredith McCoy: There’s a really great resource for teachers to increase their content knowledge of this topic, particularly taking Cherokee Nation as an example. There’s a new podcast from Crooked Media called This Land that traces the history of land dispossession and land rights for Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. As we think about the end of the Civil War and how it did not result in the end of enslavement for Indigenous people, what is it, if anything, that ends enslavement of Indigenous people across the continent?

Christina Snyder: Yeah, this is a tough question. Typically, we’re so used to thinking about abolition as a legal issue, as a political and legal issue. But again, the reality is that the U.S. adopts very limited legal action in this regard and puts basically no coercive authority behind it. So there’s really no big push to liberate Native peoples of the West. So I would say that what the Civil War does in the West is not to end slavery but just to transform it into different kinds of coercive and bonded relationships. We can see this playing out in some different ways in different colonial contexts. For example, in Utah, the dominant settler group there, the LDS settlers are Mormons. They move into that space in 1840s. This is a space where the Indian slave trade already exists. They immediately buy Indian slaves. But how they come to think of it is as a kind of indenture program.

Christina Snyder: So they develop forms of indenture and apprenticeship that keep Indigenous children in their households as labors sometimes with the goal of assimilating them. Although those children died very young, did not outlive their indentures. And that continues well after the Civil War. So the last child who’s kind of taken in that way is taken in the 1880s, I think the late 1880s. And the reason that the federal government did not take exception to what was happening in Utah is that actually the way that LDS sellers framed this was very similar to what the federal government was doing with Indian boarding schools during the Allotment period. So these kinds of environments where Indian kids are forced away from their families under the guise of getting an education, but they’re often doing manual labor for half the time that they’re there. This is also an environment of confinement and labor and assimilation. So again, there are some significant overlaps with the kinds of forced labor and also the people that is targeting, women and children that are left over from these earlier eras.

Christina Snyder: I would say too that we could think about this in the context of convict labor because the 13th Amendment explicitly protects convict labor. Native people are incarcerated at the highest rate of any racial or ethnic group in the United States. And this has been the case for a long time. Kelly Lytle Hernandez wrote a wonderful book about incarceration in California. And she says that this practice of arresting and forcing Indigenous people to labor has been happening in California since the 18th century. And so I would say, again, that the Civil War doesn’t so much end slavery as transform it, transform bondage into these different forms. And again, I think a useful metaphor is thinking about slavery as a virus that mutates over time, that it doesn’t always look the same. And in this case, it’s adapted to these different environments where it lives in a kind of area that’s either a legal gray area or is a legal practice, but still can serve many of the same ends in terms of labor exploitation and confinement.

Meredith McCoy: There are so many contemporary ripple effects, and I’m really appreciative that you’ve pointed to the disproportionate rates of incarceration for Native people. It’s also important that we think about this theft over centuries of Native women and children and the current epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. These things are all related. And as teachers are thinking about how to address these issues in the classroom, it’s important that we think about not just enslavement as something that happened in a historical period, but something that, as you say, has morphed and evolved over time and that ripples out into a variety of social issues that impact the health and well-being of Native communities today.

Meredith McCoy: This is where an exercise in contemporary issues could be really interesting for teachers and students. What happens if we ask students to think about the border camps that are housing migrant children as a form of confinement? How do we connect those to the stories of the confinement of Native children in the boarding schools? What happens if we ask teachers and students to build a community where they’re having open conversations about the rates of violence against Indigenous women and children and how that connects to earlier histories of violence against Indigenous peoples? This kind of drawing of connections over time, connecting the present rates of disproportionate violence, disproportionate incarceration, disproportionate poverty as a result of centuries of treaty abrogation and centuries of the prevention of wealth accrual. If we connect all of those things past to present, I think students start to get a really clear understanding of why this history is so important and why, when we discuss it, we can’t talk about it as isolated to the 1800s.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That’s such an important perspective to offer to our students that what they see today doesn’t exist in isolation just as what we study and read about 150 years ago, 200 years ago didn’t exist in isolation. The ripple effects and that the connections over time are very real. And that in order to understand something that happens today, like disproportionate incarceration of Native people, of African Americans, that that just doesn’t happen. That there is a long history that gives rise to the conditions that we see today and they’re not just the happenstance of poor decision-making on the part of people of color. I really like that framing of the past and the present.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And when you lay out this history and explain both as you and Dr. Snyder were pointing out that something like slavery isn’t fixed, it’s not static. It is constantly changing because the motivation and desire behind it, the reason for it, the exploitation of labor for personal profit and gain, the desire to seek land, the desire to exploit people and natural resources, is really what’s driving it. So when the Civil War ends, people just don’t suddenly throw up the hand and say, “Oh, well, everything is equal now, let’s treat everybody the same.” You have folk who are trying to do the same things but now it’s in a new context.

Meredith McCoy: You’ve really hit some of the core takeaways that Christina wanted people to leave with, thinking about how do we understand histories of Indigenous enslavement. This idea that it’s dynamic because of its underlying goals, its connection to global capitalism. Since global capitalism doesn’t go away, neither does the motivation for profit and for the commodification of individual people. That is all part of this massive impact of the slave trade on Indigenous populations over time in terms of population loss and incorporation into this evolving version of global capitalism. So I asked Christina if she were going to boil this down into just a handful of takeaways for teachers and students, what they would be? And this is what she had to say.

Christina Snyder: I do think there are three takeaways that we can all benefit from and try to implement in the classroom. So I would say the first is that understanding Indigenous enslavement expands the scope of our understanding. That slavery is much bigger, much broader than we ever thought before. And we honestly are still wrapping our minds around just how vast the Indian slave trade was. We do know that just in terms of Indigenous people who are deported and traded coming out of the Americas, they’re between 2.5 and 5 million Indigenous Americans who were forced into the Indian slave trade. That’s a staggering number. In terms of that scope, colonialism forced Native Americans and Africans alike into a global economy that valued coerced labor.

Christina Snyder: So they’re dispossessed, they’re forced into these different environments. It’s something that has really lasting consequences in terms of transforming their homelands and the futures of those places. Which kind of leads me to the second point that I think we can take away, which are the kind of demographic and political impacts of the Indian slave trade. So as I mentioned before, when we talk about the early colonial period in particular, we often talk about Native population loss. And it’s really important to think about that, not just in terms of germs, it’s not just the diseases that are taking all these Indigenous lives. Warfare and slavery have a major role in Indigenous population devastation and these declines that you see everywhere in the Americas. And so that story of how early colonialism works, it’s not just a story about germs, it’s also a story about human agency.

Christina Snyder: And again, that’s forcing people into this global market that values slavery. This has a major impact on how Native people, how their ability to kind of deal with colonizers become so compromised by the Indian slave trade. There are devastating population losses, but then there are also relationships that people felt compelled to enter because they feel like they need to gain access to firearms, gain access to global markets. So I think that by thinking about the Indian slave trade, it does give us a totally new window on how these colonial relationships developed and why they’re so devastating to Native communities. And the third thing that I mentioned is just the dynamism of slavery that this helps us understand that slavery changes over time, that it’s not one thing all the time. It’s not just in one space, that it’s actually incredibly dynamic and incredibly dangerous. It spread across the entire continent and affected millions of different people of different backgrounds. And if we define slavery too narrowly, we can fail to see its persistence over time, and even its modern-day permutations.

Meredith McCoy: Teachers have really packed schedules, and there are dozens, and in some cases, hundreds of standards that social studies teachers have to cover in a given year. How might you think about talking to a teacher about how this blends in with the curriculum they already teach so that we don’t see this as additive history, but rather part and parcel of the history that we’re already integrating into our classrooms?

Christina Snyder: There are certain strategies that I imagine could be implemented fairly easily in the classroom. The first one that I’ll mention is just going back to thinking about Columbus because I think it’s something that we all teach about anyway. The reality it is that we’re not adding a different story, we’re just telling the fuller story of Columbus. He’s already engaged in African slavery and he brings those same principles to the Americas. And so that’s where you can really see this convergence and start to understand how this story is related to the Americas. I think that’s a very logical place to start. And again, I think that this topic will come up again when we think about early Native population loss, we probably already talk about disease.

Christina Snyder: But you can also think about that quote that I talked about from the French colonial officials saying that, for every Indian slave that’s taken alive, three people die trying to resist that. That helps you see kind of the mortality levels, the ways in which Native people are struggling against that. And when we talk about colonial wars, we’re often thinking about them strictly in terms of kind of imperial rivalries. But Native people are involved in all colonial wars in North America. They’re allied with European powers, they rely on European relationships for manufactured goods. And so again, we talk about colonial wars and the reasons why Native people wanted to ally with them. That’s another way to bring in some of the principles that we’ve talked about. When it comes to thinking later in the class about the Civil War and Reconstruction, I think it’s really important to talk about what the Civil War accomplishes and also to think about its shortcomings.

Christina Snyder: How does the Civil War look from Dakota lands? Let’s read the 13th Amendment and see what it actually says. Because again, it very explicitly leaves out convict labor. When you think about turning to the West, again, we probably talk about boarding schools already. And perhaps in the context of the Dawes Act, we can talk about those boarding schools in terms of a longer history of removing Native children from Indigenous households for purposes of confinement and labor. So I think that there are areas where those moments will come naturally. They won’t just add extra information, but they’ll really expand our understanding of these periods and these transformative events in American history.

Meredith McCoy: Thank you so much, Christina. I feel I have learned a lot from you today that will certainly inform my own classroom practice, and I hope will be really helpful for our listeners as well.

Christina Snyder: Thank you so much, Meredith. It was great to talk to you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Christina Snyder is the McCabe Greer Professor of the American Civil War Era at Penn State University. She is the author of Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America, and Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson. Dr. Snyder is the 2018 winner of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians.

Meredith McCoy: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, helping teachers and schools prepare their students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance offers free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find these online at tolerance.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of what would become the United States, or how its legacy still influences us today. Now in our second season, this podcast is part of an effort to provide comprehensive tools for learning and teaching this critical topic. Teaching Tolerance provides free teaching materials that include over 100 texts, sample inquiries and a detailed K‒12 framework for teaching the history of American slavery. You can also find these online at tolerance.org/hardhistory.

Meredith McCoy: Thanks to Dr. Snyder for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackleford with production assistance from Russell Gragg and content support from Gabriel Smith. Kate Schuster is our executive producer.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Our theme song is “Different Heroes” by A Tribe Called Red featuring Northern Voice, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie.

Meredith McCoy: If you liked what you heard today, please share it with your friends and colleagues, and then let us know what you thought. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University.

Meredith McCoy: And I’m Dr. Meredith McCoy, assistant professor of American studies and history at Carleton College.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries & Meredith McCoy: And we are your hosts for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. 

Resources and Resources

• Learning for Justice: Lesson, Rethinking Discovery
• Learning for Justice: I am the Blood of the Conqueror, I am the Blood of the Conquered
• Learning for Justice: Stowage on the Slave Ship Brooks, 1788
• Wikipedia: Requerimiento: The Spanish Requirement of 1513

Christina Snyder
McCabe Greer Professor of History, Penn State University

• Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America
• Great Crossings; Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson

References:

• Learning for Justice: Lesson, Precolumbian Native Peoples and Technology
• Doctrine of Discovery
• Learning for Justice: The Atlantic Slave Trade what too few textbooks told you
• U.S. Supreme Court, Johnson V. M’Intosh
• Wikipedia: Requerimiento: The Spanish Requirement of 1513
• Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South
• Sarah Shear, Social Studies & Multicultural Education, University of Washington-Bothell
   

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Transcript

Hasan K. Jeffries: When opening day finally arrived, my girls and I headed to the movies. I didn’t break out the high-African fashion like my good friend, the brother Doctor Charles McKinney, down in Memphis, Tennessee, who, along with his wife, the most elegant and regal Nat, went full Wakanda to the theater. But I did at least wear my Lowndes County Freedom Organization hoodie, which is emblazoned with a snarling black panther, the logo of the original Black Panther party. 

Black Panther, the movie, did not disappoint. It was action packed, suspenseful, cleverly written, visually magnificent and wonderfully acted. The end was just the beginning. As soon as the credits began to roll, African Americans took to social media to debate the central premise of the film. That there existed in the 21st century, an African nation that had been untouched by the scourge of transatlantic slavery and the ravages of European colonialism, and as a result, had developed technological capabilities far in advance of anything that existed in the Western world.

Black Twitter was on fire. Soon, the same discussions were being had on black call-in radio shows and in black-dominated spaces. From college dorm rooms to black barber shops and beauty salons. These were fascinating conversations. People speculating about what life would have been like in African societies had they not been disrupted by slavery and colonialism. This is of course impossible to know because slavery and colonialism lasted for centuries and reach deep into the interior of Africa and the Americas. No African kingdom or Indigenous nation was untouched, either directly or indirectly, by slavery and colonialism.

Their trajectories were altered forever. But these were rich thought experiments because rarely do people think in such public and communal ways about the deep and lasting impact of slavery and colonialism and how these systems forced African and Indigenous nations and people to react and respond. Exploring how African and Indigenous nations would have been different, were it not for slavery and colonialism, is a useful intellectual undertaking. It starts people thinking about the lives of African Indigenous people on their own terms.

But this should be more than just an exercise because it’s an effective way to see the impact of slavery and colonialism on African and Indigenous nations. “Wakanda forever” is a catchy phrase, but it also reflects an idea that is central to understanding the evolution of American slavery. That life for nations and people touched by slavery and colonialism was forever and irrevocably changed. This has to be unpacked first if we are to understand the origin and evolution of American slavery.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Hasan K. Jeffries: In our second season, we are expanding our focus to better support elementary school educators, to spend more time with teachers who are doing this work in the classroom and to understand the often-hidden history of the enslavement of Indigenous people in what would become the United States. Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

Hasan K. Jeffries: There were millions of Indigenous people living in North America when Europeans first arrived on the continent. These invaders and settlers brought established principles and practices of human enslavement with them, along with their insatiable desire for free labor. In this episode, historian Christina Snyder tells the story of what unfolded when these worlds collided. She explains how European concepts of bondage transformed the way Native nations interacted with each other.

Hasan K. Jeffries: We learn how millions of Indigenous people were enslaved during the 400 years between the time Columbus landed in the Caribbean and the American Civil War. But first, we’re going to meet Doctor Meredith McCoy. Meredith will be joining me for this season of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. She’s going to share with us her conversation with Doctor Snyder. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy. I’m really excited to welcome to the podcast for season two, my cohost, Meredith McCoy. Meredith, how are you? Welcome aboard.

Meredith McCoy: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here with you. The first season was amazing. So I’m excited to come on board.

Hasan K. Jeffries: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself so our listeners can get to know you a little bit?

Meredith McCoy: I recently began a position as Assistant Professor of American Studies and History at Carlton College. My interests are really in histories of federal education policy and Indigenous resistance. My dad is a tribal citizen at the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, so I’m of Turtle Mountain descent. I also come from a family of educators. So this is very personal to me, thinking about issues of curriculum and teaching practice. 

I’m particularly excited about Teaching Hard History and being involved in the histories of Indigenous enslavement. Because when I taught middle school as a middle school social studies, Spanish and English language arts teacher, I was never prepared to teach histories of American slavery, either for African enslavement or Indigenous enslavement. It wasn’t part of my development and my master’s in education, it wasn’t part of my standards or textbooks in Tennessee or Georgia, and it also was not part of the education I received as a student myself, growing up in North Carolina. So I think the materials that we’re developing are really crucial resources. I’m so excited to be part of this project and bringing this very hard history in an accessible way to our teachers.

Hasan K. Jeffries: Now you had a chance to interview Doctor Christina Snyder. Could you tell us a little bit about why it’s important for our listeners to hear what she has to say?
Meredith McCoy: Absolutely. Doctor Snyder was someone that we really wanted to bring on early, because we wanted to get her perspectives on how Indigenous understandings of enslavement before European invasion changed once Europeans arrived in what are currently the Americas.

Hasan K. Jeffries: There’s so much history there. Where is it that you chose to begin this discussion?

Meredith McCoy: There is so much history to cover. A lot of K–12 social studies standards in textbooks tend to distort or even erase histories of Indigenous peoples, and that includes the history of Indigenous enslavement. So, Doctor Snyder and I began our conversation with a question about common misconceptions about Indigenous peoples and enslavement.

Hasan K. Jeffries: Well, let’s take a listen.

Meredith McCoy: I am thrilled today to welcome Christina Snyder.

Christina Snyder: Thanks so much, Meredith.

Meredith McCoy: Christina, what are some common misconceptions that you think people might have to undo as they think about integrating this new content into their classrooms?

Christina Snyder: For a country that is so fundamentally committed to the ideal of freedom, I think this really challenges us to reconsider just how broad the scope of slavery was, how long it lasted, how many people it affected? Before the 1970s, historians tended to depict slavery as something that happened exclusively in the antebellum South, focusing on African Americans. They even depicted the slavery as timeless. Since that, we have really focused on how dynamic slavery was, how many different groups of people it affected, where it was?

So it’s not just in the South, it’s in fact, all over the continent. When it was  enslaving native people as part of a global economy began with Columbus’s second voyage in 1495 and it really continued until the 1880s or even later in some places.

Meredith McCoy: You mentioned Columbus. How do we understand the role of Columbus in a history of enslavement of Indigenous peoples?

Christina Snyder: So Columbus, even before he came to the Americas, he had participated in the African slave trade. This was a trade that people in Spain and Portugal in particular had started engaging in the 15th century. He and his father were both participants and had bought and sold West Africans in Europe. So on the second voyage to the Caribbean, he takes captives. Columbus captured 550 Indigenous peoples, carried them back to Spain. Actually, 200 of them died on the voyage, which was overcrowded, many people were ill, but of the survivors, he sold them in Spain.

When he was marketing them to potential buyers, he actually compared them to West Africans. So something that we can see is that colonialism forced Indigenous people and Africans into a global economy that valued them as commodities and laborers.

Meredith McCoy: So there is a mutual displacement of peoples being taken across the ocean. This really I think applies to how teachers think about the Atlantic slave trade and also about mercantilism. How is that working, in terms of Indigenous peoples are being sent to Europe as enslaved people at the same time that African people are being brought to what’s currently the United States as enslaved people?

Christina Snyder: I think that phrase “mutual displacement” is really effective, because once these colonial endeavors really force Indigenous people and Africans into the global market, it’s really surprising how far that diaspora goes. One thing to immediately come to terms with is that labor is a scarce resource in colonial North America and colonialism is fundamentally about money. These empires wanted colonies to generate money for sometimes private investors, sometimes for the crown.

So they were desperate to gain access to laborers and especially eager to get bonded laborers who could be enslaved for life. But, even though these colonizers are really eager to engage in the African slave trade to get laborers for these plantations that they’re beginning on the American side of the ocean, they sometimes have difficulty accessing it. That’s why many of them become interested in buying and selling Indigenous captives. Partially to work them on their own plantations, but also for deportation.

Christina Snyder: So some of those captives go back to Europe. Some of them are even sold to places like the Philippines, part of the Spanish empire at that time, or sold to the Caribbean in exchange for African captives. So the kind of traffic that we think about in the Atlantic is really complicated by our including Native peoples in that story.

Hasan K. Jeffries: Meredith, obviously this is 2019 and we have been commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony, British North America. So I’m really struck by what Doctor Snyder was pointing out with regard to Columbus: 1495, Columbus kidnapping and enslaving 500 or so Indigenous people, bringing them back across the Atlantic. That really stands out.

Obviously the Atlantic slave trade didn’t begin in 16 and 19, but you’re talking about 130 years of a system having developed. We should be thinking about the starting point for slavery in the Americas, if you will, at a totally different moment in time.

Meredith McCoy: That’s so true, Hasan. I think part of the importance of including Indigenous enslavement in how we teach the history of American slavery is that it does change so much about how we understand timeline and geography. One of the things that really stood out to me about that conversation with Doctor Snyder is this idea of mutual displacement. That there was a threat to having indigenous societies be fully intact for these European settlers who were coming to take Indigenous lands and resources. So to minimize that threat, they removed people from their homeland.

So they were removing Indigenous peoples from the Americas and sending them out to the Caribbean, Europe and as far away as Asia. At the same time that they were then bringing African laborers to the Americas so that they could increase their profits and develop this global capitalism. So that reorients how we think about the triangle trade, how we think about the Atlantic slave trade, because it adds this countercurrent to the normal cycle that we look at when we have these maps and diagrams in our history textbooks.

Hasan K. Jeffries: It really does force you to think about the institution of slavery itself as dynamic and not in a celebratory way of course, but dynamic in the sense of it is adjusting, it is changing, it is adapting in this never-ending search for free labor. That point that was made about, labor is a scarce resource, and those European colonizers who were coming in, they are desperate for this free labor and are using this system, obviously, to tap into labor sources. But as a result of that, we have this sort of “If we can enslave you, we will enslave you” system or attitude going on.

Meredith McCoy: I think your point that we have to understand this longer timeline of enslavement as dynamic and changing is a really important one that could help our teachers frame this in their classrooms with their students. Often the version of enslavement that we’re expected to teach is sort of fixed in time as though there is one version of enslavement and that everyone who was enslaved experienced it in a certain way. What this history forces us to do is reckon with the myriad experiences depending on location and time.

Hasan K. Jeffries: It seems that, what’s also going on, is within that displacement of peoples is this collision of cultures.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. One of the big ideas that Doctor Snyder has researched is that Indigenous peoples had certain ideas about bondage and captivity that predate the invasion of Europeans. So part of this change is how European understandings of the commodification of human beings as laborers interface with Indigenous understandings of captives as part of a mechanism to repair a broken social fabric after warfare or after death.

So I asked Christina to explain how captivity and bondage were understood and practiced within Indigenous societies before Europeans arrived on the continent. Maybe that’s a good place to pick up my conversation with her.

Christina Snyder: One thing that we have to understand first is that Native North America is incredibly diverse on the eve of colonization. There were likely between five and 10 million people living in what’s now the U.S. They’re speaking 300 different languages. We don’t know exactly how many different nations they lived in, but today in the United States there are over 560 different Indigenous nations. Just because of the devastation of colonialism, those numbers were much greater, we think, before the European invasion.

All of these people, they had quite different cultures, histories and politics. They had their own conflicts. So we know that warfare played a role in shaping these Indigenous societies before Europeans. The ideas about warfare and captive- taking, they did vary from one place to the next and it’s not the same everywhere. But taking captives as a byproduct of war is pretty common in Native North America. A widely held tenant was that captivity was a kind of substitute for death in warfare.

It was another outcome that could happen to enemies who were taken in war. For example, when war parties go out, they’re often addressing a particular grievance and that’s usually the loss of life due to the fact of enemies taking their own people in war. The Iroquois have a term for this, which is “the mourning wars.” Mourning, not as in the time of day but as in mourning a relative for death. To compensate for that loss to your people, it was necessary to enact justice. So a successful war party would take home captives and the captives as a whole would really face different fates.

There were basically three different things that could happen to a captive. One is that that person could be executed as vengeance for the death of a loved one. The second thing is that the person could be adopted. In that sense it’s taking a life and transforming it. Also compensating for that life that you’ve lost to enhance your numbers. What we have to understand about this and what makes it so important in Indigenous societies is that kinship was really the organizing principle of creating Native societies.

So, for them thinking about adoption is really addressing the loss of a loved one, compensating for that, taking in someone new, repairing the social fabric, incorporating them in society. Now the final thing that could happen is that if a captive remained alive within an Indigenous community but was not adopted, that person could become what we would think of as a slave. Different Indigenous societies have different words for this. It often translates as “one who is owned.”

So basically the idea of someone who has not been incorporated into a kinship network, that person is permanently an outsider and they’re thought of as being kinless. So again, somebody who’s not totally connected into your own society. They could be exploited in certain ways so they could be used as laborers, as servants. One thing that we do know is that labor is only one part of this equation. There is also a kind of prestige and power in having these captives.

Part of the reason that we know what we know about these Indigenous captivity practices is that some of the very earliest Europeans who invaded North America were taken captive, and some of them endured these kinds of fates. So they might, for example, have to serve a particular chief who had conquered them without being fully incorporated into the kinship structure. Again, well if we had to sum up their ideas about captivity, one is that it’s not racial, it’s really more about kinship and social fabric.

One’s appearance really did not play a role in what would happen to them as a captive. It was really about addressing a balance that had been lost through a relative who had been killed. It’s about social reproduction, it’s about warfare and justice. Again, labor is only one part of what might happen with that captive’s life. They could also be a symbol of prestige and power or part of the expansion of a chief’s social network.

Meredith McCoy: There is so much that is so exciting and interesting about what you’ve just shared. I’m really glad that you brought up this idea of kinship because kinship continues to be such a fundamental concept for how Indigenous peoples identify each other as belonging today. We think about our networks of family and relationship as being really core to our identities as Indigenous peoples. I also wanted to ask you, you’ve written that colonialism brought distinct and evolving notions of bondage into contact with one another.

What are these notions of bondage that Europeans are bringing with them? The differences between understandings of enslavement and captivity in Indigenous societies and in European ones and how did they then apply these ideas in their interactions with Indigenous peoples?

Christina Snyder: Yeah, so one of the key things, key takeaways I hope from this conversation, is that slavery is really dynamic. It’s not one thing; it changes all the time. I think the best metaphor probably is to think about as a kind of virus that mutates as it migrates. It may come into contact and kind of reform itself. So slavery itself is on the go, it’s dynamic. It’s really colonialism that creates the Atlantic slave trade. Which is what we typically think of as the prototypical form of slavery that is the kind that was practiced in the South and the Caribbean in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But that took a long time to evolve. On the eve of colonialism, Europeans had relatively limited experience with slavery, and they each brought their own experiences and understandings into the colonial context. When we think about major colonizing powers in North America, three of the most important are Spain, England and France. Out of these, especially in the early colonial period, the Spanish are really the most important because they’re the first colonizers and partially because other colonizers look at their experiences as they form their own colonial policies.

So when Spaniards first came to North America, we have to remember that, 1492 is when Columbus set sail, but it’s also the year that marks the end of the Reconquista, which is Christian Spain’s centuries-long fight to claim all of the Iberian Peninsula for the Christian kingdoms. Those Christian kingdoms eventually become what we now think of as Spain. Ideas that had really propelled the Reconquest more based on an intolerance of non-Christian people, especially in this case, Jews and Muslims.

As part of that, there are these germs of ideas about race that are articulated during the Reconquest and the Spanish referred to these as notions of “blood purity.” That is that Christians had this pure blood and Jews and Muslims did not. That they’re somehow fundamentally different from their Christian neighbors. They also have an anti-black bias against sub-Saharan Africans during this time. When they’re engaging in these wars during the Reconquista, they employ ideas based on what they thought of, as a quote, “just war.”

So that non-Christian combatants could be enslaved during these religious wars. When we see the Spanish coming to the Americas, again they’re coming right off of that Reconquista. The ideas that they have about people who can justly be enslaved are based on a few different criteria. So people who are non-Christian, people who are enemy combatants, that is, they may have some ill will against the Spanish and they’re also starting to articulate these ideas about race and what we would call today “biological ideas about race,” that is that differences can be “carried in one’s blood,” would be the way that they would phrase it. So, again, that’s a germ of an idea that becomes really explosive in the context of colonialism. 

The English come a little bit later, the Spanish, again, they’re coming over in the 1490s, in terms of North America, the English colonized Roanoke in the 1580s and then Jamestown a few decades later. They’re more familiar with servitude and slavery. Servitude exists in their own country. But they did have already some African slaves in their nation and they were familiar with Spanish exploits just by reading.

We know, for example, that John Smith, who’s famous in terms of his interactions with Jamestown and Pocahontas, he had read quite a bit of the Spanish literature and had also been a mercenary. The French too, begin to colonize North America in 1608 when they found Quebec City. They really push deeply into the Mississippi Valley, eventually into Louisiana. They have a kind of ambivalent relationship to slavery at first, but eventually they too become involved in the African and the Indian slave trade.

So essentially if we look at these different colonizing powers, they too have their own cultures and histories, but they’re beginning to form a more coherent ideology that justifies bondage. So they all adopt this idea that slavery is an option for enemies taken in a just war, that slavery can be undergirded by cultural, religious or racial difference. And there are two things that really distinguish it quite a bit from what you see in an Indigenous context. The first is that it’s trans-generational.

Just what I mean by that is that it can be passed from a parent to a child. Even though Native people did take captives, we really don’t see evidence for that passing on to a child. So it’s not an inherited status. The only place where there’s some evidence for that is on the northwest coast, the Pacific Northwest in the 18th and 19th century, but it’s not a widespread idea. So Europeans have this idea that slavery can be passed down indefinitely through, especially the maternal line, is how they begin to define it.

The second thing is that they really rigorously try to use the law to protect it. So over time, as Europeans become more financially and ideologically invested in slavery, they develop laws to protect slaveholders and to enforce that trans-generational enslavement of Africans and Indians.

Meredith McCoy: Christina, it sounds like what you’re talking about is related to the doctrine of discovery. Could you explicitly define that for some of our teachers who may see that term pop up in their textbook or in their standards? It might be interesting for you to also speak to the relationship between Christianity and European understandings of human dignity, particularly given what you were just discussing about understandings of Christianity in religious wars.

How do we get this mesh of Christian ideology and legal concepts that then justify the enslavement of peoples from Africa and the Americas?

Christina Snyder: Christianity and the legal doctrines that are developed around colonization have a really strong role in the invasion of North America and also in ideas about slavery. This doctrine of discovery is basically a legal notion that, supported by the Catholic Church, that decrees that only Catholic powers should colonize North America, and that essentially Indigenous people only had use rights. That is, it really didn’t recognize indigenous territorial claims as being legitimate in European eyes.

Meredith McCoy: The doctrine of discovery becomes such a critical foundational concept in law in the United States. It’s really the concept that is at the basis of Indian law. We see that in the 1820s and 1830s when the Supreme Court’s dealing with a set of cases that comes to be known as the Marshall Trilogy. The first case, Johnson V. M’Intosh, just when this doctrine of discovery gets sort of lain out and the idea becomes that Native nations are domestic dependent nations. Nobody really knows what that means.

Supreme Court Justice Marshall makes it up on the fly, but it becomes this deeply entrenched legal concept that then affects everything about how Native nations are able to exercise their inherent sovereignty, their inherent right to self-governance and self-determination. So we see the ways that this concept that starts as a European religious idea, comes and travels to the United States and its origins and becomes this really foundational and shaping idea that impacts everything else about how the legal system functions for Indigenous peoples in the United States today.

Christina Snyder: Something interesting that I’ve done with my class in order to really get students to wrap their heads around this is to have them read a version of the Requerimiento, which is a legal document that the Spanish came up with, I think in the 15 teens. It’s interesting because even though in many cases European colonizers are really using this brute force to invade Native villages to take captives, they actually wanted to have this legal foundation that would make their conquest legitimate, at least in the eyes of fellow European colonizers.

Certainly not in the eyes of Indigenous people, but in order to do this when they were invading a village, they would read the Requerimiento, usually in Spanish unless there was a readily available Native interpreter, which basically said that, “If you refuse to submit to the King and Queen of Spain and to the doctrines of Catholicism, then we have every right to kill you, to enslave you, to sell you.” Spanish colonizers thought about this as a legal contract. It’s interesting, even if you have a student who is fluent in Spanish, to have them read the document in Spanish to the rest of the class who maybe can’t understand it.

That just gives us a sense of the dissonance of this and how people who couldn’t even understand the words, because they’re in a different language, would have been impacted by these legal ideas that originated in Europe that just really did not recognize Native rights to self-governance or to territory.

Meredith McCoy: That has so many ripple effects out across Indian law. This idea that Indigenous peoples only have a right to occupancy and not a right to these territories that we’ve been stewarding and care-taking since time immemorial. So this ripples out into understandings of enslavement and indigenous enslavement, but it also affects everything else about how we think about Indigenous rights within the settler state that is currently the United States.

So I think it’s really important that teachers take a minute with their students to think about things like the doctrine of discovery, because it does open all of these other temporally rippling issues that they can then engage with their students.

Christina Snyder: Absolutely. One of the really sobering facts about studying the early colonial period is what a long shadow it casts and how many of those legacies are still very much with us today.

Hasan K. Jeffries: So often when we hear discussions about slavery in America, we often hear all societies had slavery, Indigenous societies had slavery, African societies has slavery. But what we’re talking about is that what we might consider slavery or forced bondage in an Indigenous context and what will emerge in the Americas under these colonizers is something completely different.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah, I think that’s a really important thing for teachers to break down with their students. Because it would be really easy for a student to just think, “Well, Indigenous peoples had enslavement too before the Europeans arrived, so why is it a big deal?” Or, “Indigenous peoples participated in the European slave trade too. So, shouldn’t we cast equal blame on Indigenous peoples [as] on European colonists or European settlers?”

What Christina’s pointing to here that is really important is that there is a way that over time, because of extreme social pressure, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous nations are having to make the best possible choices that they can make in extreme circumstances to preserve their own people. They’re facing severe land loss, severe population devastation, and in order to make sure that their people survive, they’re having to shift their understandings of what enslavement means and how they participate in this very capitalistic notion of enslavement that Europeans are bringing with them.

So the ways in which Indigenous peoples become incorporated into this global slave market, totally upends these earlier models of captivity and bondage as a way to repair and maintain the social fabric. That, to me, is a takeaway that teachers can use to frame these changes in Indigenous population, in the slave trade over time with their students. That this is about how Indigenous peoples adopt technologies and systems that they believe will provide them with the resources, or the strategies that they need to protect their peoples, and their lands over time facing this severe threat from European invasion.

Hasan K. Jeffries: That seems to hint at and speak to the ways in which Indigenous people resisted the encroachment of colonizers and resisted the enslavement of their own.
Meredith McCoy: Yeah. For me as an Indigenous person thinking about how we talk to students about histories of violence against Indigenous peoples, there is so much trauma that’s embedded in those histories. But I wouldn’t be here today, Indigenous peoples wouldn’t be here today, if it weren’t for the resilience, the creativity and the resistance of our ancestors. So those stories are really important stories for us to chat with our students as we’re thinking about how Indigenous peoples participated in and also pushed back against European notions of enslavement.

Having learned from Christina about the philosophical differences and the legal origins of these tensions between European enslavement and Indigenous enslavement, including, for example, that Indigenous enslavement was not racial, that it usually was not trans-generational, that it was not grounded in a legal framework, then I wanted to know about the long-term impacts and the actual logistics on a day-to-day basis. So to begin, I asked Christina, how have interactions between European settlers and Indigenous peoples would actually work on the ground.

Christina Snyder: They’re really two ways in which Europeans begin to trade in Indigenous slaves. The first is by taking them directly. Of course, you can see that with Columbus, but as early as the 1520s, Spanish ships started terrorizing Indigenous communities on the Atlantic Seaboard and in Florida. So Native people are essentially being kidnapped and sold as slaves in Europe, in the Caribbean. Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, they go on similar kinds of expeditions in the late 1530s, early 1540s, and they kidnap hundreds of Indigenous people, mostly women.

So there are lots of examples, especially in the early colonial period, of these colonizers taking and selling, were deporting Indigenous slaves. There does develop, though, a trade in Indian slaves. So the other source for Europeans acquiring Native slaves is through Indigenous middlemen. To understand this, we really have to go back to the fact that for a long time, Indigenous people had taken war captives. One of the things that we know happened from very early historical interactions is that sometimes these war captives were gifted to other Indigenous leaders during diplomacy or to Europeans.

So some of the kinds of diplomatic rituals that Native people had been conducting for a long time, they extended those to European newcomers as the new people on the block. We often talk, and rightly so, a lot about conflict early in the colonial period. But there is also a lot of effort on the part of Indigenous people to turn Europeans into allies because sometimes Indigenous leaders thought they would be useful trade partners. Obviously, Europeans had a lot of new goods and interesting things to trade, or they saw these invading armies of mostly men very well armed.

They had horses, which Indigenous people had never seen before. They had armor. So they rightly see that these are military really strong people and that maybe they would make good military allies. So, especially for Indigenous people who want to ally with Europeans, they engage in trade and really Europeans are only interested in two items of exchange. Those are typically furs. So animal pelts and Indigenous slaves. Again, there’s this incredible demand for labor.

Europeans are already interested in acquiring forced labor to begin plantations to start other kinds of economic endeavors. So they engaged quite eagerly in this. So something that begins small-scale captive exchange really rapidly in the colonial period amplifies into a huge, violent, transformative trade. Because, essentially what happens is that the European invasion leads to a kind of incorporation, willing or not, of Indigenous peoples onto a global market that really values their labor. So, what you see is an exponential increase in the amount of captives taken and also a distortion of war practices.

So warfare becomes much more violent, much more deadly, partially through the introduction of firearms. Throughout the colonial period, firearms are a very popular trade item, second only to textiles. In order to really understand the Indian slave trade, you have to understand how desperately a lot of these Native nations were to acquire European firearms. Early on, when we think about the very first encounters between the Spanish and Indigenous people, the Spanish had an impressive array of technology that was also quite terrifying.

Again, they had armor, they had lances, they had dogs that they actually put armor on and had trained to kill, but they only have really primitive kinds of firearms. These matchlocks called arquebuses—they’re kind of unreliable in wet weather. They can explode and kill someone. So they’re not actually these really magnificent weapons initially. But what happens pretty quickly is that, by the late 1600s, Flemish gunsmiths have developed a different kind of firearm called the matchlock that is much more efficient, much lighter, very deadly, very accurate.

European gun manufacturers actually start to mass-produce these for an American market and primarily for Native American people who want to use these. So Native people become consumers in this global market. Part of the reason why is that they very rightly see that they’re living in an unsafe world. They’re becoming embroiled in imperial conflicts, in global trade. They want ways to protect their communities. They feel like if they don’t get access to firearms, that they themselves will become victims of either European colonizers or more powerful Native neighbors.

So there is this kind of arms race that fuels a desire for trade with Europeans and what do Europeans want above all else from Native people? Its Indigenous slaves. This really gets amplified. My primary research again has been about the Southeast, but this really is a continental phenomenon where you see it happening in all the areas of colonization. So the Northeast, the Southeast, the Southwest. The way that it plays out in the Southeast is that Charleston becomes the most important trade port.

While many Native people are bought, sold and live their lives on South Carolina plantations, many more are actually deported and exported for sale on the global market. So if we just look at the first few decades of Charleston, from 1670 to about 1715, there’re somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 Indian slaves are deported from that one port in South Carolina. If we look at that, and we think about it in terms of the broader effects of colonization, it really gives us a sense of the devastation. One thing that I would emphasize to teachers is that we think a lot about Native population loss in the early colonial period.

Typically, we emphasize disease, and certainly disease has a major role. But what we need to do with this new research is to realize that slavery, and the warfare that accompanied it, contributed significantly to Indigenous mortality in that early colonial period. So it’s not just diseases. Often disease that’s operating in tandem with warfare, either from Native neighbors or from colonizers and the violence of slavery. We do have an estimate from one French colonial official in Louisiana, around 1700, who estimated that for every captive taken alive, three people died resisting that invasion.

So, those rates are really horrific, and they give us a sense of this violent synergy that’s creating a really unstable region and is also having really negative effects on the Indigenous populations of that region.

Meredith McCoy: It is just devastating to sit with those statistics, to think about the loss of life and the bringing of instability into communities that previously had used these ideas about captivity and bondage in some contexts as a way to restore and maintain a social fabric. So thinking about these ideas of Indigenous people being integrated into these European capitalist understandings of intergenerational servitude, it really is a cognitive dissonance with the idea that captivity is something that maintains a social fabric.

Could you pivot a bit perhaps and speak to why they could not just keep doing captivity in the ways that they always had? Why is it that Indigenous peoples really feel that they have to adopt these European notions of the slave trade? Why Indigenous nations are making these political alliances, choosing to engage in warfare, choosing to integrate into the slave trade, and how does capitalism play a role in that expansion?

Christina Snyder: Many Indigenous nations actually do try to maintain traditional ideas as much as they can in terms of how native people are engaging with the warfare around them. It really varies quite a bit. I will say that, overall when we think about what Indigenous leaders are facing, there’s devastating population loss. So we think, these numbers are very hard to pin down. But by the period that we’re talking about with the slave trade, it’s very likely that Indigenous peoples in the Southeast had experienced a 70 percent population loss from just 150 years before.

So that’s extremely significant. They are also experiencing land loss. Especially peoples who are living near the coast closer to these European sites of invasion. European colonies, like Virginia and South Carolina, New England, even in New Mexico, they’re beginning to be strongholds of European settlement and pushing out Native people. Our colleague Robbie Ethridge has applied this concept which can help us understand some of the ripple effects of this. She calls it the “shatter zone.”

So the metaphor here is thinking about when you drop a wineglass, for example, that the shards radiate out very far from the site of the initial impact. That helps us understand how even in societies that are very far away, let’s say from colonial South Carolina, they’re still experiencing these debilitating effects of invasion, because European expeditions are going into the interior, because these diseases are spreading, because of the demand for Indian slaves.

Warfare is spreading into the interior, sometimes hundreds of miles away from European settlement because demand for enslaved laborers is just insatiable. So Europeans are engaging in this slave trade at the same time that they are trying to buy more and more enslaved people from Africa. So what people are confronted with is a really difficult and desperate situation and there is a kind of tipping point. So here’s where I think it’s appropriate to talk about the Yamasees’ war.

Hasan K. Jeffries: There are real parallels between what happens to Indigenous nations when Europeans arrive bringing with them this new system of servitude and slavery, and what happens on the African continent when Europeans arrive and are bringing with them this new system of slavery and servitude. In both instances, I’m really struck by this idea of Indigenous populations, whether they are Indigenous nations here, African people on the continent of Africa, are in a sense saying, “Okay, in what ways can we incorporate these new people into our existing way of life?”

But then how quickly the tide seems to turn, not just impacting individuals, but how, for example, the nature of warfare begins to change. It seems that we have to really wrap our minds around the impact that is felt so very soon on Indigenous nations as a result of Europeans coming in with this new way of interacting with people and this idea of furs but also enslavement first.

Meredith McCoy: I think that would be such a brilliant way for teachers to think about how these changes are occurring on both continents with their students. To do some sort of mapping where they’re looking at, what are these power dynamics? How are these interactions changing for leadership and Indigenous nations in the Americas and for leadership in Africa? What is this looking like in terms of how communities, exactly as you’re saying, initially attempt to incorporate these newcomers as guests, or visitors, or relatives, and then eventually as a tool for their own survival become complicit in these systems of violence against other people?

Hasan K. Jeffries: I think we have to keep at the forefront of our mind when trying to understand the difficult decisions that native people are making. So first and foremost it’s about surviving. They are trying to survive. They are trying to protect. They are trying to preserve and as a result of that, it becomes sort of a new starting point in the difficult choices that they are making in what to do and what not to do vis-à-vis engaging with Europeans and also engaging with other nations.

Meredith McCoy: That is such a good point. One of the things that we really have to remember is that for most of the colonial period, and certainly west of the Mississippi, Indigenous peoples are still in control. Europeans are coming in and they’re certainly disrupting dynamics, especially in what come to be known as the colonies, but Indigenous peoples largely are still able to maintain pre-existing relationships with each other and relationships with their lands.

Yet as European expansion, as settler expansion occurs across the continent, we see the same dynamics play out over and over again as Europeans are pushing not only their own bodies and their own consumption of Indigenous lands and resources, but also these really toxic ideas about the commodification of human beings out with them across the continent. In future episodes we’re going to think about how this was operating under Spanish rule, but for the purposes of this conversation with Christina, really thinking about the Eastern Seaboard. One of these moments that she turned to is the Yamasee War. An example of Indigenous people figuring out ways to push back and really exert their own sovereignty and their own control over their own space. I think this would be a good moment to really understand both its historical importance in terms of Indigenous resistance and its historical importance in terms of the pivot from Indigenous enslavement to African enslavement on the seaboard.

Christina Snyder: So, the Yamasee War is something that I would encourage teachers to really think about incorporating into their classrooms because it helps us to understand the devastation of the Indian slave trade, also Indigenous agency and pushing against it. So we can see both of those dynamics at play at once. The war itself takes place between 1715 and 1718. That is when the last significant peace treaty is signed. It really almost destroys colonial South Carolina and it changes the Indian slave trade in the South forever.

The Yamasees Indians are originally from the Savannah River valley. Which you can think of as the border between Georgia and South Carolina. They had actually been forced out of their homelands by the Westos, who had participated in the Indian slave trade, were allies of the Virginia colony, provided slaves for the Virginia colony, the Yamasees, because they’re not well-armed because they can’t really resist these raids, they decide to move into the Spanish mission system in Florida.

The mission system can be really repressive. Its goal is Christianization and cultural assimilation and yet the Spanish do provide a measure of protection. Unfortunately for the Yamasees, that protection did not include arming them. So it was Spain’s policy not to arm its Indian allies. That’s where you can really see the vulnerability of these kinds of unarmed groups. Because what happened around 1700, basically the decade between 1700 and 1710, there’re just repeated raids against the Florida mission system by English traders and allied Indian warriors.

It really devastates the Florida mission system. It’s not completely destroyed, but tens of thousands of people are either killed or displaced into slavery. As the Yamasees see this happen, they actually decide to come back to the Savannah River valley region, move close to what’s now Augusta and form relationships with Scottish traders who were affiliated with the new colony of Carolina. They believe that the only way to really gain a foothold in this global market to gain access to firearms is to engage in the Indian slave trade.

At that time and native slave could fetch the cost of 200 deer skins. That is much more than the average hunter could expect to earn in a year or even several years. So you can see both the economic pull of this, but also that desire for security, in a really violent and changing world. So the Yamasees engaged in the slave trade, but they begin to become disillusioned with it. They first start to articulate grievances against Indian traders. So Indian traders start to beat and abuse Yamasees. The Yamasees become very much in debt to these traders.

So a few years before the Yamasee War starts, they’re 100,000 deer skins in debt to Carolina, which is really about twice of South Carolina’s annual export. So they’re just massively, massively in debt to these traders who are extending them goods on loan. What happens is that these traders, in order to satisfy those debts, start to kidnap Yamasees or people that the Yamasees wanted to adopt, so that is captives who had maybe been taken from elsewhere, but that the Yamasees want to incorporate into their own society.

So, they’re really starting to lose control over their participation in this trade and to see how abusive and how destructive it can be. So it’s the Yamasees who launch this war against South Carolina. They started on Good Friday of 1715 and they do it by executing South Carolina’s Indian agent, Thomas Nairne, who had actually accompanied some of those raids against the Florida missions. They execute Nairne, they begin to attack plantations around South Carolina, and many other Southern Indian nations applaud this.

So they have similar kinds of grievances, not necessarily all the same, but they do all see problems with the Indian slave trade. So they’re joined by Lower Creeks, Savannahs and Apalachees, and to a lesser extent by Upper Creeks, Choctaws and Cherokees. These allies have varying roles in the war. Most of them execute their resident traders. So there were traders who had actually resided in these Indian villages who were their main connections to the Indian slave trade.

In order to sever that connection, they execute probably about 90 traders, which is most of the British traders who are in the interior. Many of them also join attacks against South Carolina plantations. So they kill about 400 colonists, which may not sound huge in terms of today’s numbers, but that was actually about 7 percent of the colony’s white population. All of the other remaining settlers and enslaved people are forced into fortified Charleston for most of the remainder of the war.

The Yamasee War destroys the plantation economy of the Carolina back country. Eventually South Carolina cobbles together and army from their own militia, from some neighboring colonies. They even enlist African-American slaves and some Indian allies. They eventually push back the Yamasees in a really brutal campaign. But there are several really important legacies of the Yamasee War that are worth highlighting.

The first really is that Native nations decide that they’re no longer willing to engage in the Indian slave trade with European colonists. That trade continues in much diminished fashion, but it’s never the same after that. Colonists themselves are really terrified and they have seen how the Indian slave trade has destabilized the region, has really invoked the military power of Native nations, which still outnumber them and nearly destroyed the colony.

So at that point they and most other English colonies on the Eastern Seaboard increasingly turn to African slavery. You see their participation in the Atlantic slave trade, which targets Africans, increase dramatically throughout the course of the 18th century. That really reshapes the way that slavery looks in the region. It highlights Native people’s role in trying to extricate themselves from this trade which had been so detrimental to their societies.

Hasan K. Jeffries: One of the things that really leaps out when I think about the history of the Yamasee War is that as teachers, we really have to take seriously Native nations as political thinkers. They are not simply waiting for things to happen to them. They are certainly existing within a context but they are also responding to the moment and they are thinking about their futures and responding accordingly.

It seems that the Yamasee War really reflects this idea of Indigenous people being ensnared in this system of enslavement, the system of capitalism, the system of debt and trying desperately to extricate themselves from it and taking proactive steps in the form of going to war to get out from under it.

Meredith McCoy: That’s exactly right. That, I think is precisely the narrative that teachers should be using in their conversations with students about how to understand the role of Indigenous peoples in the slave trade, both in the slave trade of other Indigenous peoples and in the slave trade of African peoples. So much of the way that social studies has been taught up to this point has been about Native peoples, either as violent warriors coming to attack innocent European settlers or about Native peoples as total victims.

It’s really important that we as teachers think about ways to center Indigenous agency and to contextualize the choices that Indigenous peoples were making. Remembering that these choices are about how to preserve Indigenous lands, Indigenous resources and Indigenous peoples. That Indigenous nations are making choices, as you say, strategically, to ensure the well-being of their people.

Hasan K. Jeffries: When we think about the racialization of slavery in the American context, we often draw our attention to Bacon’s Rebellion and think about the ways in which this colonial rebellion, landless whites in Virginia, are rebelling against the landed elite for their piece of the pie, and the response to that on the part of the land and white elite is like, “Oh, we need to move away from this particular class hierarchy and shift our attention to creating a permanent underclass, that being enslaved African laborers.”

But here we see that there’s a different sort of resistance when thinking about the Carolina country and how that would explode in terms of its enslaved African population from—certainly beginning in the 1680s, we get this uptick—but then really right after the Yamasee War, there is a response to resistance on the part of Native people that changes the complexity of the system of slavery and racialization of slavery in what is then the American colonies and what will become the American nation.

Meredith McCoy: Absolutely. The Yamasee War is such an important historical pivot. So, I asked Christina just what the impact of the Yamasee War was in terms of racialization and enslavement.

Christina Snyder: This is really the moment in Southern history when enslavement becomes really associated with the African trade and enslaving people of African descent. Following the Yamasee War, British colonists really increasingly associate slavery with blackness. Even though they had already been heavily invested in the Atlantic slave trade, they really turn almost exclusively toward people of African descent as enslaved laborers. At the same time, the war itself doesn’t actually liberate Indian people who are already in slavery.

Those people who had already served in South Carolina households, they remain there. But what does happen that’s different is that they, over time, are going to be a smaller and smaller percentage of that overall enslaved population. So that the enslavement of African people is really encouraged by law and by custom and some Southern colonies even goes so far as to try to outlaw Indian slavery all together. Even though it’s not entirely effective.

Meredith McCoy: How effective is the Yamasee War at ending indigenous enslavement, both along the Eastern Seaboard and then continent wide pushing into the West?

Christina Snyder: It is incredibly important in the Southeast in particular. It does have somewhat of an impact on all British colonies of the Eastern Seaboard. Partially because New England had been one of the top buyers of enslaved Native people from the South and they to get more cautious about it in the wake of the Yamasee War. But in the West, the impact is really perhaps minimal or zero. That’s partially because the colonial situation is so different. The British really dominate parts of the Eastern Seaboard by then.

You see a lot of French influence in the Mississippi Valley. They continue to engage in Indian slavery. In the West, the major colonizing power are the Spanish. They to continue to engage in the Indian slave trade. So these events, especially in the early colonial period, they don’t necessarily translate from one colonial context to the next. I will say that something very interesting does happen around this time of the Yamasee War.

If we look at the places of heaviest colonial invasion, so those would be the South and also New England, in the West, what you see are pretty intense Spanish colonization of New Mexico. Around the same time as the Yamasee War, New England, a few decades earlier, had experienced King Philip’s war, which is also partially about the enslavement of Indigenous people in New Mexico. The Southwest—what you see is the Pueblo Revolt. Again, around the same time.

There is some Indigenous slavery there, but also what people are responding to are other kinds of forced-labor systems. Like the [inaudible 01:09:28]. But what these things have in common, even though they’re coming out of these very different colonial contexts, is that Native societies are reaching a saturation point where there are settler colonial societies. Meaning people who are engaging in long-term colonial strategies of trying to displace or replace Native people, pushing Native people out.

Native people are beginning to become the minorities in their own homelands and they have a number of different grievances against these colonial powers of which, forced labor or slavery is one. But again, around the same time, they are all rising up against these different imperial powers with different consequences. In the Southeast, the consequence for the Yamasees is really devastating in the sense that South Carolinians and their allies kill most Yamasees.

The survivors are forced to go back to the mission system in Florida. But for the region as a whole, you know, it does really turn away from the Indian slave trade.

Meredith McCoy: So much of what we’re asked to teach as teachers is divided into historical periods. I think many of us were trained as history teachers to teach the colonial era, and then the idea of colonization sort of disappears. Could you talk about the relationship between ongoing settler colonialism and maybe define that for us… and land displacement and in slavery?

Christina Snyder: So “settler colonialism” is a term that teachers may have encountered and certainly it’s something that we as scholars talk about a lot. Basically, in the context of our classrooms, we can think about different forms of colonialism. So there are different models of how empires wanted their colonies to function. For example, the mission system would be one form of colonialism that has to do with converting Indigenous people and assimilating them into a Europeanized, Christianized lifestyle.

The fur trade is another one, which is primarily with the goal of extracting these animal resources from indigenous environments. Settler colonialism is still another kind. It’s something that is particularly important to understand in our context because it is the form that colonialism took on the east coast of North America and eventually the form that became dominant across the United States.

Rather than working with Native people or trying to include them somehow in the colonial project, settler colonialism really sought to either destroy them or displace them to somewhere else, so that colonizers, these new settlers, could claim these Indigenous spaces for themselves indefinitely. So it’s a form of colonialism that imagines Native people as being absent, disappearing, as having no role in the future of their society. So you see this, especially in British colonies.

So in the global context, we often talk about this in the United States, in Canada, in New Zealand, in Australia. It isn’t necessarily as applicable to places like Latin America, where there are different forms of colonialism that become more dominant. I tried to be really careful about terminology. Especially when thinking about American history as a whole, because from the perspective of Native people, the colonial period started in the 15th century with Columbus’s arrival and it’s still going on today.

Indian country today is still being colonized. Native people are still being marginalized. Their resources are still very much under siege, as we can see today. So these processes are actually much longer. If we want to get a fuller sense of American history and not just present a Eurocentric understanding of it, we have to understand really what the nature of colonialism is and how it continues to impact Indigenous people today.

Meredith McCoy: Thank you for that. I want to return to the Yamasee War for a moment. A lot of the resources that exist, if you Google “classroom resources to teach warfare,” think about the world wars, or they think about Vietnam, or they think about the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are not a lot of resources out there for thinking about how to teach histories of early colonial Indian wars in a K–12 context.

So Sarah Shear, our colleague who teaches social studies education at the University of Washington, Bothell, had two ideas that might help classroom teachers think about ways to engage the Yamasee War in their classrooms. One is idea of an interactive timeline or a 3D model of the different timelines that the different players in the war are navigating. You might have your students break out into teams and assign each team a different player in the war.

You might have the Yamasee nation, you might have each individual, other nation that eventually came into coalition with the Yamasee nation, you might even bring in entire concepts like the African slave trade. As you’re building out these timelines, the individual timelines will eventually intersect at specific historical moments so that you’ll start to see the development of a 3D mobile or a 3D model that allows your students to see how these different interests are overlapping and coming in and out of play with each other.

Another possibility is to spread all the chairs and desks out to the corners of your classroom and spread butcher paper out on the floor. Then have your students, again in teams, each focus on a different pressure, or tension, or idea that eventually led to the Yamasee War conflict. So as your students are building out these graphic organizers on the ground, they start to draw connections between their ideas and how they’re connecting to the other ideas or pressures that both lead up to the conflict and then that radiate out from it.

Sarah mentioned that these kinds of activities are really useful and important for students because it helps them see the conflict as not just an isolated event. In this way, they can see the multifacetedness of the war itself and they can see both what leads up to it and how it then reverberates into other historical events that come after. These kinds of moments and activities in our classrooms allow students to see war and conflict, not in a vacuum, but as a social phenomena that really changes the course of events.

It’s also a very different approach than the sometimes coverage model of just focusing on people, places, events, dates, battles, and it allows students to see this conflict in its holistic environment over time.

Hasan K. Jeffries: I’m so glad that you and Doctor Snyder talked about this concept of settler colonialism because it’s so important to understanding what would become the United States, these American colonies, how they evolve over time. What’s so central to that evolution is how in the minds of white settlers, white colonists, European colonists, how they are seeing the relationship to these colonies by Native people.

If we don’t understand that relationship, I don’t think our students will understand the impact that slavery and these colonies will have on Indigenous people going forward.
Meredith McCoy: We continue today to feel the impacts of Indigenous enslavement in so many ways. In order to understand the United States and how it functions today, particularly how class, labor and race function today, you have to understand that the settler colonial state has a deep desire for labor, land and resources. Where was it going to get those resources? From the Indigenous peoples whose lands it decided to set up on.

So we cannot understand the history of American slavery separate from the United States as a settler colonial entity. One helps us to understand the other.

Hasan K. Jeffries: It is very much to the starting point to this whole [sojourn] in what will become North America and what would become what we call today the United States. This episode has been absolutely fascinating. I have learned so much. So what can we expect in the second part of the conversation that you have with Doctor Snyder?

Meredith McCoy: In the second part of the interview, we’re going to move forward in terms of time. We’re going to continue to talk about the relationship between the Indigenous slave trade and the African slave trade. We’re going to talk about the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and Emancipation from the perspectives of Indigenous peoples, recognizing that the Emancipation Proclamation actually didn’t apply to Indigenous people who were enslaved.

We’re going to talk about contemporary impacts that have ripples over time of the Indigenous slave trade for Indigenous peoples today. Those are the real takeaway points that we hope that teachers will sit with in thinking about histories of Indigenous enslavement. That this is not something that is just relegated to the past, but that the legal tenants and the social dynamics that were established through the Indigenous slave trade continue to impact Indigenous peoples today.

Hasan K. Jeffries: I can’t wait to hear it. Christina Snyder is the McCabe Greer professor of the American Civil War Era at Penn State University. She is the author of Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. And Great Crossings: Indian, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson. Doctor Snyder is the 2018 winner of the Francis Parkman prize from the Society of American Historians.

We’re going to continue this conversation in our next episode, starting with some insightful perspectives on the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. So be sure to tune in.

Meredith McCoy: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Helping teachers in schools prepare their students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance offers free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find these online @learningforjustice.org.

Hasan K. Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of what would become the United States or how its legacies still influence us today. Now in our second season, this podcast is part of an effort to provide comprehensive tools for learning and teaching this critical topic.
Teaching Tolerance provides free teaching materials that include over 100 texts, sample inquiries and a detailed K–12 framework for teaching the history of American slavery. You can also find these online @learningforjustice.org\hardhistory.

Meredith McCoy: Thanks to Doctor Snyder for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford with production assistance from Russell Gragg and content support from Gabriel Smith. Kate Shuster is our executive producer.

Hasan K. Jeffries: Our theme song is “Different Heroes” by A Tribe Called Red featuring Northern Voice, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie.

Meredith McCoy: If you liked what you heard today, please share it with your friends and colleagues and then let us know what you thought. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Hasan K. Jeffries: I’m Doctor Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University.

Meredith McCoy: I’m Doctor Meredith McCoy, Assistant Professor of American Studies and History at Carleton College. 

Meredith McCoy & Hasan K. Jeffries: And we’re your hosts for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

Resources and Readings

• Teaching Hard History: American Slavery
• Teaching Hard History Key Concept Videos
• Teaching American Slavery Through Inquiry

Maureen Costello
Former Director, Teaching Tolerance

References:

• Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations
• Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States
• Kathy Swan, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Kentucky
• National Council for History Education
• Learning for Justice: Text, I Have a Dream by MLK
• Learning for Justice: Webinar, Beyond the Bus: Teaching the Unseen Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Learning for Justice: The Moment, Teaching the Truth about Confederate History

Eduardo Díaz
Director, Smithsonian Latino Center 

Renée Gokey
Teacher Services Coordinator, National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) | Learning for Justice author

References:

• Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
• NPR Genevieve Valentine, Horrors Pile Up Quietly In 'The Other Slavery'
• Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America
• Christopher Columbus, Extracts from Journal
• Indigenous Peoples' Curriculum Day and Teach-In
• Native Knowledge 360°
• National Museum of African American History and Culture
• NMAI exhibition, Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean
• NMAI exhibition, T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America
• Learning for Justice: Text, Indian Removal Act: Primary Documents in American History
• National Museum of American History, Molina Family Latino Gallery

Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Department of History, Ohio State University | Teaching Hard History author

References:

• CARTER Center for K–12 Black History Education, Teaching Black History Conference
• Carter Conference 2019, Teaching about the Beauty, Power, and Resistance of Black History
• Dr. LaGarrett King, founding director CARTER Center, University of Missouri
• James Madison’s Montpelier (Ohio State University students' visit)
• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
• Barry Thomas, Director of Equity and Diversity, Omaha Public Schools
   

Return to Episode Listing

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I have always wanted to visit Colombia, to stroll through the streets of the walled city of Cartagena, to take in panoramic views of the capital, Bogotá, to commune with nature at Tayrona National Park, perhaps even to take one of those tours of Medellin that explores the life and times of the notorious Pablo Escobar. And this summer, things were actually lining up perfectly for me to steal away to Colombia, meaning that my mother-in-law was taking my kids to Disney World for an entire week at the end of July. But alas, it wasn’t to be. My girls made it to Disney, but I didn’t get to take my bucket-list trip to the gateway to South America. I did get to go to Columbia, Missouri, though. On July 26 and 27, the CARTER Center for K–12 Black History Education at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, hosted its second annual Teaching Black History conference. Dr. LaGarrett King, the founding director of the CARTER Center, had invited me to deliver a keynote address, which I entitled “Teaching Hard History During Hard Times.”

I wasn’t scheduled to speak until the second day of the conference, so I spent the first day attending sessions. In the morning, I learned about Black Power children’s books, and about using young adult fiction to teach middle and high school students about police violence. In the afternoon, I sat in on a presentation by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, who skillfully deconstructed teaching slavery through children’s literature. It was a rich and rewarding day. When I spoke the next morning, I shared my experience from this past fall of taking students from The Ohio State University to James Madison’s Montpelier, to explore slavery and freedom in America. I talked about why slavery is hard history. Why it’s so difficult to think about, talk about, teach about and learn about. I outlined the typical responses to hard history: the purposeful historical amnesia, the attempts to rationalize evil and the creation of false historical narratives. And I concluded by explaining the five keys to teaching hard history effectively―knowing your history, knowing yourself, knowing your students, knowing your school and knowing your community.

My address was well-received, sparking thoughtful questions and a thought-provoking discussion that continued even after the session ended. As the conference attendees headed off to the late-morning workshops, I struck up a conversation with Barry Thomas, the director of equity and diversity for Omaha Public Schools in Nebraska. I didn’t know Barry, but he knew me. It turns out that he had been listening to the podcast. Barry started his career with the Omaha Public Schools in 2002 at McMillan Magnet High School. Four years later, he began teaching social studies at North High Magnet. And in 2012, he became the district supervisor for social studies instruction, responsible for supervising, coordinating and improving the teaching of more than 200 social studies instructors in the district. As we talked, I learned that Omaha’s public schools had not yet fully embraced a version of the American past that portrayed slavery as it actually was and that acknowledged that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War.

“I have seen the propagandized instruction that we were all taught as students ourselves, maintained in the classroom,” Barry told me. “I have received phone calls from disgruntled parents who report that their children have had to analyze the pros and cons of slavery for enslaved Africans. The fact that anyone thinks that there were pros to being enslaved is absurd,” Barry continued. “Another parent,” he said, “complained about a slavery video game that a teacher found online that had some questionable depictions of the enslaved, and that fed into the white savior narrative.” But Barry explained that classroom activities were actually less of a problem than the attitudes of some teachers. “There is a nervousness and anxiety when we teach race,” he said, “states’ rights as a root cause of the Civil War is an emotional convenience, not just a manufactured lie.”

To help his teachers overcome their distress and uneasiness with teaching American slavery, Barry shared with them the Teaching Hard History framework and encouraged them to listen to the podcast. “The Teaching Hard History resources and podcast give teachers accurate depictions of ‘the peculiar institution,’” he explained, and “provides them with the facts that they need to  ‘dispel falsehoods that they may be confronted with by students and parents who have bought into easy history.’” I immediately wanted to know more. What did the teachers think of the resources and the podcast? Did he think it made a difference in how they taught slavery? After all, that’s the whole point of this project: to help teachers teach slavery more accurately and effectively. Barry told me that the teachers he spoke with were amazed at the wide range of topics that we covered in the podcast last year, and that they were struck by the different approaches we use to examine these topics, approaches they had never considered before.

As to classroom impact, he said, “I didn’t specifically research correlation or causation, but I did note that I didn’t get a single phone call or email about someone doing something in the classroom that I had to go offer some support for.” Barry’s observation pointed to a positive shift having occurred in the city’s social studies classrooms regarding how slavery was being taught, and that was truly exciting to hear. I still really want to go to Colombia, to visit Cartagena and Bogota, and Medellin. But I’m glad that I closed out this summer in Columbia, Missouri, at the CARTER Center conference, listening to passionate teachers committed to teaching hard history. From them, I learned that there remains plenty of work to do, but I also learned that this project and this podcast are having a positive impact on how American slavery is being taught. That was our goal when we launched this project and debuted this podcast in January 2018. And it remains our goal today, a little more than a year and a half later, as we release a suite of additional teaching resources, and begin the second season of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises. In our second season, we are expanding our focus to better support elementary school educators, to spend more time with teachers who are doing this work in the classroom, and to understand the often-hidden history of the enslavement of indigenous people in what is currently the United States. Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

In this episode, we’re going to explore the new themes for this season and introduce some of the new Teaching Hard History resources that are designed to support educators. We will hear from Eduardo Díaz and Renée Gokey of the Smithsonian Institution, about the need to understand the history of enslavement of Indigenous people. But first, I had a chance to speak with Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance. She explained how the Teaching Hard History project has been expanded. Among other things, it now includes a first-of-its-kind framework for teaching about slavery to students in grades K–5. She also highlighted some of the new tools that teachers can use to paint a more complete picture of American slavery. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

I’m so very glad to welcome to this episode of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, the director of the Teaching Tolerance project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Maureen Costello. Maureen, it’s so good to have you with us.

Maureen Costello: Hasan, it is wonderful to be here.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Maureen, we have been working together, myself with the Teaching Tolerance team and those who have been working on the Teaching Hard History project for almost two years now. And this has really come out of a vision, I think it’s fair to say, that you have had, as the director of the Teaching Tolerance project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, for how the Southern Poverty Law Center ought to be engaging education and teachers. Could you say a little bit about the work that Teaching Tolerance has done and then how the Teaching Hard History project fits into that work?

Maureen Costello: I’d be happy to. You know, Teaching Tolerance has been around for almost 30 years and we started out as a project that sought to reduce prejudice in classrooms across the United States and we’ve grown considerably since then. But one of the continuing themes that we’ve had has always been about the history of the civil rights movement, and the history of the struggle for racial equality. We are a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose mission is to fight hate, seek justice and to teach tolerance, there are those three pieces of what we do. We bring lawsuits to try to enforce civil rights. We also investigate hate groups across the country, and the most important work, in my view at least, is that we work with teachers across the country to provide information and curriculum, pedagogy, school-climate resources, to help them combat every one of the “isms” that afflicts our society. But certainly, racial justice has always been at the heart of what we do and it’s the vision of my team, of lots and lots of folks who turn to us for this work.

The way it began though, the Teaching Hard History project, is a few years ago, in 2011, we decided to take a look at how well the states were teaching civil rights movement. We became kind of convinced that the civil rights movement had kind of began to calcify in a way and then instead of remembering really all the struggles and the degree of work and the degree of sacrifice that went into it, and the opposition, that it had kind of boiled down to a sort of catechism of two names and four words. So most American schoolchildren can tell you: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, ‘I Have a Dream.’” And we thought, We have to make that better. So we started a project called Teaching the Movement. And we looked at the state standards who are teaching the civil rights movement, in fact, issued a report card, much to the dismay of many of my colleagues at the state education departments. And what that showed is that over 34 states received Fs.

They did a terrible job, and we, of course, were imagining that standards actually mean something because governors had just finished signing on to the Common Core standards and they had said standards really means something — they set a state’s expectation. And so we kind of said, “OK, put your money where your mouth is. If ‘standards’ means something, then how are your standards on teaching the civil rights movement?” So we were looking at that problem and we really studied it for a few years. In fact, we did two reports and we came up with a lot of resources. And some of the problems we recognized is that states were expecting the story of the civil rights movement to be taught without ever mentioning Jim Crow, for example, or without ever mentioning the tremendous opposition or basically, they were expecting the civil rights movement to be taught without recognizing what conditions made it necessary.

And finally, we kind of came to the realization that the problem went much, much further back. And that until we really dealt with the legacy of racism and the legacy of slavery, we were never going to be able to teach the civil rights movement well. And obviously, we were also never going to be able to really take a hard look at the current situations in terms of racial inequity. If we really want children and young people to grow into folks who can change the world, which, you know, is my unambitious goal, they need to understand how things came about and how we are still living with the inheritance of the past. And so it’s really recognizing that we just did a terrible job doing this that led to the project.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It’s so interesting to hear you talk about how we are wrestling with the inheritance of the past, which means both what we embrace and what we reject. So much of what we’ve been doing with the podcast and the guests who have been on, and the topics that we have been probing, has been not only looking at the past but looking at what we inherit from the past and in the present. And so it’s very interesting that the team came to this project by looking at something more modern and realizing that we were unable, and teachers and students, are unable to fully grasp such an important historical event in American history, like the civil rights movement, without understanding the ways in which the problems that folk were trying to address in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, et cetera, really had their origins in this earlier time in the American experience.

You know, Maureen, the podcast is just one element of the Teaching Hard History project. For those who are just sort of tuning in for the first time or have only been listening to the podcast, could you share some of the other elements, some of the other parts to the broader Teaching Hard History project?

Maureen Costello: I can, indeed. You know, the project is built on two sets of frameworks. One framework is for K–5, and that’s one of the new frameworks. And the other one is for 6–12. And the frameworks lay out kind of broad, conceptual knowledge. We have the 10 key concepts, which are based on Ira Berlin’s work, as you know. But also a series of summary objectives for 6–12 and essential knowledge for K–5 that says, “Here’s what we think students should know, when they should know it, and here’s how you can teach it.” What we hope is that the frameworks are flexible enough that any teacher could pick up the framework and rethink the way they teach the subject, and possibly the way they teach all of U.S. history. But that also, department chairs could pick it up, committees within schools, entire districts or even states, or textbook publishers, or anyone else, really can look at this and say, “Ah, here is an orderly system that traces this history of enslavement and racial oppression from the very, very beginning.”

Through certainly to Reconstruction, but by implication, if you know that story very well, you’re going to see modern echoes of it as well. So the framework are the skeleton upon which we laid a lot of meat. The materials that we’ve provided for teachers are student materials like a rich selection of leveled student texts. Some of them are original that we have commissioned, especially at the elementary level. Some of them are historical documents, but what we’ve done is we have selected them to support the items in the framework. We have put them on our site. In the cases where we’ve had to get permissions, we’ve secured the permission so that teachers can use them. We also have a learning plan builder tool onsite so that people can build their own lessons. We’ve worked with Kathy Swan and some other folks who are part of the C3 and we’ve created some IDMs. For the people who don’t know what IDMs are, they’re Inquiry Design Models, and they are complete units to explore a central question.

One of my favorites of that is "Why does it matter who freed the slaves?" And it really examines not only the real question of self-emancipation and the role it played, but it also raises that historiographical question of: Who gets to tell the story, and who takes the credit? So we have the IDMs, we have texts. We also have videos that we’re about to put out, and which will be out by the time this podcast airs, from really renowned historians across the United States discussing the key concepts.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The videos that are connected to the frameworks, are those just for teachers or are they just for students, or for both?

Maureen Costello: I think they’re for both. We actually made them with the intention that they’d be used in classrooms. And then when I saw them, I thought, I’d want to study this first as a teacher, because I think the stories are probably unknown to a lot of teachers and they give you a lot of starting points.” So both and.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Awesome.

Maureen Costello: Also, we have a lot of links to online databases because one of the most exciting things these days is the amount of information that’s available online. And that I just think, prompts inquiry. You know, if you look at a database of the transatlantic slave trade, and you see the patterns, and you see the movement of ships and the movement of people, I think it just sparks curiosity, and instead of answering questions, you’re asking questions; that’s what we want students to do. And of course, we know that there are databases now of plantation ledgers and of fugitive slave ads, and all sorts of things that are rich primary sources. So we’re kind of providing a map to those. We also understand though that a lot of what we’ve included in this framework is fairly recent scholarship. And if there are teachers out there like me who haven’t been in graduate school for 30 years, they need to have that recent scholarship.

So we’ve done a lot of professional development work too; this podcast is part of that and I’m really, really pleased with the way people have been so excited about it. But the videos are in a sense for professional development. We also have webinars on-site, so you can go in and take them on demand. And where we actually have in-person training on Teaching Hard History as well. So we’re really trying to make this a full suite of components that will address all the needs that teachers have. This is a hard topic, and we want to give as much support as possible without telling you, “Teach exactly this,” because we also realize that teachers are working in different districts. They have different state histories they have to teach, they may have different curriculum requirements, but the framework gives you that skeleton that you can follow to figure out how to make it work in your particular district.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, that’s one of the things that I have heard from teachers over the course of the last year and a half as I’ve traveled the country talking about the work that we’ve been doing, is that the information that has been available online, through the podcast has been so teacher friendly and teacher accessible, that they’re really able just to sort of dip in, dive in, pull out what they need and they’re ready to go. And we all know that that is so helpful to teachers who just don’t have the time to go back to graduate school and study this stuff up. And yet, here it is, including teacher plans for lessons and the like.

Maureen Costello: I’ve heard a lot of anecdotes too. Last year, we mailed copies of the framework and the report to 100,000 educators across the United States, all the way from the state departments of education down to U.S. history teachers in high schools and we got a lot of emails in response. And one of my favorites was from a teacher who said, “I just was looking at this one lesson that I’ve taught every year and I was getting ready to teach it again next week, and I looked at your framework, and I am completely revamping the lesson.” And it was wonderful to see that. So we’ve heard a lot of that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So what has been the impact over the last year and a half, from the initial rollout of the Teaching Hard History materials?

Maureen Costello: Several states have advised us that they are going to take the frameworks into consideration during their review cycles of standards and frameworks. We know that Massachusetts has done that. We’ve been told that Michigan has looked at them as well and certainly we’ve seen a lot of interest in Virginia. We’ve seen entire districts that have aligned their curriculum to the frameworks. In fact, I did a workshop last March, in March 2018, at UVA for teachers in northern Virginia and Maryland. I mean, they came from as far away as Maryland and Delaware to go to this workshop. And about a year later, in fact, it was March, I was doing a presentation at NCHE, the National Council of History [Education], you were there too. And not only were you on the schedule, and I was on the schedule, but there was another “Teaching Hard History” project on the schedule.

It turned out to be from teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland, who had been at that UVA workshop, went back to their district and brought together another group of teachers and completely revamped their curriculum, the U.S. history part of the curriculum that taught about slavery, to follow the framework. So we’ve seen entire districts be changed, revise their curricula. We know that it’s being used as reference to revise standards in frameworks in some states. It’s been cited by the news media. It’s been cited by scholars, and at least one Democratic candidate for president has cited it in his plan for racial justice. And finally, in Illinois, a state senator who was proposing a bill to mandate the teaching of African-American history and slavery in K–12, cited our report; that bill has passed. And in Connecticut, such a bill is already under consideration now and that legislator has also cited our report as evidence. So in a short year, it’s gotten a lot of traction.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: A lot of traction, indeed. And I don’t think anyone would be too upset if we just rested on our laurels and said, “Look, we’ve put a lot of work in. This is reaching the people that we wanted it to reach. Let it do its work, and we’ll just see what happens.” But that’s not what we’ve done. In fact, the team, especially down there, has said, “No, we’re going to build on the initial iteration of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, and expand it, make it wider and dig deeper,” and that’s what’s coming out very soon. Could you say a little bit about the expansion to the Teaching Hard History materials, and you mentioned some of the videos and some of the professional development stuff. But really, what was the thinking or the emphasis that went into building this out, if you will?

Maureen Costello: One of the things I’ve learned as director of Teaching Tolerance and doing other kinds of projects like this is that nothing is ever final. As soon as you put it out there, you start hearing from people about how it works in the world. And that’s one of the things that we heard: We need this at the elementary level and we always knew that we needed it at the elementary level. Very, very few educators in elementary school are history specialists. They’re usually reading specialists or math specialists, or special education specialists. They don’t have a lot of room in the curriculum for history, although they do often cover the story of slavery through literature. So we knew that we needed to provide a framework for elementary school, also partially because so much of the narrative gets laid down in elementary school. My earliest memory of learning something in elementary school, was learning that Columbus crossed the ocean blue in 1492. It got hardwired into my brain. And I know that there are kindergarten students out there today who are learning about Harriet Tubman, leading her people out of slavery who haven’t a clue about what slavery is.

So we wanted to make sure that if hardwiring was going on, it was going to be hardwiring that high school teachers and college professors could build on instead of having to unteach what had happened earlier. And the second thing that we got a lot of feedback about and we also knew was an issue, was that the history of enslavement on this continent, in what is currently the United States in the Western Hemisphere, is not simply a history of chattel enslavement of people who are descended from Africans. It is also a history of Indigenous slavery. Both of those things, the K–5, and the integration of Indigenous slavery, needed more time. We needed more experts at the table, and we decided that they would be part of phase two. So phase two is the K–5 framework, which I’m very, very excited about. As far as I can tell, and given everyone I’ve spoken to and all the experts who have worked on this, this is literally a first-of-its-kind attempt to bring this kind of structure and order to such a difficult topic in elementary school.

And the Indigenous enslavement piece, really most of the scholarship in that field has been within the last 10 or 12 years. And so it was also bringing in the right voices. It’s a vast topic. There are so many Indigenous nations in what is currently the United States. It is a widely varied experience, but it actually makes an interesting connection between the past and the present because the enslavement of Indigenous peoples preceded the trans-Atlantic slave trade and it lasted longer. The 13th Amendment did not apply to domestic nations, which is what American Indians were considered. It’s also not chattel slavery [necessarily]. It could be things like debt peonage or something that looks like indentured servitude. And in that sense, it’s a much more modern definition of slavery. And of course, we know that today, 40 million people around the world are involved in some form of slavery, which is some form of coerced labor.

And so including the story of Indigenous slavery not only fills out the picture, which was truly unknown to me even as a history teacher for many years but also makes these connections to the present and reminds us that exploitation of human beings is not something that just happened in the past.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That sounds like one of the things that I’ve heard from a lot of the listeners and those who have engaged with the materials, a lot of the things that they have said to me is that they have not only learned how to teach this subject, they’ve learned what to teach. I mean, this has been one of the strengths of this whole project, is that it’s been teaching teachers. And I think those teachers who really approach the work that we have been doing as students themselves, as people who are learning, I think they really get the most out of it. Maureen, you were in the classroom for 20 years before you moved into this aspect of sort of education. Did you pick up on some new stuff through this process and through the work that we’ve been doing?

Maureen Costello: I picked up on so much new stuff that, it’s just been incredible. So much that I didn’t know or that I thought I knew and just didn’t think about how to teach. A good example is from early in the first season, and the whole story about the New England, New Bedford particularly, and its role as kind of a grocer to the sugar colonies. And the ideas there were so specific, they are wonderful, that I actually built a workshop activity out of it. But there’s just, I realized that I still have so much to learn. I feel like what we have provided for teachers is this marvelous opportunity to take graduate-level courses in the subject via podcast, via the videos and we have Annette Gordon-Reed, Christy Coleman, Ibram X. Kendi, Adam Rothman, Martha Jones, Edward Ayers, Tera Hunter, Daina Ramey Berry doing videos that we can use in our classes. But frankly, I think they’re master classes in how to think about such a difficult topic and personalize it.

And I’d just like to say that I think the podcast has been so powerful and that because sometimes this is a difficult topic for educators to figure out how to deal with; white teachers often are dealing with their own sometimes fragility, but also just discomfort around talking about race. We’ve had teachers talk to us about the fact that they feel uncomfortable acknowledging that as white people, that they’ve benefited from a society that was based on racial oppression. You know, there’s been a lot of discomfort and one of the things I think happens with the podcast is that you’re sitting there in your car or you’re taking a walk, or you’ve just got your phone plugged in and it’s just you, and Hasan, and whoever your guest is. And there’s time to kind of think about it and process it and think about how you’re going to use it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Speaking of those videos, they really are phenomenal. Are there a couple that stand out to you personally that really struck a responsive chord with you?

Maureen Costello: To some degree, every one of them does. Annette Gordon-Reed, who did two of the videos, I think she helps answer that question about the past being a different place and sort of not being a different place at the same time. She’s so careful when she talks about the founders to discuss the world in terms of what they believed. So she really confronts this notion, this presentism that we often encounter in students who want to believe that people in the past thought the same way we did. And I think that she does that really, really well. Edward Ayers talks about family separations in a way that just kind of catches you and you suddenly realize, Wow, this is really what this meant. The things that are most human to us, that really define us, our connection to our mothers, our fathers, our siblings, our aunts, our uncles, and the ability to believe that those are eternal in some way, that they can be broken that easily. And he just boils it down that simply.

He says, “If a student asks you what slavery meant, it’s that you could be separated from your family at any moment.” I think that’s just incredibly profound. Tera Hunter talks about the infant, Rachel, who’s just about a year old, who is sold at auction and the person who’s charged with bringing that infant to the auction is an enslaved man. And it turns out that the decision to sell Rachel was made while her mother was pregnant. They are the kinds of stories and videos that just, I would hope make you see the world differently.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the things that we have done in expanding the materials for Teaching Hard History is to move beyond this idea that America is shaped and slavery is shaped solely by the British, that this is simply a sort of British colonial thing, ignoring the French and ignoring most especially the Spanish, and even the role of the Dutch for a certain extent, in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Could you say a little bit about the importance of moving beyond this Anglo-centric, British-centric understanding of the origins and development of slavery in what we now know as America/the United States?

Maureen Costello: Well, I like the way that you said, “What we now know as America/the United States,” because we tend to think of the colonial period is the 13 colonies on the Atlantic Seaboard, which was only the British colonies. But every part of the United States that we live in today has had its own colonial experience with those different powers. And all of them enslaved Indigenous people at some point in their history, and in many cases, even after they cease to be under the control of colonial powers. And so we really need to shift this idea that “colonial” only refers to the British colonial experience. And we also have to realize that we’re talking about hundreds of years of European involvement in exploiting people across the continent, and enslaving them and look at the ways that that shaped their cultures, their behaviors, what became the system of chattel slavery and how wealth was produced. That’s one story.

And you know, again going back to my own teaching, even with thinking about the British colonies, the typical story was that the British came, in — particularly, in the Carolinas, and with rice cultivation, they attempted to enslave the local Indian tribes and that the Indians basically were, turned out to be bad slaves. I mean that’s kind of the conventional wisdom. They die, they are weak, or because it was their home territory, they figured out how to like get up in the middle of the night and go off someplace else. And so the conventional wisdom in a sense, in a lot of textbooks, is that they tried with Indigenous people to enslave them, but it didn’t work and that’s why then, European colonists turned to Africans. But in fact, they tried. They succeeded. And when I say “they,” it is the French, the Spanish, the British. They devised myriad forms of labor exploitation. They reaped massive amounts of wealth, and they developed notions of race that we still live with today.

So Indigenous slavery is part of the story and it’s the part of the story that has been much more erased than the story of the enslavement of people descended from Africans. And I think a really good time to teach that is in November, when Thanksgiving is approaching. The person that helped the Pilgrims, who most of us know as Squanto, but whose real name was Tisquantum, was helpful to the Pilgrims because he spoke English. Well, how did he speak English? The reason that Tisquantum knew how to speak English was because even before the Mayflower arrived off the coast of what is now Massachusetts, Tisquantum had been captured, had been brought to England and had been enslaved, and had managed to get back to North America, but had picked up the language while he was in England. He was one of many Indigenous people who had been plucked off the shores of what we now called the Atlantic Seacoast, prior to the English landing at Plymouth Rock, prior to Jamestown settlement, prior to all of that and who had already spent time in Europe as enslaved people.

So that throws a whole different light on that story, and it’s a light that we should shine on the story, and we should ask the question, why do we tell that story without that particular piece of information? So even before the pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock, before the Mayflower drops anchor, there is a history of Indigenous enslavement that they are going to encounter, and how does that shape the story? Those are questions we should be asking.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I really love the idea of connecting the past to the present in that way, since Thanksgiving, or some call it Thanks-taking, as a nationally recognized and observed holiday. And so you can put the present into context in this way to make the past a little bit more relevant.

Maureen Costello: And maybe also ask ourselves the question of, why is this traditional story that we’ve whipped up so appealing?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That’s a great question. What does it do for us?

Maureen Costello: Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Today.

Maureen Costello: Exactly. And then how does the way we talk about history do for us today, which also sheds light on the kind of arguments about the Confederate monuments and whether ethnic studies should be in school, that these are ultimately stories of representation and power.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely, absolutely. What would you say that we should learn about the present from studying slavery in the past?

Maureen Costello: That things as they are, don’t just happen naturally, that they were created by decisions and choices made by people in the past. And that choices and decisions made by people in the present and the future can create new things. That’s the simplest way of looking at it. But as I’ve looked at many of the stories and themes that we’ve unearthed in Teaching Hard History, I see those kinds of cycles of history, ideas, the control of the black body, the desire that leads us from enslavement to Jim Crow, to debt peonage, to mass incarceration. The talk that’s required of children, I can’t remember what guest it was on the podcast, but she talked about the fact that at some point, every young enslaved child knew two things, maybe by the age that they were six. They were loved by their parents, that they understood that they had the love of family, and that they could be sold away at any moment.

And you imagine parents or care keepers, if there are no parents there anymore, whatever members of the community are taking care of those children, letting them know that and there’s a straight line between that and the talk that African-American parents have to have with their sons today, and their daughters. Our beliefs about how to explain the wealth gap, the education gap, all that are so much still echoing the beliefs of the 19th century. And more important, I guess, I’m speaking very broadly and very philosophically here, but that belief in American exceptionalism: that we somehow are a nation outside of history, founded in an idea that’s always been struggling to just get better and better and closer and closer to that ideal, is a complete denial of how much we’ve all benefited from the oppression and elimination of people. And it hurts to acknowledge that that’s the case, but if you don’t acknowledge it, we’re going to hurt ourselves even more because we’re just believing in a fantasy that does not match the reality.

We are human beings, like every other historical group of human beings in the history of the world, which means that we can do horrible things to other human beings. And we’re not going to prevent horrible things from being done to other human beings in the present or in the future unless we acknowledge that that’s something that we are capable of and that, as Americans, we’re not uniquely exempt from it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I think all of the work that has gone into the Teaching Hard History project, these new videos combined with the elementary framework as well as the additions to the framework as a whole, expanding it out to incorporate these various elements of the enslavement of Indigenous people, really speaks to this broad idea that you’re laying out of the importance of this history, not only to understanding fundamentally how American history actually was, but really so that we can see these myths for what they are, being myths, this myth of perpetual progress and American exceptionalism. Let me ask you, Maureen, the Teaching Hard History project has really touched and reached a lot of teachers. It’s doing good work. They’re taking it into the classroom. What is your hope for this expanded version, including the second season of the podcast?

Maureen Costello: Well, one thing I hope it does is that it puts an end to the news stories that I read all the time about mock slave auctions and simulations of the Middle Passage. What I hope is that we start learning to do a better job teaching this very, very, very hard history. But I also hope that as part of a larger kind of picture, that as a nation, we come to grips with our past and that has two pieces. One is that we recognize that the story of this nation is the story of many, many people, black and brown people, Indigenous people, people who were captured and brought here, people who were incorporated into what the country is now, that it’s all of those stories and that we’re stronger because of all of those stories. And so I hope that in education will raise up the stories of the Mexicans who became Americans and the Indigenous people who managed to survive despite incredible odds, that all of that becomes part of the fabric.

And the other piece is that I just hope that we start having a conversation about how do we right the wrongs of the past? I think that we’ve already seen that reparations is being discussed. And this is not me saying we need to have reparations, but we sure as hell need to have that conversation.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What advice would you give to teachers who are looking at the materials, who are visiting the website, who are listening to the podcast, for how they ought to approach teaching the hard history of American slavery?

Maureen Costello: Let your students know where you are in relation to that history. If I were teaching it today, I would start out by recognizing and acknowledging that my position is as a white woman, who has inherited the benefits of white privilege and who has in fact, probably benefited from the wealth that was built by enslaved people in this country. And I would also further acknowledge for myself, that even though my ancestors were European immigrants who came after the period of enslavement was over, that that does not really make a difference because I inherited this story as an American and I inherited the wealth, and I inherited the history and that we’ve all inherited that history. But that for teachers to acknowledge kind of who they are, what land they stand on, what their own position is, and probably that they also are learning as well, and that they don’t have all the answers. I think that this topic more than any other requires humility, requires listening and requires courage.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Maureen Costello, thank you so much, not only for joining us for this opening episode of the second season of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, but for your leadership at Teaching Tolerance, and for really helping and making sure that we get this information about American slavery, about how to teach it accurately and effectively to teachers so that they can do the job that they are committed to doing. Thank you so much, Maureen.

Maureen Costello: Thank you, Hasan.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: American slavery shaped the modern world and impacted the life of every person living on the four Atlantic-facing continents and nearby islands. Students deserve to learn this complicated but essential history, a history that includes the millions of Indigenous people who were enslaved by European invaders, settlers and their descendants. Eduardo Díaz is the director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, and Renée Gokey is the teacher workshop coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian. They begin their conversation by telling us about their personal discovery of this often-hidden history.

Eduardo Díaz: My name is Eduardo Díaz, I am the director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, which was established in 1997, to ensure Latino presence at the Smithsonian Institution.

Renée Gokey: And I am Renée Gokey. I’m a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, although my family has other heritages as well. And I am the teacher workshop coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian, both developing learning experiences, teaching experiences for students and teachers. Eduardo, can you describe your personal journey to learning about this history and how that journey has shaped your approach to this work?

Eduardo Díaz: Thanks for the question. I am of Mexican descent. My parents are from Mexico, but I was born in the United States. I am a mestizo, which means that I am of mixed blood, most prominently European, probably Spanish, even the last name, and Indigenous of unknown origins in Mexico. And I’ve always wondered about that. I am also a product of the Chicano movement, which was a movement of Mexican Americans that paralleled the civil rights movements of the ’60s and ’70s. And the Chicano movement was, in many cases, very much about an exploration of Indigenous roots and a rejection of European or Spanish roots. Folks were giving their children names — Tizoc, Xóchitl, Nahuatl names — and there was really an earnest effort to explore these traditions, these roots, visit Mexico, become grounded, start learning how to dance Native dances from the main nations in Mexico. And so I wasn’t really too engaged with that part of it, I became more interested in the political angles of things.

So not surprisingly, after I graduated from undergraduate school at San Diego State, I went to law school because I thought that was the route to serving my community. But I always had this lingering question about my own Indigenous background. So, I happened to be at a bookstore in my neighborhood called the Potter’s House. It’s an old-school, lefty bookstore that one might associate with someplace like Berkeley, California. And there was this book on the shelf, The Other Slavery, and at the time, I just kind of wanted to get my cortado and forget about it because I just was not ready to pick up a book with that kind of title. But it just kept on speaking to me as I went back the following week, and I said, “OK, this is enough. Just pick it up and check it out.” And as I started to read this book, written by Andrés Reséndez, who’s a history professor at UC Davis, which is incidentally, where I also went to law school, I was just engaged.

I read the book, and I just flipped through it very, very quickly. It was a page-turner for me. And I thought, Wow, I work at the Smithsonian, I don’t know that we have ever dealt with this issue. We have obviously dealt with the issue of African slavery at the Smithsonian, we have a museum dedicated to the African-American experience, and of course, plenty was going on in the exploration of that particular slavery, but nothing that I could recall had ever been done on what is now known as the “other slavery.” And so I had a conversation with the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, where you work, of course, and also the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And I said, “Guys, what do you think? I think this is something that we need to explore.” So they embraced it. I think both of them read the book and were equally enthused and agreed with me that this was something that we really did need to look at.

So part of it is a personal journey, but the other part is it’s very professional, on the other end too. I mean, I work at the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian is about the increase and diffusion of knowledge, that’s been the mission of the institution since day one, and it is viewed as the nation’s museum. So if we are the nation’s museum, then perhaps we ought to explore this little-known but major aspect of the national narrative, which is about the bondage of Native peoples, either through slavery itself, indebted servitude or debt peonage. So Renée, tell me about your journey.

Renée Gokey: Well, I grew up in Oregon. So my family is from Oklahoma on my father’s side, and the other side of my family is from actually California. And so I had a very similar experience, I think, to a lot of people growing up in Oregon, in a public school. You know, we learned about the Oregon Trail. We heard a little bit about the California missions. And we heard very, very little about slavery, in association with the California missions. And I heard nothing, of course, about my own Native history and culture. It didn’t really exist in public schools. And our museum’s really been embarking on trying to uncover and really see where teachers and students are and what they’ve been taught. So we have also done a textbook study of 23 of the most widely used textbooks in K–12 classrooms. And we found a very similar story. There are sort of 10 big stories that are told about Native peoples. And what we found is they’re often incomplete. Sometimes they’re even inaccurate, and they’re very, very rarely from a Native perspective.

And so my experience was very similar. And it wasn’t really until I was much older, and recently really, that I read this book by Dr. Stephen Warren called The Worlds the Shawnees Made, Migration and Violence in Early America. And for the first time, I was confronted with the role that Shawnees played in the slave trade, particularly in the 1700s, where my community, Shawnees, are originally from Ohio, but really moved to these frontier areas, I learned, where the English were vying for power, the Spanish in Florida and so kind of all these areas. And so the Shawnees actually went to these places as a form of resilience to try and act as middlemen in the slave trade. And we were both capturing slaves and selling them to the English and Spanish, as well as adopting them into our community or there was actually torture in our community, where our people would use that as a form of retribution for deaths in our own community. So we either adopted, had this retribution factor in our community, or we actually sold people to other communities and the colonizers around us.

And actually, this led to a lot of the Confederacies forming in the Southeast because some of the bigger nations also came together in these new Confederacies in ways to survive as well. So it’s a very complicated story that I’m uncomfortable with, I’m also at the same time intrigued by because it’s something that I knew nothing of. And so I guess it’s personal in that there’s just so much that our communities are interested in, engaged with revitalizing our languages and all of these issues today. But we really need to understand this history in the full spectrum of the human experience, and it humanizes us even more. And we know that we’re working very much against a lot of stereotypes that have been propagated through our school systems and things like that. And so we need to work against that, but we also have to understand ourselves and our roles and what this means for us today. So it’s been an ongoing journey for me as well, and I have a lot more to learn.

Eduardo Díaz: I think we all do, actually, a lot to learn. Your work in education at the National Museum of the American Indian, so why in your view, do students need to learn and why do teachers need to teach about the history of Indian slavery?

Renée Gokey: I think we need to understand ourselves and understand some of these moral dilemmas that we’re faced with even today. And I think that these are based on past experiences where people had choices in their history. And I’m not saying there’s one way or another way to think about these choices, but I think it’s important to understand that we’re all, as a society and as individuals and as communities, part of these decisions that are going to affect the world around us. And so understanding those histories is really important and this has completely been a hidden history. And so it’s really easy to just brush past this and not understand the full complexity of Native people, as well as their interaction with all the communities around them. This was a very tumultuous time period for our communities, and really for everyone. And so I think it’s important to examine those and for teachers to feel more comfortable with this content.

I think it’s going to take some work to get teachers prepared for this. And that’s why a framework to understand how to teach more about these difficult topics is really important and also learning as we go, setting up safe spaces in classrooms where there’s certain norms where respect and facilitated dialogue and these pedagogical practices that we’ve been working on can be put to use. So I think it’s an ongoing learning process as well. How about you, Eduardo?

Eduardo Díaz: Well, I’m not an educator, nor have I ever been a teacher. But I do think you hit on it. I think these are the stories — these are narratives that need to be elevated. These are obscured histories which need to be discussed and we need to infuse them into the American narrative. I think students and teachers, especially after Reconstruction, were quick to obscure the experience and histories of enslaving folks of African origin. But it has since been recognized that, of course, slavery is a foundational story to telling the American and I would say continental history. And so its impact on largely every aspect of our nation’s history has been pretty well defined and pretty well known. However, the story of enslaved American Indians has been quieted over many years, practically to the point of whispers, if not just silence, and hushed aside and especially relative to those who have inherited it as a legacy. And so I always think it’s important to teach subject matter from a first-voice perspective.

So I think the Smithsonian and particularly in an institution like the National Museum of the American Indian, and even the Latino Center, has the responsibility to create opportunities for people to hear about history, directly from the people who have been the most affected by it. I think that it’s our responsibility. I think that’s our mission. And if we don’t do that, I think we betray that mission. And I think the students need to hear it, right. Students need to hear it directly, in a way that’s appropriate for the age group. And teachers also have to have the guts to teach material that they may feel uncomfortable with or that they feel might offend some students or perhaps they don’t know much about it. I think this is the point: that the National Museum of the American Indian has the resources, has the tools, has the people to be able to help teachers get to that level of comfort and confidence to be able to handle the subject matter and work with students to ensure that it is a learning experience that really resonates.

Renée Gokey: How does thinking about this history inform the work that you’re now doing at the Smithsonian, Eduardo?

Eduardo Díaz: When somebody ask me what my job is, my response is “My job is to transform the Smithsonian into a Latino-serving institution.” And my view is, the only way we can do that is to have our content experts at the various museums and research centers of the Smithsonian, conducting the research, organizing the exhibitions, building the collections, informing public and educational programs, also informing digital content that goes online, mentoring and publishing, if possible. And so it is very important for us to understand that Latino history is American history, period. Latino art is American art, period. Portraits of Latinos are American portraits, period. And so this history is part of us because so many of our community are mixed heritage. We have to remember that when African slaves escaped their masters in the Caribbean, and they ran into the hills or into the swamps, who did they run into? Native peoples, you know? “Monte adentro,” they say. “Cimarrón de monte adentro,” means “an escaped slave or a maroon.” “Monte adentro” means “mountain way in in the hinterlands.” So “Eso era un cimarrón de monte adentro,” so, that escaped slave went into the hills and who do they associate with?

And as I always say, well, slaves didn’t go back to Africa and the Spaniards didn’t bring any senoritas. So let’s just do the propagational math here. So I think it’s just thinking about miscegenation, or “mestizaje,” is a very natural thing that we, at the Latino Center at the Smithsonian, are thinking about all the time. And if you’re Mexican, Mexican American, the chances of you being a mestizo are pretty good. And so there’s just that very basic genetic code question that you are curious about. Who formed you? Who were these people? Who were your ancestors? At least, you know Renée can say, well, she’s Shawnee, right. I can’t even tell you what Native group I am descended from in Mexico. I have no clue. And I don’t know that I’ll ever get to that point. For me, the key is, and I think for a lot of Latinos, those of us who are of Indigenous backgrounds, to understand and come to grips with our indigeneity from an Indigenous perspective, versus a Latino perspective.

Because Spanish is still dominant in our language in some cases. And the Latino identity, or Chicano identity, in my case, is what pervades. But it’s still very much a Latino perspective. It’s not an Indigenous perspective. And I think for many of us, we have to find a way not to discard that Latino part, but to engage with the Indigenous part in a way that’s more serious, that’s more intentional. That’s more honest, and a way that really forces us to be open and accepting of that part of who we are. So I think we are bound to tell this history in the only way we know how to do it at the Latino Center at the Smithsonian, and that’s straight up with facts, and not to shy away from the difficult stories and it’s all mixed up. It’s the heritage of African slavery, the decimation of Native populations in the Americas, and the arrival of Europeans and the whole notion of first contact.

Again, going back to who’s going to be using this, teachers, I think can find creative ways in which to tell the story in a way that’s going to register with their students, in a way that’s really going to resonate and that will stick with them. So Renée, how does thinking about this history inform the work that you’re doing at the American Indian Museum?

Renée Gokey: We tackle a variety of content, but what we found is that often, we have to take a few steps back and really meet teachers where they are when teaching and learning about native peoples or Indigenous people, so even something as simple but important as checking our language, and giving some guidelines on terminology and kind of understanding some of the assumptions or the biases that we might have in our language. For example, with the term “Indio,” that’s considered derogatory. And our museum is called National Museum of American Indian. So it’s confusing for people. And so we try and give some feedback on the history of why our museum’s called National Museum of American Indian, which comes from the collector itself and the legislation that was passed. But we also look at the first time that the term “Indio” was used. And it was used, as far as we know, according to primary sources, in the journals of Cristóbal Colón or Christopher Columbus. When he landed on Hispaniola, he took a lot of notes, and he held a journal. And so I think it was October 14, that that term “Indio” was applied.

And so we try and give teachers some guidance on both the history and origins of these terms, and then give them some preferred terminology, and talk about why it could be problematic and why it is problematic to use that term. And then we complicate the story and I say, at least from my own family experience, my grandmother grew up in Oklahoma, being called “half breed,” which was also a derogatory term. It’s something that you would call dogs. And this is how she grew up going to boarding school and some of those pretty tough experiences. And so she called herself an Indian because Shawnees didn’t call themselves Shawnees in the 1920s and 30s. So my grandma, that’s the experience that she had, and so I try and be authentic and real and tell that story.

And then I talk about how today, we’re really reclaiming those terms, and we’re calling ourselves by our names. And some communities have been involved in that for quite a long time but other communities are really going and reclaiming these words that we call ourselves and not words that were put on us by the colonizer. So an example: Ohkay Owingeh, San Juan Pueblo.

Eduardo Díaz: It used to be San Juan Pueblo.

Renée Gokey: It used to be San Juan Pueblo. So these are really important, because the ability to name things and the ability to put things on a map, those are colonist practices. And so it’s important for us to kind of talk about some of that. So because that’s a frequently asked question, we address that and we have teachers think about terminology, even when it comes to teaching about American Indian removal, which I’ve done a lot of. And so we have these online lessons that we use primary and secondary sources to answer this question: What does it mean to remove a people? And when we’re discussing these resources, and we’re looking at exhibitions that help us tell more complete narratives, we also look at the term “ethnic cleansing.” And we talk about how it actually does meet the definition of ethnic cleansing when you’re looking at American Indian removal.

So there’s power behind these words, and I think that it’s really great teaching and learning opportunities to have these conversations, not only with teachers — but for teachers to have these conversations in their classrooms with their students. In terms of slavery in particular, we have what’s called Indigenous Peoples’ Curriculum Day and Teach-In, and we hold that before Columbus Day so that teachers are prepared in the local D.C. metro area to address these issues around Columbus, and slavery really starts there. And so we have a session, we have a keynote, and we’ll have several breakout sessions in which teachers can choose. And one of those sessions is a dialogue and a role-play around Columbus Day, and if he should be put on trial. So these are some of the ways that we start to address and find these entry points into talking about slavery and the other broader topics that teachers need support on.

Eduardo Díaz: We started a program looking at Taíno groups. Back in 2011, Taínos are the larger group that Christopher Columbus “discovered” when he arrives in the Caribbean. We started small with a symposium. So we brought in scholars and community members from Cuba, from Puerto Rico, from the Dominican Republic, from Jamaica—Jamaica, of course, the Taíno name—from actually Belize, because there was a relationship with the Garifunas. And the first symposium was really the myth of extinction because the narrative is the Columbus narrative and the Spanish narrative is Columbus arrives, the Spaniards come, they wipe out all the Indians in the Caribbean, there are no more Indians in the Caribbean. That’s the myth.

And so we continue to explore this notion of indigeneity in the Caribbean. And finally, we’re able to open the show on “Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean,” at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. And when people ask me about that show, I say, “Well, basically, it’s the flip side of the Columbus narrative. It’s looking at first contact from an Indigenous perspective versus the traditional European perspective, so I think it’s very important that we at the Smithsonian flipped the narrative and we have to do it to be able to round out the story. And working with American Indian [museum], of course, for me has been a godsend. This is the only place we could have done it, obviously. It is a Native story but we’re also part of that story, because so many of us, particularly those members in our community who are from the Caribbean, Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, in particular, this is their story. And so we needed to tell it.

Renée Gokey: Well, I was just going to add to that. So one of the ways that we’re also working with teachers is so often I mean, I think something like 83 percent of the workforce, the teaching workforce is white females. And so a lot of times, a teacher will come to us and say, they kind of exoticize — sometimes Native Americans, not all, but here and there we’ll get a comment. And what we’re really working to do is have teachers recognize their own culture, and start to break apart their culture, because everybody has culture and kind of expand their thinking around culture. And then they can start to teach about Native people in more inclusive ways and more complex ways.

And so that’s a really important thing is to start with yourself. I remember one teacher, we were doing an activity where we kind of sort different primary and secondary sources and we look at false narratives. And we kind of define that. And we look at incomplete narratives and talk about some of the characteristics of those. And then more complete narratives where we hope to provide first-person perspective and some documents and journals and quotes and art pieces that help to tell these more complete narratives from Indigenous perspectives. And this teacher, all of a sudden, she was engaging with the activity, and she threw her hands on the table, and she said, “I get it, we tell the stories that make us feel good about ourselves.” And so we’re also these people who were taking identities and shifting and changing sometimes. We’re using terminology in ways that can help us elevate ourselves and society. And so these are really important things to really talk about and look at some of the assumptions and biases that we have in using this terminology and who has the ability and who has a representation to be able to share those because we’re not all the same in that respect at all.

Eduardo Díaz: And kind of follow up on that, what do you say to the teacher for perhaps being intimidated or maybe feeling ill-equipped or not confident to talk about indigenous slavery in the classrooms? What do you say to them that relieves them from being intimidated or feeling guilty or just not feeling equipped to tell the story?

Renée Gokey: Well, to be honest, I haven’t taught on this topic. And so in terms of content, and in terms of pedagogical approaches, those are things that we’re still kind of working on but I would maybe go back to some of the practices that we know do help teachers and help them feel supported. And first, it’s based on just Teaching 101, which is relationships, building respectful relationships where teachers feel comfortable asking questions, and building that respect and sharing and being part of the learning community as a facilitator. So I guess my own philosophy has really shifted.

We do want to bring in content experts and curators, of course, but we also want to set up situations where teachers feel comfortable asking new questions, and the facilitator’s also learning alongside the teachers as well. So I think that providing a nice array of primary and secondary sources, where teachers and students can really confront the sources and grapple with history, that can be contradictory because even when we tell more complete narratives, it gets more complicated, right? So then we have contradictions sometimes, where one community says this, and another community says that or one family says, “Well you don’t necessarily represent a whole community’s perspective,” which is true.

And then we have to find ways to provide more complete narratives because we don’t want to put too fine a point on the incomplete narratives that are out there. We know there’s a lot and we know we’ve been dealing with stereotypes and incomplete stories and narratives about Native people for a long time. But what we need to do is counterbalance that with more complete narratives and a plethora of resources that teachers feel that they can turn to that are accurate, that are authentic and that can really help be relevant to students in their classrooms. So I think connecting it with contemporary issues is really key, connecting some of these broad ideas and these moral questions with the lives of students today, and there’s a lot of issues in which we can do that.

Eduardo Díaz: I think in terms of the areas that need to be explored, we need to begin with a historical grounding, right? This is the slavery that was practiced in the Americas. It led to the development of some customs and some edicts. There were economic factors, as we know, because slavery’s a business at the end of the day. There was inter-ethnic complicity, as we’ve discussed. There were wars that were fought over this. The geographic spread of Indigenous slavery was immense, not only in the Caribbean, but as we know, throughout Latin America, the US colonies, including the Philippines, and most states, we need to go deep into the areas of removal, reservations, Indian schools, boarding schools.

And I think that a comparative analysis with African slavery and the diaspora is something that would be important to do, I think, because people recognize and they know about African slavery, so I think that the comparative analysis would help it resonate with them. And then there’s family histories and traditions, looking at genealogical and genetic research, which in my case is what drove me to the subject matter as a mestizo very much about looking at identity formation and mythologies and religious conversions and cultural practice, euphemism, stereotypes as Renée has mentioned the importance of unraveling.

And then I think so much needs to be done in the area of research relative to the artifacts or the records of enslavement. So the documentation, what’s the invisible archive, what about material culture? We have not even scratched the surface, I bet, at the Smithsonian. And that’s something I think we need to really look at. And then there’s art and creative expression as a way of dealing with this. So one of the things we’re doing is organizing a one-and-a-half-day symposium on the subject in 2021.

We are going to be bringing together scholars, of course, and community members to talk about geographic reach and the history and the aesthetic and culture and treaties and wars, and so forth, and inter-ethnic complicities and whatnot. So that’s going to be an opportunity really for us to go deep into the subject from a variety of perspectives, and to also bring artists as well into the picture so that they can also reflect from their creative standpoints on the subject. Looking at slavery, aesthetics, and cultural resurgence and multi-genre traditional and contemporary art practice to the point that Renée brought up about the importance of showing how this subject resonates in a contemporary way.

I mentioned we’re doing a symposium in a couple of years, and one of the things we’re going to do is ask people to respond to an image, right? So one image might be a photograph in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History, which is of a Mexican, I’m quoting, this is how the photo caption reads, “Mexican boy captured by Comanche Kiowa Alliance.” OK, the exhibition at American Indian in New York, the Cannon exhibition” Wow, you could pick two or three images, paintings of his, T.C. Cannon, and ask a scholar or an artist to riff on that from the perspective of slavery. And it would be an extraordinary discussion, I think. I think all of these things that I’ve just sort of outlined are things that need to be looked at as a complete package of exploration into this subject that we are referring to as Indian slavery.

Renée Gokey: For our sort of pedagogical approaches, we found that poetry and art are really effective tools to start to bring about conversation. So they can be a really nice catalyst for conversation, and just get teachers and students thinking in new ways, and listening and hearing from other perspectives on the same artwork. So sometimes we don’t sit teachers down, for example, and say, “We’re going to talk about cultural appropriation today.” No. Instead, what we do is we look at some artwork, we look at some contemporary artists, and we even use our hands to make things ourselves and have conversations and then it will come up maybe, “Well, you know what, should I be using dream catchers in my classroom?” And so then we’re ready with some conversations around that. And so I think that that can be a way to — I don’t want to say a backdoor into approaching difficult subjects, I think it’s also important to hit it head-on. If you have the content, and you have the skills, and you’re ready for that but I think that it can be a really powerful way to talk about difficult subjects through poetry and art. We found that to be effective.

Eduardo Díaz: It seems that oftentimes, Native people in the United States, we owe these communities or, “We’re sorry, we took your land, decimated your populations and your buffalo herds and moved you and so forth, took away your language and whatnot.” But then in the exploration of this whole issue of Indian slavery, do you come to the... you learn that Native peoples were complicit and active, very active in the slave trade? I know we always point our fingers at the Comanches, who were like supreme at their business of slave trading. And in fact, it was a business and they enslaved other Native groups, even in Mexico and were running slaving raids into Mexico to provide the supply of human labor in the United States, and brought them back across the border. And it was a business. It was a business and Native peoples were engaged with that business, as you mentioned with the Shawnees and their role. That kind of disrupts that whole narrative about we have to be kind to Indians, and we have to be empathetic, and we messed them over. We got to make it up to them. You know what I’m saying? And it’s like, “Well, OK, but when we deal with the issue of slavery, if we do the whole truth and the whole history, there’s some very uncomfortable conversations that are going to come up here.”

Renée Gokey: Yeah. But at the same time, though, I think we have to acknowledge what was the context that made this happen. What was the context? There were so many challenges and Native communities were so disrupted due to disease, and due to forced removals, even before the 1830 Jacksonian policy of Indian removal. Native people were also removing themselves. So this was a very tumultuous period. And so yes, we don’t want to sort of get into this finger-pointing or saying we should apologize or we shouldn’t apologize. But I think what we do need to do is provide context. And so we do need to really look at the context in which this was happening and the kind of challenges that people were having. It doesn’t make it OK, but we need to provide that context.

I think apologies actually go a really long way. I say that because just a few weeks ago, I was giving a tour on removal, and there was a sort of quiet moment where I was just telling both my personal experience, some with my family or my heritage, and then the larger American story of removal. And a teacher from the back of the room said, “I just want to say that I am really sorry.” And I don’t say it with... because it was actually a kind of an important moment, everybody sort of felt it in the room. And people were nodding, and it was a really important moment, actually. And I can’t accept that apology. I didn’t endure any of the removal or anything like that. But our families still carry some of those stories. And there were so many different policies. So I just think that it’s really important to understand these and it’s so little taught, even basics like boarding schools, that’s not taught. You ask a group of 30 teachers in any given workshop and about two people raise their hands, that even know that boarding schools occurred, so I think this is a chance to really kind of widen our eyes and help us all wake up.

Eduardo Díaz: Yeah. I agree. I had mentioned the book The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez. I wanted to quote from a book review that was done by Genevieve Valentine at NPR, just a short paragraph, which I think is relevant to what we’re talking about here. And it reads, “It’s unfortunate, though inevitable, that some of the facts under discussion have lost historical resonance amid the longstanding cloud of white defensiveness. The fact that some Native American nation sought to maintain autonomy by adapting European horse culture and becoming slavers themselves is an object lesson in the trickle-down horrors of colonialism. Rather than self-contained billiard balls colliding with one another on the frontier, as Reséndez puts it, sometimes he writes as if he knows that any engagement with Indian slavers is doomed to erase some of the nuance of his research.”

You’re right, I mean, slavery was not practiced at this level before contact and before European colonialism that some tribes “got with the program.” Oh, boy. Anyway, lots to explore.

Renée Gokey: Another thing that I would add is that sometimes these types of subjects can bring about strong emotions, so they bring about anger or guilt or shame. And I think one way to deal with that is find ways for anyone, teachers and students, but just people in general to be empowered to rectify some of these injustices that are around them today. So how can we look at some of the issues that are important in society today, we were really... when we’re teachers, we’re really guiding students to be better human beings.

We’re guiding them not only to mentally accept or grapple with information, but really to improve their civic society, to improve our civic society and move towards a more perfect union. So how do we do that? Sometimes we have to heal. And sometimes we have to kind of really grapple with our own situations, and be intentional about the types of conversations we have, and when these emotions arise, how can we set up learning communities where we can actually tackle injustices today. So I think that that helps a little bit with some of the empowerment that we can find when we feel like either we have big gaps in knowledge, we don’t have a personal connection to this, maybe some people would say, “That was 300 years ago, how does that affect me today?” Well, let’s look at the issues that do affect you today and let’s talk about some of those dilemmas and debates today.

So I think that this kind of full humanity not only in talking about Indigenous people and Latinos and mestizos and other people that are part of these conversations, and Europeans and African Americans and Africans, but also the myriad experiences of humanity. And so I think that those are really important things to grapple with as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Eduardo Diaz is the director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, whose mission is to increase and enhance the Latino presence at the Smithsonian Institution. He is particularly excited about the establishment of the Molina Family Latino Gallery at the National Museum of American History. When it opens next year, it will be the first permanent exhibit space dedicated to the Latino experience on the National Mall.

Renée Gokey is the teacher workshop coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian. She is currently expanding the museum’s Native Knowledge 360 initiative, which offers educators and students new perspectives on the history, cultures and contemporary lives of Indigenous people through online content. The museum also provides many teacher professional development opportunities across the country, including the National Teacher Institute each summer, which you can learn more about at americanindian.si.edu.

And Maureen Costello is the director of Teaching Tolerance and a member of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s senior leadership team. Before joining Teaching Tolerance, she led Newsweek’s education program. A former history teacher, she believes passionately that the past informs the present, and that studying the past makes us better citizens.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, helping teachers and schools prepare their students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance offers free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at tolerance.org.

Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of what is currently the United States, or how its legacies still influence us today. Now in our second season, this podcast is part of an effort to provide comprehensive tools for learning and teaching this critical topic. Teaching Tolerance provides free teaching materials that include over 100 texts, sample inquiries and a detailed K–12 framework for teaching the history of American slavery. You can find these online at tolerance.org/hardhistory.

Thanks to Ms. Costello, Mr. Diaz and Ms. Gokey for sharing their insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford with production assistance from Russell Gragg. Kate Shuster is our executive producer. Our theme song is “Different Heroes” by A Tribe Called Red, featuring Northern Voice, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie. If you like what we’re doing, please let your friends and colleagues know. Tell us what you think on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate the feedback. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.