Resources from Fairfax County Public Schools

• Changes in Population (PDF 800 KB)
• Dos and Don’ts of Teaching About Race, Culture, and Identity (PDF 130 KB)
• The Role of Virginians During the Civil War (PDF 1.4 MB)
• The Role of Virginians in the Founding of the New Nation (PDF 970 KB)

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching is a creative profession. And as one of our guests for today noted, sometimes we have to “MacGyver” our classrooms. Even in the best of times, when we’re not trying to learn how to teach remotely on the fly, every day in the classroom is an adventure. Education is, at its core, improvisational; teachers are constantly dealing with different situations, a range of student personalities, and unfolding current events.

Meredith McCoy: That is so true. And as part of our work on the Hard History advisory board, we get to see the many ways teachers use our materials out in the world as they adapt to their classrooms. And we know there are so many more ways that teachers are using these resources that we don’t even know about. It’s encouraging and exciting to see all the ways teachers are taking this material and running with it, especially while we’re teaching long distance.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And today, we’re going to get to share some of those stories with you.

Meredith McCoy: I'm Meredith McCoy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries. And this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

Meredith McCoy: 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: During our second season, we expanded our focus to better support elementary school educators and to understand the often-hidden history of the enslavement of Indigenous people in what is currently the United States.

Meredith McCoy: And as this season draws to a close, we’re excited to turn our attention to you—the educators in our audience—to talk about how we're navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We want to thank everyone who participated. We received a lot of calls, and in the end, we tried to pick some questions and stories that would resonate the most with you. We’ll see you on the other side.

Meredith McCoy: Hey Hasan, we’re just gonna go straight into it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ah, my bad. My bad. What is it that you say? We’re so glad you can join us!

Meredith McCoy: Yes we are. Our first call today is with Erin Green, a fifth grade teacher in Texas who just started a unit on enslavement with her students distance learning. Erin, welcome. Could you start by telling us a bit about your classroom and your question?

Erin Green: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I teach 18 kids and I have those same kids all day and teach all the subject areas. But I work on a team of four teachers, and my job is to create the lesson plans for social studies and English language arts. And so I have a unit on slavery and abolition that I've taught for the last few years and kind of worked with and tweaked. And I feel pretty good about it. And then with this whole work from home distance learning situation, I just couldn't wrap my mind around how to teach such a hard part of our history from a distance. So yeah, that's kind of how I landed at the question. And I'm really grateful that you guys jumped on it and everyone's so willing to talk to me.

Meredith McCoy: You know Erin, I know that your original post generated a lot of thoughts, and this is something that really resonated with me. I teach histories of Indigenous education. And this week, I'm doing a unit with my students on the federal Indian boarding schools.

Erin Green: Mm-hmm.

Meredith McCoy: And I was similarly struggling with how do I teach such sensitive and potentially traumatizing content with my college students when I can't see them, and I don't know how they're responding to the content.

Erin Green: Yeah.

Meredith McCoy: As I was looking through the responses to your original question, I noticed that there was one teacher who had a lot of great ideas, and that teacher was Deborah March. So I asked her to join us. Deborah March is the multicultural studies curricular resource teacher for Fairfax County Public Schools. Deborah, could you start by telling us a bit about your work, and particularly the materials you've been working on around enslavement?

Deborah March: So my position was conceived as a position focused on identifying and addressing bias in the curriculum as written. Although I serve across the disciplines, you can imagine that one major priority is the social studies curriculum. It shapes how students feel about themselves as learners and as human beings in our classrooms.

Meredith McCoy: Erin, what strategies seem to be working with your students so far?

Erin Green: From a distance, I didn't know how I could possibly show the photographs that I might show otherwise or look at those primary sources that reveal that brutality. So what I kind of did this past week, I focused a lot on abolitionists. Really looking at empowering positions of people who were enslaved and fought to end slavery. A lot of kids and adults come into the understandings of like, well, Abraham Lincoln ended slavery. And so really pushing back on that idea and looking at who really ended slavery, and how this took a coalition of hundreds of thousands of people to end something like this.

Meredith McCoy: I'm so glad to hear that. And you mentioned that one of Deborah's original comments on the social media page was about thinking really carefully about what images we choose to show for our students right now while we're in distance learning. Deborah, I wonder if you could talk a bit more about some of the strategies and resources that you're recommending for teachers to think about right now while they're teaching enslavement via distance learning.

Deborah March: A lot of Erin's insights here even in just talking about her focus on abolitionists and empowerment are aligned with some of the guiding principles that have informed my work, alongside my team in revising the social studies curriculum. One of those principles is affirming human dignity. And this means teaching about a dehumanizing institution without reenacting that dehumanization through our pedagogy. A small question like, "Who gets to be an individual with a name and a face in our curriculum?" You know, disproportionately it's white, wealthy men who are named as individuals, and folks with marginalized identities tend to show up as groups, right? And are treated as a monolith.

Deborah March: It also, I think, a question like, "When do we start the story?" I notice in the fourth grade standards for Virginia that the first-time students encounter Africans is as slaves, right? To me, that stands in stark contrast to decisions that curators at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture made to start the history concourse in the 12th century, so that visitors encounter diverse African civilizations and the many individuals who made contributions to those civilizations over hundreds of years before encountering the middle passage. It's really about centering the perspectives and experiences of people who were enslaved, as well as other people who were harmed by the institution of slavery, such as free African Americans. To me, this is as much about what we teach as it is about the lens that we use to frame the content. You know, when kids are encountering events or figures in history, whose perspectives are framing those events? When we teach about George Washington as, you know, the quote, "Father of our nation," or when we teach about Thomas Jefferson as a champion of liberty, are we teaching hard history but avoiding the hard parts when we talk about our founding fathers, our so-called founding fathers?

Deborah March: And then third—and I feel like Erin touches on this so beautifully in her learning experience around abolitionists, this goal of empowering students as change agents who recognize and address injustice. You know, some of the texts that I've seen that address slavery for young learners either minimize or rationalize this system of injustice. I've seen too many resources that say the South's agrarian economy required cheap labor, right? A sentence like that justifies an unjust and brutalizing institution of slavery on economic grounds. So we have this slavery without enslavers. Calling attention to injustice and empowering kids to notice injustice, it helps students believe that a central part of learning our history is about imagining better and more just and more free ways of being with each other in the world. Better systems, right? And I think a small way to empower students is just to make space for their questions. Why does it have to be that way? What if it were different?

Meredith McCoy: Those are such important and wonderful guiding principles. Erin, I'm wondering how you're thinking about applying those in your classroom.

Erin Green: Yeah, I love that you brought up George Washington, because one of the resources that you shared even on that thread was just a graphic of the people who lived at Mount Vernon. And you can tell that it's overwhelming that the population at Mount Vernon was people who were enslaved by the Washingtons. Something that I was going to do when we were still planning for a typical school year is we were going to do a book study on Never Caught, the story Ona Judge, a woman who was enslaved by George Washington. In this nonfiction narrative, it talks about his relentless pursuit to get this woman back onto his plantation. And I've been looking at some different resources online to really center her story, and then to also look at Thomas Jefferson, and look at these contrasting narratives we have of what even do are our learning standards say about them? Because our learning standards in Texas are pretty bad for social studies. So looking at how are we supposed to learn about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and these men we call our founding fathers, and what are these other histories that we should also know about them?

Meredith McCoy: Hasan, how is all of this resonating with you?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, I love the core principles, the guiding principles, Deborah, that you outlined, because they really speak to the practice that Erin, that you are trying to implement in the classroom itself: this idea of humanizing the enslaved people, affirming human dignity, centering those who often get marginalized. That's critical. It's difficult under normal circumstances. It's even more challenging now, in part because it's hard to read the students. There's so much in this material that can be misinterpreted, because it has been wrongly interpreted for so long. The response, the hesitancy, the concern is well guided. It's so critical to what they are going to learn going forward, it's so critical really to understanding what they're seeing, the disparate impact on so many people of color. This history is so important to them. We don't have a choice to skip it. We just got to figure out how to do it accurately and effectively in these circumstances. Deborah, did you have one or two things that teachers can do right now that you might want to share?

Deborah March: Yes, I thought it might be helpful to talk a little bit about one of the resources I shared with Erin, the perspectives chart.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Deborah, I just want to jump in and tell our listeners if you want to see the resources she's describing, we've put a link to them in the show notes for this episode.

Deborah March: So if you imagine an infographic with, like, five or six columns. In each of those columns imagine a portrait of a person, the name of that person and, you know, a two- to three-sentence blurb about that person. And these are people that students would not usually find opportunities to encounter or learn about in typical textbooks. Portraits of a People is a really good example of a book that visualizes the history of African Americans in the 19th century. But each of these blurbs and each of these historical figures is represented on this perspectives chart. So I've seen teachers use these perspective charts in a variety of ways. One is just to present kids with a chart and a couple of simple provocations. What do you notice? What do you wonder? We typically have found that Project Zero's thinking routines have been really powerful tools for supporting developmentally-appropriate inquiry among students, and these so-called thinking routines are available for free online to all teachers. Allowing students to engage in a thinking routine like that with the perspectives chart in a small chat room or virtually in a Google doc or another format can add a layer allowing kids to kind of collaboratively construct an understanding of the past. And I would also emphasize they are the wonder portion, giving kids some time to ask questions.

Deborah March: Another great example of how you might use this perspectives chart is alongside the study of any event or important document or historical figure that you might be teaching about in American history. So it's one thing to present Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence, but to present them alongside a perspectives chart that visualizes profiles of actual enslaved African Americans who were living during the time and inviting kids to think, "How might that person make sense of Thomas Jefferson's words here? What might that person think about, feel about or care about as that person encounters these words?" This is a way to really shift the lens and reframe the narrative and think about whose lives and perspectives are valuable in interpreting American history.

Deborah March: One of the majorly important interventions that a perspective chart like this makes into the study of American history for young kids is it names individuals who typically are not named in our textbooks, who typically are not named in our curriculum resources, and indeed in the mainstream narrative of American history tend not to be deemed worthy of formal study. So it helps kids see more lives, more experiences, and it really enriches their opportunity to navigate the complexity of American history.

Deborah March: I so far have been talking about an emphasis on individual lives, but I also wanted to think about ways to empower students to see the system. If we're talking about the history of slavery, it's crucially important to affirm human dignity by lifting up and honoring the lives of individuals who were enslaved or who were harmed by the institution of slavery. But too much focus on individuals might cause students to lack a perspective on the institution of slavery more broadly. We really need to foster sensitivity to how systems are designed, so that we can help students see themselves as participants in systems and also agents within those systems who might change in the service of justice.

Deborah March: So I think a lot about data visualizations here. I thought it might be useful to follow up to Erin's point about the data from Mount Vernon. George Washington's Mount Vernon has recently, over the past few years, really done a lot of important work in trying to shift the history that visitors encounter when they visit George Washington's former residence, away from centering the Washington family and toward honoring the lives of the many enslaved people who lived there and worked there and made life possible for that family there. One of the resources that they give to teachers is a set of stick figures representing individual human beings who lived at Mount Vernon in 1799. These stick figures are color coded. Green stick figures represent enslaved people of all ages. Red stick figures represent free workers, and yellow stick figures represent members of the Washington family. There is no other information on this sheet of paper, and so it's presented really without comment. Pairing that with a thinking routine like See, Think, Wonder, has yielded really powerful student thinking about the complexity of slavery in relation to our nation's first president.

Deborah March: I've seen students pose questions in chalk talks or virtual settings around why? Why did slavery exist, right? So big questions all the way down to small questions about the data itself. They're counting the stick figures and noticing how few people were free, how few people were enslaved, and wondering why that was the case. And so the pairing of data visualization with a very open-ended question and just seeing what kids do with it, can be a powerful way for students to begin to make sense of the system more broadly.

Deborah March: There are many really powerful data visualizations related to the history of slavery, but one is an interactive visualization of the Atlantic slave trade. Picture a world map, and it's a time-lapsed video of individual slave ships leaving West Africa for both South and North America. Over the course of 150 years, you can see the individual slave ships and where they land, and you can see over the course of time the magnitude as the Atlantic slave trade increases, the number of ships leaving and where they're going.

Deborah March: There are a few other approaches that I'd love to discuss. One is the use of primary source artifacts. Many museums have made their collections digitally available to educators, and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in particular has incredible resources digitally that I've seen teachers use with powerful results. Joseph Trammell's freedom papers are digitally available. These are the freedom papers that an African-American man carried around in Loudon County. You can see the box that he preserved these papers in. You can see the ways in which the papers are carefully folded and stowed away. 1852 is the date that the papers are marked. Using an artifact like Joseph Trammell's freedom papers alongside other artifacts such as, you know, a cowrie shell found at Monticello dating back to the late-18th century, with just a couple of sentences of the ways in which cowrie shells were featured in the clothing, the jewelry, the practices of many sub-Saharan African and South Asian cultures for thousands of years, right? But the fact that this cowrie shell was found at Monticello during America's colonial period.

Deborah March: And then, you know, a third artifact, a good example might be Jesse Burke's violin, which is also digitally available through the Smithsonian. This is a violin that an enslaved person played during the 1850s and 1860s. And there is an accompanying quote from his descendant who remembered her father's skill, but also her memory of the impact of enslavement on the family's lineage. And so a simple image of the artifact, a name associated with a person whose life that artifact touched or was part of. And most importantly from my view, also choice, right? By offering three or four artifacts, it gives kids an opportunity to decide, what am I drawn to? What am I interested in? Also, what am I ready for? What do I have space for in my mind right now to kind of dig more deeply into?

Deborah March: And so a thinking routine like Connect, Extend, Challenge, can pair really well with this assortment of artifacts. How does this connect to what you already know about slavery and freedom? How does this extend your thinking about slavery and freedom? What challenges or puzzles does this create for you? You can imagine this taking place in a variety of digital formats, synchronous or asynchronous, to kind of find a way into the history of enslavement through these artifacts and try to imagine the ways in which these artifacts were part of the system, but also part of people's lives, speaking to their humanity and their resilience.

Deborah March: And a final approach that I'd love to talk about, so far we've talked a lot about kind of individuals, systems and the artifacts that speak to their everyday experience. What we haven't talked about is resistance. And I know that many scholars of the history of enslavement in the United States point out that a major gap is in trying to imagine enslaved people having agency, that that's part of affirming their humanity. You know, there's a learning experience that we offer teachers and we've actually done it with some teachers where we have individual index cards. You can imagine doing this digitally with individual boxes that have each word or phrase in it. And each of these boxes identify a different form of resistance. Some are violent, right? Revolts, uprising. Some are escape, self-emancipation. Some are about individual nonviolent resistance. Some are about everyday resistance: breaking tools, slowing the pace of work, faking illness. Some are about the ways in which culture might be a part of resistance and resilience. You know, maintaining African cultures and languages, religion, cooking, music and dance. There are also collective forms of resistance, like teaching other enslaved people to read. And so anyway, if you imagine all of these as separate separate cards or separate boxes, what we invite learners to do is to group them according to a grouping that makes sense in the learner's mind. How do these things go together? We've seen, you know, learners—adults and children—group them as, you know, violent or nonviolent, group versus individual. Adults use language like "overt or covert," "organized or day to day," you know? Pre-planned. Confrontation or culture. And students have, you know, developmentally-appropriate language to name some of the same things. Really, the opportunity here is in giving kids a chance to notice the many different ways that enslaved people resisted and preserved their own cultures through this brutal history.

Deborah March: And I would say, regardless of the approach that the individual educator chooses, I feel like it's important to emphasize backwards social emotional planning. What do we want students to be feeling by the end of this? There's an equity thought leader named Beverly Daniel Tatum that has been really important to guiding our work in cultural responsiveness. And I'd love to just read this quote from her. She says, "Learning to recognize cultural and institutional racism and other forms of inequity without also learning strategies to respond to them is a prescription for despair." And so, you know, of course, as educators, we neither want students to feel complacent or good about this history of injustice, of course, but we don't want to leave them despairing either. So where do we want them to be? And I think, you know, imagining one possible goal as empowering students as potential and current agents of social change, empowering them as actors in their communities and in their world, is a good starting point for thinking about where we want students to be by the end of their learning about the history of enslavement.

Meredith McCoy: Deborah, these are such phenomenal resources. And this idea of helping our students to both wrestle with hard history and also find ways out that are hopeful and action-driven, I can see so many of these tools being applicable in my own classroom, thinking about perspectives and systems, about artifacts, primary source materials. I'm particularly excited about this attention to resistance, and think that it's so important that we engage our students in thinking about ways of resistance that apply to the past and are also so relevant to our present moment. Erin, in thinking about the different tools that Deborah has offered to us, which resources or tools can you see being useful to you in your own teaching with your students online?

Erin Green: The first thing that I think I really want to make sure my kids get out of this is just language. Teaching our kids why we say "enslaved people" instead of "slaves," which for us who are in these conversations all the time seems so basic. To kids and to their parents who maybe are not engaged in these conversations, I think that's huge. To just start with language, and how do we talk about this hard history. And I think that is a—just the initial building block towards affirming human dignity. And then with that, I've also really been thinking about this idea of the system and also individuals and giving both of those stories and both of those realities a lot of weight. In my own classroom, I would love to do this, specifically looking at Ona Judge, who was enslaved by the Washingtons. Pairing that with the infographic that Deborah shared, it just seems like a beautiful way for my young students to be able to see this is a story of a person, and this is also a story of a system. And just that infographic in this distance-learning atmosphere, I feel okay as a teacher giving my students that to look at in a space where they might be at home by themselves, and they might not have an adult there who's going to walk through this with them.

Erin Green: Because I think I mentioned this earlier, but a lot of what I'm doing right now is asynchronous learning. Like, we're not all logged in at the same time. And then I think continuing the conversation afterwards to empower students as change agents, and to harp on this idea of resistance today. I think that looking at the idea of reparations, like, what does this look like today in the sense of reparations? And this is where it's hard because I'm not physically in the classroom with them, because usually it would be such a larger conversation of, you know, slavery didn't end at the end of the Civil War. How has slavery transformed and evolved? That's the conversation that I would want to have in the classroom, and I'm grappling still with how to have that conversation from a distance. But I do think that talking about what's happening today, what's needed to be done today, and how can we engage in that resistance in that fight today in 2020 is something that I would want to end this unit on and to have my students walk away with this understanding that there's still work to be done to fight the system.

Meredith McCoy: Erin and Deborah, thank you both so much for allowing us to learn from you as you're learning from each other.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That was awesome.

Meredith McCoy: It was awesome, yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That was great.

Erin Green: Thank you so much.

Deborah March: Thank you.

Meredith McCoy: Erin, I look forward to hearing about your students' response to the unit once it's done. And Deborah, thank you so much for your work developing those materials and sharing them with us today.

Deborah March: Take care.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks.

Erin Green: Bye.

Meredith McCoy: Thanks y'all.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm so glad Erin asked that question, but of course, not everybody who is interested and wants to teach these difficult subjects and wants to teach hard history and wants to talk about slavery in the classroom is a social studies teacher. We received a call from Justin Aion in western Pennsylvania, and Justin teaches math to middle and high school students outside of Pittsburgh, PA. And here's what he wanted to know.

Justin Aion: As a math teacher, not a history or English teacher, I try to incorporate as much social justice into my math class as I can, but it's incredibly easy for teachers and administrators to talk about how mathematics is not a political subject. It is a political subject from the way that we decide which topics we're going to teach and which kinds of mathematics history we're looking at. I was wondering if you could address how non-social studies, literature, English teachers could tackle some of these topics in their classrooms as well, especially when we're told simply to teach to the standards which do not include social justice or slavery. Thank you so much.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We thought this was a great question and reached out to Justin. So he's joining us here now. Justin, how you doing, man?

Justin Aion: I'm doing very well, sir. And how about you?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm making things happen. We're here, we're excited. We're really thankful for your question and the work that you do. How are your students? How are you doing right now under these new conditions?

Justin Aion: The district that I'm working for recently is an adjudicated residential school. So at the moment we are all laid off. So my teaching has been really helping with my own kids as they try to navigate this landscape through distance learning for elementary.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Man, I'm really sorry to hear that. And hopefully the district, as many other districts, especially for that population, will realize we have we cannot lay off teachers. But you know, let me ask you this: What ways have you tried in the past to incorporate hard history with your students and in your classrooms?

Justin Aion: So there are a lot of aspects of social justice that I've been able to pull into my classroom. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has set out a whole bunch of guidelines and ways to advise on how to incorporate those into class, and that's been really helpful as sort of a guide for moving forward. In my own class, we have a tendency to talk about specifically things like media literacy. When a graph pops up in the news, when statistics pop up in the news, we talk about what informs the decisions that were made to create that study. What kinds of inherent biases might already be there?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know Justin, when we received your initial question and now hearing what you're wrestling with in terms of teaching media literacy, I immediately thought of a wonderful teacher and a friend, Liz Kleinrock, and reached out to her because I know she has some wonderful insights into this very issue. Liz, of course, is an anti-bias anti-racism educator and consultant based out in L.A., California. Liz was in the classroom for 10 years and now works with educators across the country. I had the chance to meet Liz in 2018 when she received the Teaching Tolerance Award for Excellence in Teaching. And Liz over the years has developed some really wonderful resources, techniques and practices for addressing equity and inclusion, talking and teaching about social justice across grades and subject areas. So we're really glad that Liz was available and made some time to join us on this episode. Liz, welcome. How are you doing?

Liz Kleinrock: Hey, I'm doing okay. Every day is a little bit different, but happy to be here today and happy to be talking to all of you. Thanks for having me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No. Thanks so much for joining. And you're absolutely right, it's crazy because on the one hand, every day seems like the same, but every day is so different, especially when you just think about just what life was like a few weeks ago.

Liz Kleinrock: Right? It's pretty wild.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No, it is. You heard Justin, and Justin was talking about ways to incorporate teaching about social justice and social justice issues in the classroom for teachers who are not teaching social studies. What advice and what experiences have you had and developed that might be helpful for Justin and others who are facing the same issue?

Liz Kleinrock: This is actually a really common question, thinking about weaving in social justice issues or teaching from an anti-bias, anti-racist perspective might seem a little bit more manageable than if you're just responsible for a subject like math or science that have been deemed to be more objective or neutral. But that really isn't the case at all. But what I try to break down for educators is that this is like a lens through which you teach. It's a pedagogy. It's not a particular strategy. It's not one specific lesson or unit. And the way that I try to explain it is you have your how you're teaching, your pedagogy, and then you also have what you're teaching. So looking at your content. But both of these things need to be working in alignment.

Liz Kleinrock: One of the earliest activities I'll do with my kids is ask them to draw a picture of what they think a mathematician looks like. And it's really interesting to see some of the depictions that they come up with that typically look very, like, Albert Einstein-esque, and talking about why that is and where we get those ideas from. I think a lot about how I can incorporate culturally-responsive practices and that lens, and thinking about assumptions that I have been taught or have learned and need to unlearn about how my Black students do in math, Asian students, boys, girls, students with disabilities, emerging bilingual students, and also being just very aware of how those biases might impact the way that I communicate with them and interact with them in a math classroom. So like, in an elementary school classroom, one example that I have shared in the past is in fourth grade, we have a lot of standards around multi-digit multiplication. So I wanted my students to look at the cost of living in a very expensive city like Los Angeles, look at base like minimum wage rates and average rents, and have them figure out how do you calculate a budget, and what does it actually mean for a person to be able to afford to live in a place like this? So, yeah, just some examples to get started. Different ways to incorporate things like averages or graphing and fractions by looking at topics like voting rights or food deserts, about like gender and racial inequality of pay scales.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I love this idea of connecting and being purposeful in thinking about how you are teaching and aligning that with what you are teaching. And as I was listening to you, two things really leaped out. And Justin, I would love to get your response to it. One, how purposeful you, Liz, are in terms of thinking about who your students are, where they're coming from and what their life experiences are. But then also what the context of the world is in which they are living. In other words, using examples to teach that reflect the end goal of equity and inclusion. So not just about sort of the insular lives perhaps, but about the broader life experiences of those whose lives may look different from them. Justin, what do you think? How might that play out in your classroom with your students?

Justin Aion: Well, so I think that's a really important idea. And for myself as a teacher, I am much less concerned about the content than I am about the relationships that I build with my students. So going back to what was said about how you teach, in addition to what you teach, I love the idea of using fractions to talk about voting rights, to talk about food deserts and access to voting, things along those lines, but also just sort of figuring out how to interact with students who have had vastly different life experiences than my own.

Meredith McCoy: Liz, I'm wondering if you have any other specific examples that teachers can look to or engage in their own practice, especially right now that so many teachers are having to pivot to online learning.

Liz Kleinrock: Yeah, absolutely. Justin mentioned NCTM providing a lot of resources right now for educators in this state of distance teaching that's going on. I know educators José Vilson and Marian Dingle just did a webinar that's recorded on their website about equity in mathematics during this time. I also really love the website Radical Math, which is mainly geared towards, like, middle and high school. So Justin, like, that would probably be, like, an interesting fit for you. And the organization Rethinking Schools has a text called “Rethinking Mathematics,” where actually, I got a lot of ideas about how to be able to implement this type of mathematics in my classroom.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah, I think so much of the kind of culturally-responsive or culturally-sustaining pedagogies that both of you were talking about has to do with relationship building. So how do you continue to build those kind of meaningful relationships, looking ahead to the start of a new school year with a new group of students, when you aren't getting that kind of one-on-one face time with your kids?

Justin Aion: I think for me, ideally what I would like to do is to set up one-on-one time with those kids, or even in small groups. So this idea of, you know, every week for this 15-minute group, you can keep that in your schedule. This is when we're going to have our small group meeting so that we can have those face-to-face discussions, we can build at least some semblance of a relationship. And it's not overtaxing if a student is unable to make that time, then being flexible with the timeframe where they can attend. Trying to integrate those standards while still being aware of the drastically different lives that our students have to be having right now, as opposed to the traditional schooling model, which even then didn't work for many of our kids.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah. I mean, I think in some ways, the coronavirus and the global pandemic situation is forcing us as educators to walk the walk of this social justice-oriented teaching that we've always said that we're doing and that many of us practice in our classrooms. And it's both an opportunity and a requirement in this time that we attend to our students' whole lives and find ways to support them in their full selves. We can't just think that, oh, we're going to drop in and do this teaching hard history and then log off of our computers at the end of the day. And I know as a former middle school teacher that our job doesn't stop at 5:00. Our job never stops at the end of the day. We're always thinking about our kids. And I think in this time, that we are so in tune with all of the facets of our kids' lives that need supporting at this moment. Liz, I wonder if you could speak to that, about how to think about the sort of holistic needs of supporting our students during the coronavirus?

Liz Kleinrock: Yeah. I mean, relationship building has been brought up a couple of times, and I really think that any foundation of teaching, whether it's distance learning or if you're physically in the same place, really comes back to knowing your students, allowing them to know you as a human, getting to know them, getting to know how they see themselves. And thinking about even in terms of teaching mathematics, one of the earliest questions I'll always ask my students is just how do you feel about math? How do you feel about any particular subject? What are things that you're really proud of being able to accomplish on your own, and what are things that you still need a little bit more support? I hope that people can look at this opportunity as a chance to kind of redefine what normal is, and understand and recognize that a lot of the traditional aspects of how math was taught and the way that we approached teaching certain subjects with our students wasn't working when we were all in the same place and certainly isn't working when we're physically distant from each other. So hopefully we can take this opportunity to rewrite some of that.

Meredith McCoy: So as we think about teaching STEM in the time of the coronavirus, it's also really important to think about how we are helping our students continue to learn science. And one resource that I've been pointing people towards is Learning in Places, which is a resource from Anishnabe educator Megan Bang. And Learning in Places offers lesson plans for teachers and families to think about how to ground students in place, learning in place ecologically and learning in place historically. So thinking about the significance of place. And this is coming from an Indigenous way of knowing and Anishnabe etymologies, these lesson plans are available and applicable to non-native students as well. Liz, how are you thinking about science in this time of distance learning?

Liz Kleinrock: In my practice, I've thought a lot about how both science and math have been used as weapons to uphold pillars of white supremacy, to uphold beliefs of racial superiority, and trying to also, like, reclaim those tools to show students how we can begin to push back and dismantle them using science and math. Ways that I've incorporated this in the past is just being very intentional about whose knowledge has been validated. If you look at the discoveries of European scientists or explorers, knowing that they actually weren't the first people in certain places, were not the first to quote-unquote "discover" anything, but why did they also receive the credit, and why is history written from that perspective? Why are science textbooks written from that perspective?

Liz Kleinrock: I've also used science to tackle aspects of environmentalism and climate justice. In my classroom, my students and I learned about, like, the Standing Rock protests, you know, water in Flint, Michigan, looking at the proximity of communities of Black and brown folks to toxic waste sites, places that are hazardous to one's health. And really showing them how science and racial justice are very, very strongly interconnected.

Justin Aion: If we have the time, I'd like to maybe sort of address the other half of my question, which was looking at convincing colleagues and administration that this is a topic that needs to be addressed not just in social studies and English, but also in math and science, in art, in all of the other subjects as well.

Meredith McCoy: Liz, do you have some thoughts about how teachers working in the STEM fields might be able to engage in conversation with their colleagues and administrators about the importance of this topic?

Liz Kleinrock: Sure. I think that there's kind of this ridiculous myth that anti-bias, anti-racist teaching or teaching from, like, a culturally-responsive perspective is somehow only benefiting students of the global majority. But really, this type of work benefits everybody. And I don't think of it as a zero-sum game. It's possible to handle your standards, it's possible to do the things that you need to do within your classroom or within your curriculum, but still teach from this perspective. I think that in any situation, there are going to be people who are going to be onboard and they're going to be people who aren't. And quite frankly, we do not have the time to wait around for everybody to buy into this and understand its importance. If you are working with a school administrator who might be particularly resistant, I think sitting down and having the conversation about why they're resistant is going to be hopefully the most productive first step that you can take. Show them a lesson plan, show them resources and texts, invite them into watch you teach and show the engagement of your students.

Liz Kleinrock: But I think also just being able to recognize what is under your control versus what you can't and that teachers in their own classrooms, even if you're working with an administration that is really resistant, there are small decisions that you can make every day. These, like, micro-disruptions. My friend Tamara Russell uses that term a lot in thinking about how you can kind of reclaim that sense of autonomy in your classroom, if it's the text that you're teaching or the topic that you're engaging your students on, but still having the standard on your wall. So if your administrator comes into the classroom, you're able to point out and say, "This is what we're working on today. This is the means of how we're achieving that."

Meredith McCoy: Justin, any final thoughts or resources that you would like to share?

Justin Aion: Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate being able to have this discussion about content beyond social studies and English. Specifically for math teachers, I would also like to throw out there Catalyzing Change in High School Mathematics. It is a book from NCTM on initiating critical conversations. It has been an incredible resource on how to start those discussions, not just with your students, but also with colleagues and administrators. And being able to see the importance of it and how to have those discussions in a meaningful and sustainable way.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Justin, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate you sharing your question and your experiences. And Liz, thanks so much for jumping on and sharing your insights, observations and expertise. I always learn so much any time I'm in your presence.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah. Really excellent insights, Liz, And thank you, Justin, so much for your question. Awesome. Thank you both so much for the work that you're doing, and for taking some time to hang out with us today. We really appreciate you.

Justin Aion: Thank you so much for having us. I really appreciate it.

Liz Kleinrock: Yeah, thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bye-bye. Be safe. Be well, everyone.

Meredith McCoy: Take care.

Justin Aion: You too.

Liz Kleinrock: Bye.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Let's listen to some of the other voicemails we received from teachers. This message is from Yolanda Fintak. Yolanda is a violence prevention specialist who works with middle school students.

Yolanda Fintak: I teach social skills and skills that help students understand how to get along without using or resorting to violence. We do specifically talk about subject matter around race, and how it relates to their conversations and their communication and their interaction with one another. The question that I guess I would have is, what is the best way to introduce this kind of hard teaching to sixth-grade students that may not have the background of history coming from elementary to middle school. I want to kind of start there and then see where we can go with moving up through grade sevens and eighth grade. Thank you.

Meredith McCoy: Laying a good foundation for new middle schoolers is such a good question. While students may not have a strong background in history itself, they do have their lived experiences. And so thinking about the way the world works today might be a great way to help them start thinking about the past, as you make direct connections between the long history of enslavement and contemporary ramifications for marginalized communities.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's also important to recognize that students, even at this age, certainly and younger even, have a sense of fairness, have a sense of right and wrong, have a sense of justice and injustice. And so, talking about those core human principles and societal principles, I think is also a way to begin to develop a framework for understanding the injustice that is connected to this long era of American history.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We also heard from teachers who were nervous because hard history was already controversial in their school. And now that their lessons are on video, they feel even more vulnerable. And they want to know what they can do, especially since they also can't really rely on textbooks which tend to offer a traditional narrative of the American past.

Meredith McCoy: And so I reached out to social studies scholars Sarah Shear and Noreen Rodriguez. They suggested having students critically engage the textbook and engage in an inquiry lesson about whose perspectives are being represented in the text? Whose perspectives are missing and should be included to help us better understand the issue? And then students can do their own research online to find those voices that are missing from the text, that speak to different experiences. And then students can create their own questions and engage in inquiry together to answer them. They might ask, "Who wrote the textbook?" And what that says about why certain voices are represented. And where else could you find more information, and why is that additional finding of information so important? They're able to pursue answers in a way that is student-derived, rather than having to come explicitly from teachers.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There is an opportunity and real value in just letting the history speak for itself.

Meredith McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And you allow the students, you create an opportunity for them to do research and you let the primary sources do the teaching. And that shifts the burden of criticism and critique off of you as the teacher. I didn't say I wasn't a big fan of George Washington, the people he was enslaving said that.

Meredith McCoy: Right. And, you know, we also had a few callers who asked about supporting and engaging parents and family members who are now during the pandemic involved in helping their students learn about hard history. So here's a message that we got from Christie, who teaches sixth-grade social studies.

Christie Nold: As many of us know, a lot of the young people in our lives are surrounded by caring adults, trying to help navigate their curriculum alongside them. What resources exist for the adults in our students' lives that can help as they navigate hard history, in a way they—the adults—might not have learned it themselves? Thanks.

Meredith McCoy: And now let's listen to Marley who called us from Birmingham, Alabama.

Marley Davis: Hi. I am looking for some resources to talk to my little brother about the history of slavery that explains how the history of enslavement continues to impact our present in a way that he can understand and also explore for himself. Thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Unlike any time before, parents and family members and caregivers are thrust into this more central role in the education of students, of young people, of children. And when it comes to teaching difficult histories, difficult subjects, hard history, you know, what do you do and how do you do it? Thankfully, Teaching Tolerance has been doing some work around this very issue.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah, Hasan, you know, I think about the frameworks as a really good place to start here, because they do offer so many supplementary resources: books and videos and things that parents and students can engage with together. It's okay to tell our younger siblings and nieces and nephews and children that we don't always have all the answers. So saying things like, "You know, I wasn't taught this, but let's go learn about it together," can model some of that knowledge-seeking behavior that we want students to develop as they become life-long learners themselves.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What I would actually start with are the key concept videos that are based on the framework. There's about 10 of them. They're only a couple minutes long each. Key issues to touch upon when thinking and talking to children and teaching children and ourselves about the history of American slavery. That really is, I think, a great place to begin.

Meredith McCoy: I also want us to all just take a breath and think about what is actually possible, and what we should actually be spending all of our attention and energy on. So there was an article this week from Dr. Rachel Mahmood in the Teaching Tolerance magazine. And in her article, she says, "Instead of expecting caregivers to become teachers, educators can complement family engagement by partnering with caregivers to address childrens' social and emotional needs. For families, educators can be the person who checks in on their child." So as we think about the relationship between caregivers and teachers at this moment, part of this is about reworking what each of our roles are and how we work together to make sure that our young students are taken care of holistically.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Here you have to, if possible, be even more engaged at a different and deeper level than before. I love this idea of this is looking at the upside as an opportunity to model a shared kind of learning that, in many instances many parents haven't had time to do before.

Meredith McCoy: We know also that some parents are stretched to the breaking point already. And the idea of taking this on, this additional role of co-learning with their kids may feel just untenable. And so I just want to emphasize that this is not adding anything on; the same time that you're already spending with the children in your household, figuring out how to get them to do their assignments, this is just a different way of approaching it. So instead of putting the pressure on yourself to already have all the answers, just be open that we don't all have all the answers all the time, and sometimes we have to find ways of finding those answers together.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I love this idea of what you were talking about with the modeling sort of shared learning. And for me it's not sort of deep social studies, because I can talk to my nine-year-old daughter Asha, who's in the fourth grade about slavery, and we're doing these side readings on the African-American experience and social justice, but I'm also trying to do fourth-grade math. And I'm bumping up against this, "All right. I don't know, how do we do this again? And why are they assigning this now?" And so I've seen being able to confess that, to be somewhat empowering to my daughter once she got past that sort of quizzical like, "Wait, you really don't?" I mean, she literally told me, "But this is the fourth grade!" And I was like, "Yes, I know it's the fourth grade, and I'm no longer in the fourth grade. Work with me. We'll figure it out." And so—but we sort of smiled and laughed about it. She came to this realization, and then we figured it out. It's not easy by any stretch, and we have to get comfortable with doing things that we are uncomfortable doing, but that's the whole project that we've undertaken here in the realm of hard history. And so it's an extension of the same. And this too shall pass. We'll get through it, and I'll gladly hand them back to their teachers at some point with more than a wink and a nod, but a big hug and saying, "Thank you for doing what you do." But in the interim, I think it is about taking cues from those who do it so well, and just trying to hang in there and using it as an opportunity to model a different kind of learning.

Meredith McCoy: So to all of the teachers and caregivers who are supporting our young learners from long distance or inside your own home, know that we see you and you're doing a great job. We know it's hard right now, but we can do this together. Thank you so much to all of the educators who left us messages and participated in this episode. We have all benefited from your questions, your experiences and your expertise. So hang in there, take care of yourselves and take care of each other.

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: And to find resources mentioned during this episode, visit Tolerance.org/podcasts. This podcast is produced by Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer, with additional support from Barrett Golding. Gabriel Smith provides content guidance. And Kate Shuster is our executive producer.

Meredith McCoy: Our theme music 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: I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University.

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

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

 

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Transcript

Meredith McCoy: Hey, Hasan.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Hey, Meredith. It’s good to hear from you. How’re you holding up over there with all that’s going on? 

Meredith McCoy: You know, we’re week one into teaching in our new term. We’re on trimesters here at Carleton. You know, a new group of students. They seem to be coping alright. We’re just… we’re going to get through it together. How’s stuff going for you?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Pretty good. We’re on semesters, so we sort of came back from an extended Spring Break.

Meredith McCoy: Mmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I’ve really been amazed at how well the students have adjusted. 

Meredith McCoy: Oh, that’s good.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It is good! But I’m not so much worried about them, Meredith, as I am about me! ‘Cause fourth-grade math is about to kill me!

Meredith McCoy: Oh no!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But you know, with a little practice, I boost my confidence. And I’ll get through this with my girls. It too shall pass, and we will get past it.  

Meredith McCoy: Oh, I’m sending you good vibes. Good luck.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I need all of it, all of it. So hey, what do you say? You want to get started?

Meredith McCoy: Yeah, yeah. Let’s do it. Let me head upstairs.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Alright, I’ll find a quiet corner, too.  

Okay, close the door for me, Layla? And tell your mother to hang up the phone, stop talking so loud?

Daughter: What phone?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Tell her to stop talking so loud. 

Meredith McCoy: Y’all better cut that.

He’s going to get in trouble if you leave that in the audio.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: “Tell your mother, I said…” 

Meredith McCoy: Good luck.

I’m Meredith McCoy

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries. And this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

Meredith McCoy: A special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Hey Meredith, do you mind if we turn off the theme song now. 

Meredith McCoy: No, that’s okay. I really do like it, though. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is such a different time. And this isn’t a normal episode. 

Meredith McCoy: Absolutely. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: With all of the changes that each of us are facing right now, we’ve decided to shift gears with our podcast too. It’s time to come together. So we were thinking: what if we do a call-in show? We could talk to some of our listeners—talk to you—to find out how you’re doing, and to ask how you’re using the framework to teach about slavery, and what we could actually do to help you out.

Meredith McCoy: So we had our team set up a number where you can leave a voicemail for us. You can call, tell us what subject you teach and what you want to talk about. Because we want to hear from you – the teachers and educators in our audience. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Exactly. We want you to share your perspectives, your experiences, your ideas, and the challenges that you are facing as you endeavor to teach hard history accurately and effectively. So if you can spare a moment, all you have to do is pick up the phone and dial 1-888-59-STORY. That’s 888-597-8679.

Meredith McCoy: So in the next episode, we’ll share your messages, address your questions, and have some of you on for an in-person conversation with us. Hasan, what was that number again?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That’s 1-888-59-STORY. And here’s our Executive Producer Kate Shuster calling in, so you can hear what that sounds like:

Kate Shuster: Hey, Meredith. Hey, Hasan. It’s Kate Shuster, calling from Montgomery, Alabama. Everything is tough right now. But I’m doing okay, and I’m glad that y’all are too. I’m spending quarantine doing chores I never usually would, like cleaning the windows. And, that’s given me a better view of my cats trying to hunt lizards outside. 

I am super excited that you’re doing a call-in show. I think that our listeners are really going to want to share their stories and ask questions. And I am thrilled to hear what they have to say! I feel like educators are doing extraordinary things in these extraordinary times. I’m just real thankful that you’re here to support them. We’re educators. We’re used to challenges. We’re going to get through this together and come out better on the other side. That’s all I have to say, and you know how to get in touch with me. Good luck!

Meredith McCoy: Thanks, Kate. That’s so true. Look, we know that everyone is overwhelmed right now. As teachers, we are struggling to figure out how to teach online, how our students can access lessons, how to teach kids who might be overwhelmed with additional home responsibilities. And that’s even if our students have adequate access to technology and resources at home, let alone how we can support students with unstable housing right now. So in the call-in episode we will also address distance-teaching challenges and specific resources for teaching hard history that you can plug-in to the new digital formats we’re all adjusting to right now.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Like so many things, the history of American slavery might seem like the last thing that anyone wants to think about. But slavery’s long-lasting legacy helps explain the painful reality that African Americans and Native Nations are being hit disproportionately hard by this pandemic. And as we’ve heard from a lot of educators, this is also a time for thinking about what comes next. And whether you work with elementary, middle or high school students—whether you teach Social Studies or English Language Arts—the coming months are also a time for planning and reflection on how to bring new and interesting content into our lessons. 

Meredith McCoy: So as you’re looking back over the last year, what new topics related to the history of American slavery have you tried to teach in your classes? And how did your students respond? Where have you found ways to incorporate Indigeneous enslavement into your existing lessons and learning goals? Are there any concerns that are standing in the way of trying something out? And have you found successful strategies for engaging parents and other teachers in this content? 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: How are you introducing your students to systemic concepts like labor and land theft, or racism? If you teach younger children in elementary school, what ways have you tried to introduce them to the history of slavery?  

Whatever you’re experiencing, you can be sure you’re not alone. And we are here to wrestle with these challenges together and learn from each other.

Meredith McCoy: So pick up the phone and give us a call. Most importantly, let us know how you’re doing. And then also tell us how teaching hard history has been going in your classes. Feel free to tell us a story about something that’s happened during a lesson. What are you hoping to incorporate in the future? And if you’ve encountered problems that you’d like some help thinking about, let us know! Tell us about needs that you see or resources that would be helpful for you. And if you’re excited and proud of things you’ve tried with your students, tell us about those, too. And Hasan, how do they do that again?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Just give us a call at 1-888-59-STORY. You can find that number in the episode description. Or, if you’re tech-savvy, you can record a voice memo on your smartphone and email us a message at lfjpodcasts@splcenter.org. However, you want to reach out is fine by us. The important thing is that you get in touch. We genuinely want to hear from you.

We will be taking calls and emails throughout the week. So be sure to contact us by the end of the day on Sunday, April 19th. 

Meredith McCoy: But you don’t have to wait. Go ahead and pick up the phone and call us now. And with that, shall we wrap this up?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Let’s do it.

Teaching Hard History: American Slavery 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. This special series provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. You can find us online at learningforjustice.org.

Meredith McCoy: Our production team—Shea Shackelford, Russell Gragg, Barrett Golding, Gabriel Smith and Kate Shuster—deeply, deeply appreciate your patience as we work out the technical kinks of recording this podcast now that everyone is sheltering in place. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And to all of you listening, we want to say thank you for being a part of this with us. Along with everyone at Teaching Tolerance, we are thinking about you during this difficult time. And we are so excited to talk with you in our upcoming episode.

Meredith McCoy: Stay safe y’all. 

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

 

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Transcript

Meredith McCoy: Here at Teaching Hard History, we know that our classrooms are in a state of a rapid and unforeseen change. We know that for many this is a time of confusion, apprehension, and uncertainty. And yet, we also know that some parts of life seem to keep moving. Our students are still looking to us for learning in whatever form that learning might be taking place. We want to continue to support you as best we can, and we'll continue to provide these episodes so that you can have resources that might be helpful to you, especially as you pivot to online and distance learning. Bear with us as we work out the logistics of producing these episodes while we and our guests are increasingly isolated, and we will continue to provide these episodes for you and your students. Now more than ever is the time to turn to our professional learning communities and support each other. I and the rest of the Teaching Hard History team are sending out to all of you best wishes for health and well-being.

Today, we're taking on a particularly challenging topic in our coverage of the hard history of America slavery, indigenous enslavement of African and African-descended peoples. This is a fraught subject, one that can seem incredibly complicated and dangerous. Native people are already so often stereotyped as violent, and this seems to add fodder to an inaccurate and incredibly damaging narrative. And yet, as scholar Tiya Miles reminds us in a recent interview with Teaching Tolerance magazine, Native American history can and should be treated with the same degree of nuance with which we now treat US history.

This topic is not one we enter into lightly. We must tell these stories carefully with an eye to the economic and social pressures native people faced as settlers increasingly encroached upon and forcibly evicted native people from their homelands. As we tell this story, Miles offers us guidance, which I'll quote at length. She says, "Teaching the history of indigenous enslavement of others is indeed a challenging task, especially given concerns that some educators may feel about preexisting stereotypes of Native Americans as savage and about exposing historically oppressed and marginalized groups to further scrutiny. However, no population is exempt from the complexities of being human or the complexities of organizing societies that conceive and commit atrocities. To deny the ability of any people to do terrible things, to harm others, or to fail expressed ideals would be a denial of their membership in the human family."

These nuances are important to keep in mind as we think about how to teach not just the history of how settlers enslaved native people but also how native people enslaved others. We're talking about a relatively small number of native people in the 19th century who had the economic capital to hold others in bondage. This is a story that must be approached with nuance, specificity, and a lot of context. And it's a story that must be told if we're going to understand the full hard history of American enslavement.

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. In our second season, we're 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 America slavery.

When we think about Indian removal, we might not always think about its relationship to the institution of slavery. But the United States is built both on its theft of indigenous lands and its exploitation of enslaved people for their labor. In this episode, we're going to talk with historian Nakia Parker about the impact of removal on the expansion of enslavement. Dr. Parker sheds light on the complicated context in which some indigenous people participated in enslavement. And throughout or conversation, she shares several helpful stories and resources that you can use with your students. I'm so glad you can join us.

Nakia, welcome to Teaching Hard History. We are so glad that you're here with us.

Nakia Parker: Thank you for the invitation.

Meredith McCoy: So today we're going to be talking about how indigenous people sometimes participated in the institution of chattel slavery. As we move into today's episode, what are some key things that you think teachers should prepare themselves to be able to discuss with their students?

Nakia Parker: I think that teachers should be prepared to discuss, first of all, how the arrival of Europeans, and invasion on native land, and colonialism affected indigenous captivity practices as well as how native nations became involved in the enslavement of African-Americans. And another major point to remember that teachers can pass on to their students is that Indian removal and slavery are not separate, unrelated events. They're intertwined. So the expansion of slavery in the Deep South does not happen without Indian removal.

Another thing that's important for teachers to remember is that native history during this time period, 19th century America Indian history, is very important to understanding the history of the US South, to understanding the expansion of slavery, and also important to teaching slavery in the 19th century and how it developed to our students. We have to include aspects of America Indian history like Indian removal.

Then, another important thing to remember is that historical actors often have to make hard choices. And systems of oppression often overlap one another, and we'll definitely see that in our discussion when we look at how native people handled Indian removal and how native slaveholders brought the institution westward to Indian territory as well as in our discussion of freed people's rights.

Meredith McCoy: I'm excited to talk with you about these things. Could you start just by telling our listeners a little bit about you, what you study, and how you came to be studying it?

Nakia Parker: Sure. Broadly, I'm a historian of 19th century African-American and American Indian history, US slavery, and also gender enslavery. But more specifically, I study the lives of enslaved and free people of African and Afro-native descent and the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. I look at their lives during the removal period of the 1830s after the passage of the Indian Removal Act and follow their experiences into resettlement in Indian territory, what we now know as present day Oklahoma, during the 19th century.

So how I became interested in this research, I was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Newpaltz. I took a class of the American Civil War and our final assignment was to do a research paper on any topic that we chose about the Civil War and I decided that I would write about American Indian participation and the conflict. I assumed that these two groups were likely comrades in struggles against white supremacy and oppression. I reasoned that most native people must have fought for the Union, certainly they had to be on the side of abolitionist and protected enslaved people and even helped them to get to freedom. And indeed I did find examples of protection and cooperation between native people and African-American people. I even found examples of native people who fought on the side of the Union. But image my surprised when my professor told me that there were some nations that did side with the Confederacy, in particular, five major nations who had homelands in the southeast. The Creek, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Seminole all allied with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Then, my shock deepened when my professor told me that some native people enslaved African-Americans and that the last general to surrender in the Civil War was a Cherokee general, Stan Watie. So this rattled me, really, to learn that some native people participated in the institution of chattel slavery. And by chattel slavery I mean people as property. People could be bought, sold, insured, willed. This was the institution of slavery in the United States. It certainly was a history that I didn't learn from my parents, I didn't learn at school, and certainly not in the dominant narrative, the dominant narrative in American popular memory, that there were some native people that participated in the institution.

Meredith McCoy: Given what you're describing, how did settler encroachment and other pressures for social change influence how indigenous people were thinking about enslavement?

Nakia Parker: Well, for a brief time after Europeans arrived and invaded native soil, some white colonizers enslaved native people, particularly women and children. So native people for a time worked alongside people of African descent in places like Virginia and South Carolina. African people and native peoples were enslaved together. They intermarried. They even rebelled against enslavement together. But by the mid 17th century, the dynamic start to change. Enslaved Africans become the preferred laborers, especially with the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade. Some European nations, like England, Spain, France, they desired to form alliances with native people, and it's not a good political strategy to enslave allies.

So some native societies, especially nations in the southeast, like the Chickasaw and Choctaw, they're keenly aware of these economics and social dynamics that are happening and these different dimensions of European settler societies and their slaveholding practices and they begin to participate in slave catching, first by trading native enemies to the British and French, and then later they become involved in capturing enslaved African-Americans when the enslavement of African-Americans becomes entrenched in colonial settler societies.

So by the late 18th, early 19th century, some native people in the southeast graduate from becoming slave catchers to actually enslaving African-Americans and people of African descent. They become wealthy sometimes by participating in the institution. But they see enslavement of African-Americans as a way to secure or maintain a semblance of political autonomy, of economic autonomy while also pursuing self-interested economic and political goals. They're trying to combat another form of oppression, which is settler colonialism.

Meredith McCoy: Teachers, particular teachers working the southeast, may have come across this term of the five tribes or the five civilized tribes in their curricular materials. Could you explain who that's referring to?

Nakia Parker: Yes, absolutely, because there are over 600 native nations in the United States, and we're referring to in particular five major nations that had ancestral homelands in the southeast that were removed westward. These nations are the Cherokee, the Creek, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole. Their homelands were originally east of the Mississippi in states such as North Carolina and Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida. Teachers may be familiar with the term the five civilized tribes, and that was a term used to describe these nations because these were five nations that particularly adopted certain white European and American norms, such as written constitutions, governing structures, written language, gender norms, Christianity, as well as, for some native people, the adoption of enslavement practices, enslaving African-Americans as well.

Meredith McCoy: So in your thinking about enslavement in these five nations, how does that adoption of chattel slavery compare with forms of captivity that these nations might've practiced prior to their interactions with Europeans?

Nakia Parker: Many native societies engaged in captivity practices for centuries prior to European invasion. But Indian captivity practices and slavery was not hereditary, it wasn't unchangeable, and it wasn't based on any notion of racial superiority. So what do I mean by that. In other words, you weren't born into slavery. You weren't considered a slave for life. Captivity didn't mean that slavery was passed on or captivity was passed on from mother to child or was transgenerational. And it wasn't justified by the argument that one group of people were racially inferior and therefore were meant to be in slavery. Instead, captivity generally was a byproduct of war. It was a possible outcome for enemies who were on the losing side of a war.

Captives were often involved in political negotiations, and they also could be adopted as kin or family members into a tribe or clan to replace deceased relatives. For the captives who were not adopted, they remained outside of kinship networks, a permanent outsider in a socially marginally place, but there were limits to their subjugation. But, these practices start to transform with European invasion on native soil. There's increasing trade, and then there's the introduction of the colonial practice of racialized chattel slavery. So again, what I mean by chattel slavery is people as moveable property. And that was an introduction, a colonialist introduction, and it dramatically reshapes and adds a different dimension to indigenous captivity practices.

So when I teach this topic to my students, especially the part about native people being engaged and selling other native people as slaves to Europeans, to the British, to the French, sometimes they express confusion of that or they'll echo a sentiment and they'll saw, "Well, that means Indian people sold their own people." And I hear similar sentiments when I talk about the transatlantic slave trade. And when students find that some African people participated in the transatlantic slave trade, they'll say something similar. It was Africans selling their own people. But what I highlight to them is that we can't categorize native or African people as one homogenous group with similar backgrounds, with similar aims, cultures, even languages. It's really colonialism that introduces the idea to lump all native people or all people of African descent into one group.

And I tell them when we talk about this time period in history and we discuss the different European powers who vied for supremacy on native land, for the most part, we don't say the Europeans. We specify. We say the British had these interests, the French had these interests, the Spanish did, the Dutch did, the Swedes did. We realize that they had different goals, different political structures and societies. The same thing applies to native people. The Cherokee, the Seneca, Mohawk, the Choctaw, the Shawnee, they all had different goals, different societies, even languages. And the same things applies to African nations as well, such as Ghana, and Mali, and Songhai. And they're searching to combat and adjust to new threats against their sovereignty as their own distinct society and as their own distinct nation. So that's something that we need to remember when we teach indigenous captivity practices and participation in the enslavement of African-Americans that I think will help us to teach this difficult narrative.

Meredith McCoy: That attention to the diversity of native nations is so critical. And I think teachers have two opportunities here. One is to really deeply engage with the concept of sovereignty, which is native nations' inherent right to self-governance. And the other opportunity is to have students looking at the treaty documents themselves. Because as they have students looking at treaties between, let's say, the Choctaw Nation and the US government, they're able to see that the federal government is making these very calculated decisions about how to interact with specific native nations on the basis of what those native nations are arguing for and also what the US government's interests are in those areas.

Nakia Parker: Yes, I completely agree.

Meredith McCoy: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. 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's Nakia Parker.

I think it is a useful classroom tool to take a comparative approach to removal and understand how different nations experienced removal distinctly from one another and in that way to illustrate that removal was a content-wide phenomena. Teachers could think about what removal was like for the Navajo Nation compared to the different bands of the Potawatomi Nation compared to nations in the southeast. And by looking at those difference and experience, over time, they're able to help students understand, again, the diversity of native nations and that even removal, something that we tend to be exposed to in textbooks as just something that was experienced by the Cherokee Nation was actually a much more common phenomena.

Nakia Parker: I agree with that.

Meredith McCoy: There's a much more common policy.

Nakia Parker: Yeah, that's an excellent point, Meredith. Like you said, we tend to center the idea and the story of removal on the Cherokee, so imply in the southeast, and we need to remember there were Midwestern, people in the Midwestern United States that were also removed, like you said, the Potawatomi, the Shawnee, the Delaware as well were removed. One big idea that I want our listeners to take away today if nothing else is that you cannot teach the expansion of slavery in the 19th century United States without teaching Indian removal. They are not separate events. They are intertwined. One does not happen without the other. And I think one of the great tools to use in the classroom that I've used with my students is maps to explain that.

So I take two maps side by side. I show them a map of where the homelands of southeaster Indian nations are as of 1830, and they can see it's mostly the South, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana. And then I show them a map next to it of by 1850 a map of the largest concentrations of populations of enslaved African-Americans in the United States, and I ask them what similarities do they see and it comes to them almost right away, that where the largest population of enslaved African-Americans are in the United States is in these same homelands, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina. So it's a potent way to show how the expansion of slavery and Indian removal are intertwined.

Then I explain to them that most enslaved African-Americans and native people experience multiple forced migrations in their lifetime. And to think about this that at the same the domestic slave trade is transporting over 1 million African-Americans from the upper to the lower South. This federal policy of Indian removal is expelling thousands of American Indians from their homelands in the southeast and in the Midwest of the United States. These two forced migrations expulsions are happening simultaneously. So most of the time, we focus on these processes as separate rather than intertwined events. But in reality, Indian removal not only forces native people westward but it also facilitates the expansion of slavery in the Deep South.

Meredith McCoy: So Nakia, I wonder if you could explain a little bit more this idea of allotment and what that means and how perhaps the counting of enslaved people was a factor in how allotment worked in relation to removal.

Nakia Parker: While Indian removal expands the growth of slavery in the South, it also expands slavery westward because indigenous people who enslaved African-Americans could bring enslaved people to their new home in Indian territory. So though although aspects of removal negotiations with the federal government differed, provisions concerning the institution of slavery received similar treatment in the five nations. I particularly researched the Choctaw and Chickasaw so that is mostly who I will refer to today.

But, treaties and policies created to enforce Indian removal really accommodated, even maintained the institution of chattel slavery. So for example, both the Choctaw and Chickasaw removal treaties allotted private reservations of lands to native individuals and heads of families in Mississippi and Alabama until they were ready to move westward. Then at that time when they were ready to remove, the person could sell their section of land, their allotment, for money and/or buy what the government referred to as portable property, which was simply just a euphemism for enslaved people, enslaved African-Americans.

But even though treaties acknowledged the existence of slavery, federal government agents still had to work out the logistics, the physical logistics of bringing in slave people on the removal trail. So for a time period, removal agents even questioned whether enslaved people should even receive rations on the trek westward. Because they said, "Well, if they're property and not people, why should they receive food? Why should they receive blankets? Why should they receive anything to drink?" Federal officials finally decided that enslaved individuals would receive the same amount of rations as native people who were forced westward.

In addition, we can see in sources that even can be pulled up online that federal Indian agents added columns to removal roles to include the number of enslaved people traveling with a group. Some Indian agents even suggested that identifying physical characteristics of enslaved people should be listed on the removal roles just in case an enslaved person decided to liberate themselves from enslavement. Then they could be easily recaptured if they took notations of physical characteristics. We don't see that in any of the roles presently, but it was a suggestion offered by a federal official. So even though the federal government dispossessed native people of land, they still took extra precautions to protect investments in human property.

But, Indian removal also aggravated class distinctions in some native nations as well. So for example, if you're a wealthy slaveholder, you would have access to more allotment of land. Because one of the things, for example, that the Chickasaw removal treaty dictated was that if you received allotments of land according to the number of people in your household, and that included enslaved people. So if you had 10, 15, 20 enslaved people, you would receive a larger allotment of land that you could sell and get more enslaved people to remove west.

Some slaveholders who were wealthy and therefore had access to these kind of resources sent their enslaved people westward first to begin the process of insettlement. The enslaved people arrived at Indian territory, started cultivating the land, starting rebuilding homes. And as they labored, these native enslavers returned to their lands east of the Mississippi and they brought their family members to their new homes in Indian territory. For example, in the Chickasaw Nation, two members of a prominent slaveholding family named the Loves, they removed in this manner. So Benjamin Love, for example, sent for his wife and his children after he sent his enslaved people to Indian territory to start resettling the land. Then he sent his family. Another member of the Love family entrusted his son, Overton ... This was Henry Love. He entrusted his son Overton to bring 25 individuals that he enslaved. It was 11 men and 14 women. He sent Overton westward with these enslaved people before he came with the rest of his family.

So with the aid of enslaved workers, some native slaveholders, particularly wealthy, could rebuild their homes. They could continue a plantation, comfortable lifestyle that they had acquired before the federal government took their land and forced to Indian territory. But imagine if you were not a slaveholder or if you only had one or two enslaved people, as the majority of people in southeastern Indian nations did not enslave people or had very few enslaved people, then the economic strain of removal was even more devastating.

But in addition, Indian removal also brings economic benefits to white settlers in nearby areas, such as the state of Arkansas. Arkansas is a pivotal state to consider when we teach the history of Indian removal. Normally, it's a state we don't think of. We usually focus on Georgia. We focus on Mississippi and Alabama. But all five nations of the southeast had to cross Arkansas to get to Indian territory. Fort Smith and Little Rock were pivotal places, particular Little Rock, as far as a supply depot for Indian removal.

So the commissary general who was tasked with overseeing the physical logistics of Indian removal actually wrote to removal agents in Arkansas. For one group, there was a group of a thousand Choctaws who were about to pass through the region, and so he instructs agents to tell the nearby settlers to not plant cotton, to plant corn and raise cattle because these would be the rations that Choctaw people would need for removal and then they could sell it to them for exorbitant rates. In fact, he said, "Tell them to raise corn and cattle. Hold out every proper inducement for them to raise both in quantities sufficient to meet the expected demand." So this directive to white Arkansas settlers to plant corn, to raise cattle instead of cotton really demonstrates the profitability of Indian removal for the old southwest.

And indeed, just five years after the first wave of Choctaw forced migration, which occurred in 1831, Arkansas becomes a state in 1836. So no doubt the process of Indian removal contributed to this developed. It not only freed up land for white settlement but also Arkansas becomes this supply depot to finance Indian removal.

Meredith McCoy: For teachers who might be joining us from Arkansas, this information that Nakia is sharing with us fits really well into Arkansas history standards, particular for seventh grade which features a standard that says, "Students should be able to analyze the impact of geography on settlement and movement patterns over time using geographic representations and a variety of primary and secondary sources." And they cite specifically something that they refer to as involuntary migration, which we would certainly argue includes removal.

Nakia Parker: Absolutely.

Meredith McCoy: For Arkansas students in high school, there's a standard that asks that students will be able to evaluate intended and unintended consequences of public policies, which specifically includes Indian removal. Nakia, all of the things that you're describing here reveal the extent of calculation and logistical planning on behalf of the settler state in this expulsion, as you say, of indigenous peoples from their homelands. How can we help teachers and students understand the visceral experience of the horror that really was being on the trail and being removed?

Nakia Parker: I think it's important that we talk about and uncover as much as we can the voices of enslaved people and native people who experienced removal. A good place to start is the WPA Slave Narratives and an extension of the WPA Slave Narratives, which is called the Indian-Pioneer Papers. It was also a part of the 1930's Works Progress Administration's narratives. They're online on the University of Oklahoma's website, their Western History Collections website. It contains thousands of interviews, but some of them discuss removal, what families remembered about removal or stories that were passed down. Two in particular stick in my memory. One is of a woman Sarah Harlan who was a Choctaw woman who was forced to remove to Indian territory with her family and enslaved people a little later time in the 1840s. So this is also good in teaching students that Indian removal was not just a short period of time. Sometimes this extended for decades for some native societies and communities.

Sarah Harlan is forced to remove to the west in 1840s and she recalled the grief that occurred when a five-year-old enslaved boy died during the journey to the west. He was playing with other enslaved children on one of the wagons. So Sarah Harlan was a wealthy Choctaw woman, a slaveholder, so she could remove with more resources. Enslaved people, slave children were playing on one of her wagons. The little boy slipped and fell and the wheels accident ran over him and crushed his chest. Sarah went to the closest town that she could to receive medical attention but it was too late for the enslaved boy. The doctor could do nothing to save him and the boy died that evening. So Sarah is recalling this in her memoirs decades later and she says she still remembers the crying and she remembered how the enslaved people traveling with her sang no more for many days. So that gives an example of the physical trauma and psychological trauma of removal.

Another example is runaway ads, also that we can find online in, for example, a historical newspaper database. Runaway ads during the time of removal always show how enslaved people resisted removal and how removal could tear apart their family. I've seen, for example, a runaway ad that was for two enslaved men who had liberated themselves and were caught in an Arkansas jail. The ad said that they were caught on the road leading to Little Rock, Arkansas in company with immigrating Choctaw Indians. So obviously these enslaved men tried to get into a group of native people, of Choctaw Indians that were removing. Perhaps there were other enslaved people in this group. Perhaps the group of Choctaw people decided that they would provided refuge for these enslaved men. We're not sure, but we know that they were caught with a group that was removing, expelled to Indian territory.

One of the men that was caught, Ben, claimed that his wife belonged to a Choctaw slaveholder that had already been expelled to Indian territory. So this provides an interesting example because it shows that Indian removal separated enslaved families. Perhaps some native slaveholders decided against taking all family members to the west. Maybe one ore more members were owned by a slaveholder who did not have to move to Indian territory. So Indian removal also devastated enslaved families as well. We usually think of the separation of enslaved families when we talk about the domestic slave trade. But these kind of incidents, and this trauma, and the severing of family ties also could happen during Indian removal, too.

Meredith McCoy: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. We'll put a link to Sarah Harlan's story and the rest of the WPA Indian-Pioneer Papers in our notes for this episode at tolerance.org/podcast. While you're there, you should listen to our recent conversation with Cynthia Lynn Lyerly about using the WPA Slave Narratives in episode 11 of our current season. She gives some great advice about how to use these rich but complicated oral history collections with your students. Once again, here's my conversation with Dr. Nakia Parker.

Once the United States had removed these nations west, the nations had to reestablish norms for governance. And I wonder if you could speak to how they addressed enslavement in their new constitutions as they were trying to promote their own sovereignty and well-being.

Nakia Parker: Many nations established slave codes and codified the institution of slavery in their constitution. For example, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, and Chickasaw implement laws to maintain control over the enslaved people in their midst. One thing that they do is they set up what they call light horseman force, which really was similar to a police force and it was created to keep order, social order, in these nations. But also, it served as a way to control slavery and enslave people as well.

For example, one of the duties of the light horseman force in these nations was they needed to check the passes of enslaved people. So example, enslaved people had restrictions on mobility. If they wanted to travel anywhere off of their plantation or away from their enslaver, the enslaver had to write them a pass. And if they didn't have a pass, it would be assumed that the enslaved person was trying to liberate themselves, was trying to run away, and they would be punished accordingly.

So the light horseman force in Indian territory would check travel passes. They would return enslaved people who had run away back to their enslavers. They supervised public slave auctions, and they also punished anyone, either enslaved people or citizens of the nations, who transgressed these laws. Sometimes this involved physical punishment as well. They also passed laws in their constitution that said enslaved people couldn't read. They couldn't meet in large groups, in public places. They couldn't own a gun or a knife without their enslaver's permission. And years later, enslaved people still remember patrollers and these laws with fear and also with hatred.

But we also have to take into account the geopolitical environment that these nations are operating in, and in particular thinking about, for example, the Choctaw and Chickasaw who are surrounded by Texas to the south, a major slaveholding state, and then to the east they're bordered by Arkansas, another slaveholding state. Particularly in Texas, what we see is the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations are accused of being a place where enslaved people could run, and hide out, and find refuge. A lot of Texas slave holders would cross into Indian territory and try to either steal enslaved people that they claimed that were theirs or try to accuse Choctaw and Chickasaw citizens of harboring enslaved people.

So perhaps one of the reasons that these codes, particularly harsh codes, are passed in Indian territories is that Choctaw and Chickasaw political leaders are aware of this. They're aware of this assault on their sovereignty and autonomy and they're trying to protect it and show that we are not a place where enslaved people can necessarily hide out and find refuge. What you do see, too, is when white Texas slaveholders, some Arkansas white slave holders do cross into Indian territory, political leaders do express their concern to the federal government and demand protection and demand redress when white slaveholders do not respect native sovereignty. Sometimes it's listened to, but for the majority their calls go unheeded.

Meredith McCoy: For teachers who are teaching about removal, they might move from removal into thinking about the Civil War. And we tend to teach the Civil War as though the only parties are the Union and the Confederacy, but the reality is so much more complicated when we also think about how native nations were viewing the Civil War. So Nakia, how might teachers talk to their students about how native nations viewed and participated in the Civil War?

Nakia Parker: That's a great question. I think it's important to highlight to students that really there's a diversity of experiences with native people who experienced the Civil War. Actually, it's at first it's important to address that the Civil War did happen in the west, that Indian territory was involved. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't find out about native people and native participation in the Civil War until I was a undergraduate history major, a junior in a university. So I think that there are ways that when we teach the Civil War we can bring up that it's not only just in a north-south viewpoint or just between the Union and the Confederacy but that native people also were involved in a variety of ways.

For example, some native people just wanted to be left out of the sectional conflict, out of the conflict of the Civil War. It doesn't mean that they weren't aware of what's happening around them, that they weren't of the political and social battles going on but they wanted to be left alone and they wanted their sovereignty respected and preserved. But eventually, all five nations ally with the Confederacy. They did have some similar interest, slavery being one factor.

One thing that teachers, though, can emphasize is the point that we talked about including treaties and looking at treaty language. That will give students an idea of why some native nations participated in the Civil war or particularly sided with the Confederacy. Because for example, particular the Cherokee, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw, they felt that the federal government did not respect treaty obligations. They did not respect annuity payments. And that was one of their main reasons for siding with Civil War. So slavery was a part of it, but ti wasn't the major part of it. So teachers involving treaties early on and considering tribal rights will help students to have a broader view of the Civil War and how it happened in Indian territory.

I think another way teachers can emphasize the importance of the Civil War among native people is to think about how it divided some nations. So for example, the Cherokee Nation in particular was divided over the Civil War. At first, they wanted to remain neutral and then eventually they split. And then you have what was called Southern Cherokees who sided with the Confederacy and then you had Cherokees who ended up siding with the Union. Slavery is even abolished in the Cherokee Nation in 1863 but it ends up completely diving the population. Some slaveholders even end up fleeing to Texas to refugee because of the war and because of the disruption in lives.

So I think it's really important to emphasize to students that the Civil War affected even Indian families, disrupted life, disrupted social relations, even pitted people, family member against family members. Usually that's something that we teach only happened, for example, in border states between people who sided with the Union or wanted to side with the Confederacy. But, these things are happening in Indian territory as well.

Meredith McCoy: I just want to emphasize a couple of things that you said. One is that depending on where native nations were located their view of the Civil War might've been radically different. So nations further west would've viewed this as a sectional conflict between parties of another nation and they just didn't want to be involved at all. And why would they? They were their own nations looking at a conflict within another nation. But for nations who were closer by, they were making really calculated decisions based on their previous experiences with the federal government. So just as you were saying, if the federal government had broken its promises to native nations over, and over, and over again, then why would they side with that government that had repeatedly failed to deliver on the promises it had made? And we see other examples, like the Lumbee Nation in North Carolina that ends up siding with the Union because of its experiences with the Home Guard in North Carolina.

So these decisions about who to ally with are very complicated and they're place-based depending on each nation's particular circumstances. The same can be said for the treaties that happen at the end of the war. Many teachers and students are familiar with the fact that the Union and the Confederacy had to come to an agreement at the end of the war that was a treaty. But they may not know that the federal government also entered into treaties with specific native nations as a way to conclude their role in the Civil War as well. Could you speak to the particular demands that the United States made of these native nations when the war was over?

Nakia Parker: Yes. This is something that always surprises the students that I teach as well, that since the federal government did not view native nations as a part of the Confederacy, just allied with the Confederacy, the 13th amendment did not apply to any enslaved people who resided in Indian territory. So in 1866, each of these five nations have to sign separate surrender treaties with the United States. What's even more fascinating is that although the Choctaw and Chickasaw were separate nations, the federal government makes them sign a joint treaty. Historian Barbara Krauthamer says that really this treaty is very unusual. Because unlike the agreements that were signed by the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole, this treaty really merges black people citizenship, freed people citizenship rights with Choctaw and Chickasaw claims to tribal sovereignty.

So what do we mean by that? So when the nations, two nations sign this particular treaty, they had to abolish slavery. They had to secede over 4 millions acres of land to the United States in exchange for $300,000. So the government said, "Well, we'll hold this land in ... We'll hold this money in trust for you until you give the freed people in your respective nations all citizenship rights." The Choctaw and Chickasaw would not agree to this. They said that this was an assault on their sovereignty. And in fact, some leaders even said, "Why should we be expected or required to do more for our freed people than white people in the former Confederacy did for theirs?" Freed people in the South did not get land at all. So many native leaders were infuriated that the United States made these demands upon them. So really, again, we can see these overlapping oppression and really the entanglement of freed people's rights and citizenship rights with native sovereignty. Native nations were really between a rock and a hard place. Those who had allied with the Confederacy, for lack of a better term, their assault on their sovereignty was wrapped up with giving freed people citizenship rights and tribal rights.

Meredith McCoy: I'm Meredith McCoy, and you're listening to Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. We can see how native nations became entangled in the capitalist system of chattel slavery and how that's linked to the systemic removal of indigenous peoples from their homelands. To learn more about how native nations became caught up in this practice of enslavement and fought to extricate themselves from it, listen to episode two of this season, Indigenous Enslavement Part 1 with historian Christina Snyder. Once again, here's my conversation with Dr. Parker.

Since removal in the Civil War, the rights of freed people has long been controversial within the native nations that you work with in your research. Could you address how these different native nations thought about the tribal citizenship of the people their citizens had previously enslaved and how did approaches vary between the governments of different nations?

Nakia Parker: For the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole, they did give full tribal citizenship rights to their freed people. And as I mentioned earlier, in 1863, the Cherokee abolished slavery, so in tandem with the Emancipation Proclamation. Now, eventually, a few decades after giving full tribal citizenship rights and the ... There's a battle between Cherokee freed people as well as Seminole freed people. They're disenrolled, and that battle lasts for decades. It's not until 2017 in the Cherokee Nation that freed people ... It's ruled by the Supreme Court that freed people need to be reenrolled and receive tribal rights.

The Choctaw and Chickasaw are a different story. They never give full citizenship rights to their freed people. The Choctaw give partial rights, some land, some voting privileges to freed people in 1885. The Chickasaw never do. And really, their defense of native sovereignty and their refusal to accept freed people as citizens reflects an unwillingness to let go of their enslaved labor force. So even after the Civil War, until the treaty of 1866, slavery is still legal. Teachers can look at the WPA narratives and share the experiences of enslaved people who say that they were still sold on the auction block after the Civil War had ended because they were in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations and they were not considered legally free.

In addition, some freed people also talk about that they experienced the same kind of violence and trauma that freed people did in the American South. Generally, for example, when we teach America history after the Civil War and we talk about the reconstruction period, we usually focus on the violence and trauma that freed people had to experience in the South, lynchings, poll taxes, the Jim Crow laws. We even talk about freed people who experienced convict labor, another type of enslavement. But, similar circumstances existed in certain parts of Indian territory with the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. There were black codes that were passed, what could be considered black codes, that said that a person without a work contract could be convicted of vagrancy and then sold into enslavement. Lynchings occurred.

So freed people were constantly facing difficult circumstances in these regions but they were still fighting for their rights. So freed people actively petitioned, both native politicians and the federal government, to honor their citizenship rights and to resolve what their status was since the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations would not give them rights. And when the federal government and native leaders wouldn't give them rights, then they fought for them on their own.

For example, one of the major points of contention for many freed people was that they wanted their children educated. So one good example that teachers could use as a point of comparison is looking at all the freed people schools in the South and also how freed people got money, raised money, found teachers to teach their children and to provide educational opportunities. That was one of the most important things to them. A good comparison would be looking at freed people in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. They did the same things. They raised money. They built school buildings. They obtained books. They asked missionary teachers to come and petition them to give their children an education.

So again, we can see it really expands our idea of how to teach reconstruction, too, that these same types of battles that are occurring in the South are also occurring in some points of Indian territory, too. We can't forget about that region when we talk about reconstruction and freed people's rights.

Meredith McCoy: This continues to be such a fraught issue in Indian country today, and it's a really important thing for teachers and students to approach carefully recognizing the diversity of perspective and opinions on this issue as it continues to develop. As Nakia mentioned, there was a Supreme Court case in 2017 that decided this issue for the Cherokee Nation. While that decision brought closure for a good number of people, it also raises a dangerous precedent in the world of the federal government's encroachment on to tribal sovereignty. So there are ways in which we have to understand competing needs and competing perspectives and allow our students to hold those things in tension.

Cherokee scholar Julia Coates has written about this issue and she talks about how, yes, there is certainly racism within the Cherokee Nation that influenced Cherokee people's unwillingness to include freedman as tribal citizens, but there is also a defense of tribal sovereignty, a recognition of clan systems and kinship that defines someone as being a Cherokee citizen, and in other words that there are factors that are more complicated than just phenotype and perception of race at hand in this issue. So I would encourage teachers who are thinking about teaching this issue of freed people's rights to dig in, to listen to the variety of perspectives, to expose students to the variety of perspectives, and to be really attentive to the ways in which human rights and sovereignty are both at play in this issue.

Nakia Parker: It's a shame that tribal sovereignty has to be at the expense of freed people's rights, because that's how it seems that it's framed, but I also feel like that's a part of what colonialism does, right? That's the issue that we have, that we have to respect all viewpoints. And whereas you have freed people who, yes, by virtue of their labor, by virtue of their enslavement, their descendants deserve certain rights, but it's also framed in we have to be realistic and see that the United States government did expect things from native nations that they did not expect from former members of the Confederacy. They just didn't. They didn't require them to do so. So that also has to be acknowledged, too.

Meredith McCoy: So Nakia, how does an understanding of native people's enslavement, both of other indigenous people and of African and African-descended people, help us to more fully understand US history? As we've talked about throughout this conversation, this is a history that is complicated and difficult to understand. And if I'm thinking back to my own experiences teaching eight grade US history, I had enough to chew on just getting out the basic facts that I knew were going to be on the end of grade test. So why then, if this is a story that is so complicated and one that's not going to show up in my students's multiple choice questions, why should I commit to teaching this history in my classroom?

Nakia Parker: I think it's hard history to talk about but it's necessary if we want to understand the whole of American history and in particular if we want to understand slavery, the expansion of slavery before the Civil War. So we have to understand it from a variety of angles. First of all, without Indian removal, there's no expansion of slavery in the Deep South. We also have to understand that that institution also moves westward because of Indian removal. It helps us get a broader idea of the Civil War. Instead of thinking of the Civil War in this north-south binary or even in a black-white binary, we also realize that it went westward geographically. It involved the diversity of people, of native groups who felt different ways about this conflict.

I also think that looking at participation in native slavery also shapes the way we think about what happened after the Civil War and reconstruction. Perhaps we can talk about things like freed people's rights, the rise of convict labor very differently if we include Indian territory. It expands our view of history, and it also helps us to really push back against some dominant narratives and some myths about American history. For example, we think of native people as disappearing from the record. I mean, we see 1830 Indian removal happened and then we don't mention America Indian history until late 19th century, Plains Indian Wars. But when we consider Indian territory in the 1830s and native people participating in chattel slavery, it really does expand our view. It makes us realize that native history is also included in US history and in southern history. You can't teach the history of the American South and of the domestic slave trade without also talking about native history and native participation as well.

Meredith McCoy: That was an awesome answer. Nakia, it has been wonderful having you on the show. I've learned so much from you, and I know that our listeners will really benefit from having gotten this chance to hear you talk about your research. So thank you for coming on the show today.

Nakia Parker: Oh, wonderful. Thank you for having me, and I thoroughly enjoyed our discussion. Stay healthy and safe, everyone.

Meredith McCoy: Nakia D. Parker is a historian at Michigan State University. Her current book project, Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country, examines the forced migrations, kinship networks, labor practices, and resistance strategies of people of African and Afro-native descent enslaved in Choctaw and Chickasaw communities from 1830 through 1866. 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 accurate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of what is currently the United States or how its legacy still influences us today. 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 Dr. Parker for sharing her insights with us. This podcast is produced by Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer with additional support from 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 Chris De Brisky and Circus Marcus.

If what you heard today was helpful, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And then tell us what you thought. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback. I'm Dr. Meredith McCoy, assistant professor of American studies and history at Carleton College, and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

 

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Transcript

Margaret Newell: Caesar ran away from his master, a blacksmith named Samuel Richards in 1739, and presented himself at the home of the local Justice of the Peace, Joshua Hempstead. And Caesar said he was a free man, and no man's slave, because his mother, a woman named Betty, had been, he claimed, wrongfully enslaved and kept in slavery so that he had been born a free man.

Margaret Newell: She was probably a Pequot Indian, and as a young girl had been separated from her family, made a refugee during King Philip's War, and sold at auction in New London. But these refugees were not to be sold as slaves for life. Many people who acquired Indians through these auctions in Connecticut and Rhode Island held them as slaves for life, and then tried to lay claim to their offspring. So this is basically what had happened to Caesar.

Margaret Newell: And Hempstead heard this case and he sent it to a jury. His community in New London decided that Caesar had been inappropriately enslaved and ordered his freedom. So Caesar won a jury trial.

Meredith McCoy: Caesar’s story reminds me of the importance of grounding our teaching of hard history in individual people’s lived experiences. Thinking about individual people helps us to remain focused on their humanity and dignity, and it also helps students remain engaged with the broader stories we're trying to tell.

Meredith McCoy: With my American Studies students at Carleton College, we've been reading City of Inmates, Kelly Lytle Hernández's fantastic new book. City of Inmates traces the history of incarceration in Los Angeles through the lens of settler colonialism. It's a story that begins with the Tongva people and their mistreatment at the hands of Spanish colonists, who introduced prisons as a way to police Indigenous bodies in an attempt to remove Tongva people from their homelands. Reading Hernández’s book, the connection between unfree forms of labor like enslavement, debt peonage, and chain gangs becomes clear.

Meredith McCoy: In the midst of talking about prisons as a violent system used in an attempt to eliminate Tongva—and later Chinese, Mexican, and Black—people, Hernández also tells stories of resistance. She talks, for example, about Native prisoners' many strategies for escaping from jail, and provides examples of Black-Native solidarity against incarceration. These are the stories that my students found most impactful during our class discussions. Using specific stories to connect structures of oppression with individual resistance helped them make sense of the hard history Hernández is telling.

Meredith McCoy: By bringing out these stories, Hernández develops what she calls a "Rebel Archive." She writes, "Grappling with conquest and elimination is a daunting task. How can historical perspective be helpful if it overwhelms us with the enormity of the work ahead?" Hernández goes on to say that the Rebel Archive "shows us more than conquest and elimination at play." It shows "resilience, protest, and rebellion—as it tenaciously documents how the criminalized, policed, caged, deported and kin of the killed have always fought back. They jimmied open the cages of conquest and stole away. They nursed the incarcerated. They took the settlers to court. They passed plans of revolution. They sang love songs. They charged the US government with genocide. And they set the city on fire."

Meredith McCoy: The Rebel Archive Hernández documents provides a model for how we might approach teaching the hard history of enslavement in our own classrooms. Continuing to center specific stories of the resistance of enslaved people provides us an opportunity to focus on their resilience. And as we do, the stark contrast between a system meant to dehumanize and individuals like Caesar who refused to become objects becomes all the more clear.

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: In this episode, historian Margaret Newell examines the history of Indigenous enslavement in New England. In an interview with my co-host Hasan Kwame Jeffries, she tells us about the intimate cross-cultural relationships between English and other Europeans and the Indigenous peoples they were enslaving in their homes. We will look at important instances of resistance and resilience, as Native people used the settler legal system to secure their own freedom. And we will learn about some easy-to-access resources that you can use to teach these same stories in your classroom.

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

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I am really excited to welcome to the podcast, Margaret Newell, my friend, my colleague here at the Ohio State University, softball player extraordinaire. So Margaret, your areas of expertise include colonial and revolutionary history, Native American history. And when we think about colonial New England, we conjure in our mind certain images, a certain narrative about relationships between English colonists and settlers and Indian people. What is that narrative, and what are some of the problems with that?

Margaret Newell: One of the really pernicious narratives is the eradication of Indians from history. The assumption that they're sort of there for the Pilgrims, but they just go away. They cease to exist. They're overwhelmed by European technology, by European disease, by European superiority, and they just sort of disappear. The Indians are, in fact, essential to the survival of the colonial project and to the success of the colonial projects. You know, both through the kinds of voluntary help they gave, and for the involuntary help through slavery. Slavery is another testimony to the continued presence of Native Americans throughout the colonial period and their importance in colonial society, even though it's a very negative and involuntary participation. It's a way to restore Native Americans more generally to the story.

Margaret Newell: Including Indians helps us understand the regional differences and the regionality of African slavery in the Americas. In other words, it's a way to move away from the plantation complex as the only site of slavery, to think about other sites of slavery like the household. And to think about how maybe it was different to be an enslaved person in New England than it was to be an enslaved person in Barbados than it was to be an enslaved person in Virginia. And how was that different? And to be an enslaved person in Quebec or New Orleans or Santa Fe. You know, what things made it different?

Margaret Newell: Most enslaved people before 1700 everywhere are enslaved Indians. By the 18th century, there's been a big increase in the number of enslaved Africans entering New England, which had been dominated by Native Americans before then. The system of slavery in English America had become extremely developed. You know, elaborate legal codes created within these colonial legislatures in other regions. And there's so much travel, there's so much trade, there's so much engagement that New England colonial leaders and would-be colonial slaveholders know what the law is in other places, and they want to see their system brought in conformity with the changes they've seen elsewhere. So by the 18th century, the American colonists of English descent had created a full-blown slave system: hereditary slavery, chattel slavery, dehumanizing laws. And, you know, the question in New England was whether those laws would end up applying there as well. So they applied some, not others. They really kind of parse the system and make some changes, but resist others, including making slavery hereditary. So it's partly the influence of this global slave trade, these shared practices, that are not just English by this period, that are also in Spanish America, French America as well, this consensus, slave-holding consensus.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But there's an influence as well between Native populations in New England on English populations in New England. In other words, there's a cultural exchange that's going back by the time you get to 1739, century-plus. And a political exchange and allies, and I mean conflict. So is that influencing some of this decision-making as well?

Margaret Newell: So all through the first decades of colonization in New England, there are a lot of complicated relationships between English and Indians, but many of them are relationships of trade, of alliance, of mutual interests, of communication, of mutual aid in warfare, and of kind of daily interactions. People often think of Indians and colonists as being—you know, living in very separate zones. And maybe they come together on this thing called the frontier. But, you know, people were in and out of each other's homes all the time. The English settled as close to the Indians as they could. They farmed Indian fields. They dug up Indians' caches of corn and other goods, and that's how they survived the first couple of years in Plymouth. You know, the Indians help, the Indians trade. All these things are what made colonization possible. So there's proximity amongst these settlements from the start.

Margaret Newell: And there's lots of interactions. I have all sorts of examples of Indians wandering in and out of English houses and vice versa. You know, some scholars look at the rhetoric surrounding warfare between Europeans and Native Americans and see, you know, cultural dislike, demonization, othering of Native Americans. And I look at the record and I see something very different and much more complex. So I think in times of great tension, the English might use, you know, very extreme language in describing Native Americans, dehumanizing, demonizing language, but they use that language to describe the French in times of extreme warfare as well. You know, I agree with those historians that don't see race as the main way in which people understood and identified and thought about people of other races and ethnicities that they were encountering. Instead, I actually think that the English thought of the Indians as people like themselves, which makes their decision to enslave them to me all the more complicated and problematic and in need of explanation. These aren't people being brought to them as slaves already. These are people that they are actively enslaving and continued to do so through the whole colonial period, sometimes in very personal ways. You know, sometimes they're enslaving people that they know, that are neighbors, that they might have interacted with in other ways before they enslaved them. So, you know, this is a highly personal set of decisions involved in enslavement. But I don't think it has to do with viewing the Indians as the ultimate others by any means.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When you place sort of Indian slavery against, or up against in comparison with African enslavement here, we often think about sort of African enslavement or enslavement of African people being sort of the dominant set force. But as you were pointing out, I mean, it's majority enslaved Indians for the longest time. And so in a way, it's kind of a beginning, as opposed to sort of an offshoot of African enslavement. You've written about it or called it the charter generation.

Margaret Newell: Right. I borrowed that term from the great historian Ira Berlin. For him, for Berlin, the charter generation were Creolized, you know, enslaved Africans, people who'd acquired European languages and had maybe passed through a number of different slave societies before they arrived in North America. But I argue that the Indians are the charter generation, and charter generations, really. So you have several generations of enslaved Indians in New England and in Virginia too, before they're outnumbered by the importation of enslaved Africans in the 18th century.

Margaret Newell: And I think this is important to think about for a number of reasons. One is that the presence of these Indians shapes the system of slavery. So New England's first out of the gate with the slave code. 1641, Massachusetts, is the first law of slavery in English America. Before Barbados lays out a complete code, you know, before Virginia. And Virginia in the 1640s will begin creating law by law, bit by bit, a code that distinguishes servants of African and Indian descent, but it's going to take several decades before that system's fully developed. So New England's first out of the gate with its slave code. But it's a very vague slave code, the hereditary nature of slavery was not encoded into law in New England, that children would be enslaved after their parents. Doesn't mention race. It really mentions who can and cannot be enslaved. Who can be enslaved, who are captives, people condemned to slavery by the legal authorities. You know, those are the categories of people who are enslavable.

Margaret Newell: And Indians fit both bills, because the colonists had just engaged in a major war against Native Americans in 1637 and 1638, had taken captives, had brought them into their homes. So I think that this law is meant to distinguish Indian captives from the kinds of English indentured servants that had been the main labor source, up until then. And that's published, the New England law code. The Massachusetts colonial legislature, the various laws that it passes are in published form, and they're actually available on a number of online platforms. The language will be a little archaic, but you could print some of these things out and take them to your classes, and maybe put them alongside some of the documents on African slavery in Virginia and so on that you have. You could pair those codes and that can be very interesting.

Margaret Newell: Labor's one of the central challenges facing colonial societies. It can never get enough labor. They always want labor, but they don't want to satisfy those labor demands in a free labor market. They don't want to pay people the wages that they would have to pay them in a free labor market. So they're choosing systems that bind people, whether be indentured servitude or slavery. The other problem New England faces is that indentured servants don't really want to go there after 1640 and even a little bit before. It's got a bad reputation as being Puritan, as being repressive religiously, as being a place where there's sort of harsh treatment. And both of those are true. And it's not viewed as a place where one gets rich quickly. So Virginia has a reputation also as a deathtrap and a place of political oppression, as does Barbados. But in both those places, you know, there are stories of former servants becoming rich planters. So, I mean, I think the dream of escaping servitude and then ending up as a wealthy person's more part of the attractive propaganda of Virginia and Barbados.

Margaret Newell: So by the mid- to late-17th century, there's also a lot more places to go to in English America. You can go to Pennsylvania and not have to do compulsory military service, enjoy religious toleration, etc. So New England's not attracting that much immigration. When the first generation of servants that they brought with them finish their terms, these people do not want to work for wages. They don't want to be bound again as servants. So the New England colonists really are facing a labor shortage. And their response to that shortage is to enslave Indians. So this is how Indians become the majority slave population, and why New England becomes a place that develops the legislation first. And the other part of your question about the charter generation, too, is other sorts of intimate relationships between English and Europeans. More than the visits to each other's homes and more than the shared trade and material life and occasional shared interests and diplomacy, you know, many of these English families have Indians living in their homes with them. And the most intimate relationships of sleeping together, of eating together, of socializing together. And of accounts of some of these early families in Connecticut and in Massachusetts and in Long Island—which was settled by New Englanders—of people who can speak Native American languages because there had been a Native American woman raising them, cooking for the family, so that they acquired Algonquian or Iroquoian language growing up in their homes. Of the fact that these early New Englanders when they reminisce about their childhoods, what food do they talk about? They talk about samp, which is a cornmeal mush or a kind of stew that might be flavored with squash, pumpkin, also Native American food. Or venison. Venison caught by Native Americans, most likely.

Margaret Newell: So I mean, even when people are reminiscing about their early childhoods and their early lives, they're reminiscing about maple sugar, all these things that Native Americans introduced into the foodways of New Englanders. So we don't think about cultural exchange in Indian slavery, and we just don't know as much about it as we do about African influence on the larger American culture. So it's a field that people have worked in for a long time, and have revealed quite a bit about those exchanges. And we've just begun to ask those questions about the Native American influence on the larger New England culture. And I'd say it's profound. Beyond foodways, I think we could point to even, you know, religion. Often those scholars have long sort of looked at New England ceremony and had seen kind of a shift from a very stripped-down ceremonial life to a much more elaborate one. So usually, we ascribe that change to changes in Europe, the influence of the Baroque, the influence of similar shifts in larger English culture.

Margaret Newell: But Heather Kopelson and other historians have pointed to the fact that maybe this is just constant contact with Native Americans. You know, they're baking the communion bread that people are consuming in their Puritan church rituals every weekend. You know, they're holding funerals that are extremely elaborate. And over time, Puritans start holding more elaborate funerals. Is this because of the influence of the European Baroque? Or because they're going to Indian funerals and thinking, you know, there's something spiritually meaningful about commemorating death in a more elaborate way than we have been? So I think we can start thinking about those questions and asking those sorts of questions.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The cultural exchange or the cultural influence really has me wondering about what kind of work were enslaved Indians doing in Colonial America.

Margaret Newell: Well, the other thing that I think is very interesting about Indian slavery in New England, and I think it's worth talking about in a larger context, is that most of the enslaved were working in households, and in fact, the majority of enslaved people in what would become the United States worked in households. We know much more about plantation slavery because plantations kept better records. But the majority of the enslaved through the Civil War actually lived and worked in households. And their experiences could be very different from the experiences of people in large plantations. You know, socially they might be more isolated. They might be the only person of color or one of a couple of people of color within the household. They'd also be living with the Euro-American family in the same household, you know, sleeping in the same rooms, eating at the same table, much more likely to be engaging in daily interaction and intercultural exchange with that family.

Margaret Newell: They were going to be doing the same kinds of work that the master's family did. So for women this meant taking care of children, washing, cooking, maybe taking care of a garden right outside the house. But for Native American women, this meant learning new skills. They were going to have to learn dairying, the care of domestic animals, the making of cheese and butter, things that weren't part of their earlier existence. Women were the homebuilders, the agriculturalists. For Native Americans, that was going to have to be men's work for a person enslaved on a New England farm. So this meant lots of changes for men and their work, too. They were going to have to become agricultural workers. So for Native Americans, this was going to force some adjustments and changes, and sometimes very difficult ones, and their expectations about what it meant to be a man or a woman.

Margaret Newell: Men also worked as soldiers. So these people who were fighting the Colonial wars, including the French and Indian War, including wars against Native American groups on the northern frontier of New England, as many as 20 percent of the forces that Colonial militias deployed and the provincial forces, which were more professionalized, they were sort of in-between a militia and the British regulars, 20 percent of those forces could be Native Americans at any given time. So they're a crucial fighting force. Some of those people are going to be enslaved, some of them are going to be free, who were participating as soldiers.

Margaret Newell: They were fishermen. They were the first whalers. So they're participating in very valuable industries. Men and women, enslaved Indian men and women, and free Indian men and women worked in the first ironworks in Connecticut and Massachusetts, too. So, you know, some basic industry as well. They were interpreters. They were messengers. The English were notoriously terrified of going any more than a few miles from their homes, got lost all the time. You know, really found it difficult to navigate the territory. They had difficulty orienting themselves, had difficulty dealing with forests, woods, swamps, other sorts of topography that—you know, England was largely a deforested country by the time a lot of these people had come. So they're very terrified of the woods, finding their way. So they needed Indians to be guides, and they needed Indians to help them communicate with other settlements. So the Indians were the ones who were carrying messages between colonial leaders, between towns, you know, between colonies, over land. Just generally being, you know, a Native American mail service essentially, that was helping keep this empire and colonial society together.

Margaret Newell: So those are kind of the typical sorts of things. But they might—you know, they would build boats, they would make shingles, you know, prepare livestock for export, do everything that made the New England economy hum and that allowed households to survive and thrive. So, you know, the survival, and the thriving of these Colonial societies was dependent on the labor of enslaved people.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The survival was more than just a meal on Thanksgiving, apparently.

Margaret Newell: That's right. That's right. It was every day, which was apparent, you know, there was a lot of gunfire at that first Thanksgiving too. Celebratory, but you know ...

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. Here’s Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Margaret Newell.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What's the impact of Indian enslavement on Indian communities?

Margaret Newell: Well, I think the impact is devastating. I think Indian slavery is important to think about for many of the reasons we very talked about: their contribution to the economy, you know, its role in warfare, it's both a product and a cause of warfare of many of the Indian wars, within so-called Indian wars and American colonial history have slavery at the root, the desire for captives on the part of the Europeans. You know, it's part of the demographic catastrophe. You know, you have families separated. You have children taken from their parents. You know, you have men deployed in very high-risk, high-mortality kinds of activities. So fishing. You know, fishing was the most deadly thing you could do is—you know, fishing and warfare are the two most high death-rate professions in early America.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And by fishing, you don't mean just casting a reel.

Margaret Newell: I don't mean—no, I mean, you know, trying to take down a whale in an open boat and going on a fishing vessel. It's not even—it's the accidents. It's falling. It's, you know, having stuff fall on you. It's drowning. All those things. So those were sort of always high-risk professions. And then warfare. And then separation. If men are being deployed in these things, you know, fishing was something you were attached to a boat. You might be away for years. Or you might be a sailor. You might be sent to the Caribbean or something like that, where you ran the danger of being illegally enslaved and sold there. And all these things happen. So all these things undermine Native American households, undermine their subsistence, undermine their ability to reproduce and maintain culture, too. So it's demography, it's the maintenance of culture, it's the maintenance of community and tradition. And for people for whom kinship is everything, is identity, is an extreme central value of their society. So this kinship's just being put under so much stress and strain.

Margaret Newell: So, you know, you've got all different sorts of, you know, political, social, cultural and personal losses arising from enslavement. But, you know, in terms of the effects of slavery on Indians, it's a story about change over time. Slavery's a constant threat for the free Indians who remain the majority population in New England. The other element of Indian slavery is there's always large populations of free Indians nearby. It is not a situation, as with African slavery in the first few generations where most Africans are enslaved. Not all. There's always some free people of color, but most are enslaved. That's not the case for Native Americans, right? There's always substantial communities of free Native Americans, even in the areas of densest enslavement. And of course, there are powerful Native American confederacies surrounding all colonial outposts. The Spanish, French and English are surrounded by, you know, large, powerful, threatening Native American alliances with population and power.

Margaret Newell: So I mean, you've got kind of a complicated geopolitical situation. So for Native Americans, you know, I think in New England, the threat of slavery is a tool that the English use to threaten entire groups, to push them into alliance, to demand tribute, you know, giant cash payoffs. To terrorize individuals and families, to force people off land, to punish people who are really protesting illegal takings of their land and property, or takings of their goods, who might, you know, take livestock that have strayed onto their cornfields and are destroying their corn. Those Native Americans who take actions like that could find for themselves face charges, fines and enslavement as a result. So slavery is a form of control, and a threat towards the free population that permits other sorts of dispossessions. So it's part of this system of colonization. It's part of the demographic pressure Native Americans are under. And we see that happening in New England.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, in thinking about some of the parallels and similarities between Indigenous enslavement and African-American enslavement, I'm drawn to ideas of resistance and examples of resistance. And one of the ways in which enslaved African-Americans resisted slavery was by using the law and filing lawsuits. Not often, but where they could. We think about different places in late-colonial era, Revolutionary era in Massachusetts, of course, Dred Scott.

Margaret Newell: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But those weren't the first lawsuits to be filed by people who were enslaved in America. Native Americans did something very similar.

Margaret Newell: They did. And in fact, I found a number of cases. One of the cases I became very interested in involved a man named Caesar. Caesar ran away from his master, a blacksmith named Samuel Richards in 1739, and presented himself at the home of the local Justice of the Peace, Joshua Hempstead. And Caesar said he was a free man and no man's slave. Using strong language, he claimed to be a free person because his mother, a woman named Betty, had been, he claimed, wrongfully enslaved and kept in slavery, so that he had been born a free man. She was probably a Pequot Indian, and as a young girl had been separated from her family, made a refugee during King Philip's War. Many Native Americans who just were fleeing from the war, non-combatants, were rounded up by colonial forces and sold at auction. So she was sold at a dockside auction in New London and was purchased by a ship's captain. And when this man died, Betty became the property of the widow. And when she remarried a ship's captain from Long Island, his name was Thomas Young, Betty was brought to Long Island. There she entered into a relationship with an enslaved man in the household of the ship's captain.

Margaret Newell: These refugees were not to be sold as slaves for life. Connecticut law had set a limit. Connecticut established sliding age scales. So young children might be held in slavery for anywhere from 15 to 30 years, but they were supposed to be freed at the end of that term. But many people who acquired Indians through these auctions in Connecticut and Rhode Island just simply failed to free them at the end of their set period and held them as slaves for life, and then tried to lay claim to their offspring. So this is basically what had happened to Caesar, that he had been taken, trafficked into a different colony in New York. You know, all these things contributed to Betty's loss of freedom and therefore Caesar's loss of freedom.

Margaret Newell: And Hempstead heard this case and he sent it to a jury. Then begins a long court battle in which Caesar gained the backing of a number of lawyers. So he had legal representation. He had people that supported his case and helped him make his case. And Joshua Hempstead was the kind of person that a man like Caesar might not have known what kind of hearing he would get. This took place in New London, Connecticut, which was the county that had the highest proportion of enslaved people of any county in Connecticut. So it's a hub of the slave trade. Hempstead himself owned an African slave. He had, as Justice of the Peace, had sold Native Americans at auction. Because of fines they had received from courts, he had bought Native Americans at auction to work for him at similar auctions or taken Native Americans as laborers in lieu of his pay. He trafficked in enslaved Africans and sold them to his neighbors. So this was a man, a farmer, a family man, and someone deeply embedded into the economy of slavery, as many of his fellow New Londoners were.

Margaret Newell: And his community in New London decided that Caesar had been inappropriately enslaved and ordered his freedom. So Caesar won a jury trial. His master, you know, fought this case vociferously, and appealed as far as he could within the Connecticut colonial system, but Caesar remained at large. Caesar's case, and the case of many other people who bring freedom suits is made possible by the fact that enslaved people in New England retained the right to testify in court. And that's a right that was stripped from them in many other slave societies over time by the late-1600s and early-1700s. Many enslaved Africans and Indians elsewhere had lost that right to appear in court.

Margaret Newell: Getting back to your initial point about some of the similarities between Indian slavery and African slavery too, Hasan, is that the other thing I've recently discovered about Caesar is that he also sued for reparations. So Caesar sued again a few years later as Caesar Freeman, demanding payment for all the years he had worked for Samuel Richards as an unpaid laborer. And he received a settlement. Whether he was actually able to collect it from Richards is another question. But, you know, this case also showed, again, jury sympathy with Caesar and with the illegality of his enslavement. So then in other words, this was a man who had a sort of standing in the community, and he had friends of many races. He had a lot of social capital. And that interested me too, the idea that many of these enslaved Native Americans and bi-racial people were really embedded in their communities. And that these communities had begun to question the morality and legality of slavery in colonial America as early as the 1730s and even earlier than that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So should we read into the jury's sympathy, as you put it, as I'm sure some would, as colonial New England being really abolitionist, right? I mean, being—at the heart of it, they were really just anti-slavery and just waiting for the moment. And every chance they got, they just freed people. I mean, is that the way we should read this?

Margaret Newell: No, no. I don't think so at all. And, you know, just think about Joshua Hempstead. Caesar's case didn't make Joshua Hempstead go out and free the enslaved African man in his own household. And it didn't make Hempstead stop participating in the slave trade himself. And, you know, Hempstead kept a diary. It's a great source of information about everyday life in New England. And this diary's published, too. So for you teachers looking for documents, the diary of Joshua Hempstead is published. You could photocopy pages and share it with your students. But he also had a long essay about a woman who lived in the household of a neighbor who had been also a child captive in King Philip's War. And when she died, he actually wrote a long eulogy for her. And nowhere in this eulogy did he mention the fact that his fellow Justice of the Peace had kept this woman as a slave and not freed her her whole life, even though both of them knew what the law was, and both of them know that she should have been freed. And litigation surrounding her children and grandchildren continued for decades afterwards.

Margaret Newell: And so, you know, these people actually know they're operating in a moral and ethical and legal gray area and they continue to do so. So what I'd say that Caesar's case shows is a shifted opinion, and that's exemplified by the jury verdict and also by the lawyers who represented him. So I mean, I think there's a group within New England society that's starting to question slavery. And they're putting together arguments, and they're sharing arguments and strategies with one another. But this is a movement that enslaved people are pushing themselves, that communities of color are pushing and initiating, aided by a small group of English colonists who also are starting to question slavery more broadly. So I mean, it's the beginning of what's a slow process.

Margaret Newell: What's interesting is that these sorts of freedom cases like Caesar's, like others that I found in this period, that many of them make it to the colonial legislatures. The colonial legislatures were the courts of last appeal. They were sort of like the Supreme Court. And in Connecticut, in the era where suits like Caesar's are being appealed to the colonial legislature, there's a tremendous debate over these cases at that level. And they really don't want to rule. They don't want to make a decision because there's a sizable population that not only wants to keep slavery, but wants to make it harsher. They wanted to bring New England slavery into conformity with the way slavery was practiced by then in Virginia and Barbados and elsewhere. They want to strip the enslaved from the few rights they retained, like the right to bring cases to court, for example. And they want to lay out that the children of enslaved people will be enslaved after them. These are areas that remained vague or unspecified in New England law.

Margaret Newell: But there's also a faction that doesn't want to do these things. Just doesn't really want to abolish slavery, but feels that because the majority of the enslaved had been Native Americans and there were so many Native Americans implicated in slavery, that they are uncomfortable with going all in and creating a slave regime that will strip these people of humanity and make it a perpetual system. So those are the factions that I see battling. And the result is a non-decision, is a recognition that people are being abused within the system in violation of the law. But at the same time, their sole desire not to engage in the, you know, kind of most nakedly exploitative aspects of slavery and to encode that into local law either. So I'd say that's more of the—that's kind of the spectrum that I see in operation. And these are English colonists who will be very uncomfortable with any law that implicates Indians and anti-miscegenation laws. They might go along with laws prohibiting intermarriage between Africans and English, but they don't want that law to include Indians. So this is also an anti-slavery movement that's maybe parsing ethnicity a little bit, and may be more comfortable with laws that dehumanize Africans and less comfortable with laws that are dehumanizing Indians in these situations.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And what's driving that? I mean, what is driving the need to distinguish between Native Americans and Africans in this situation?

Margaret Newell: I think it's partly demography. The 18th century is the high tide of importation of enslaved Africans into the English colonies. So this is really transforming the demography of slavery. And it loops back to the jury in Caesar's case and why they sided with him. I think a century of cohabitation is influencing those jurors in the courtroom that freed Caesar. But I think some of those sentiments and feelings had been there from the earliest encounters with Native Americans. There's a long court case involving a woman named Betty Cohees. This man on whose land she lives, Christopher Champlin, is really trying to get control of Betty's labor. But ultimately, he's actually trying to enslave this free Indian woman. And she fights this effort over a period of a decade. And he's trying to enslave her for debt, for her husband's debt. And when I look at the papers for this case, that lots of English people file depositions. And, you know, what they really talk about is all the different times they came and visited Betty and her husband Peter in their wigwam. This is the language people use. People are over at these people's house all the time. The English neighbors come over, they hang out, they talk, they eat grapes. You know, they admire Peter's gun. When Peter dies, many English neighbors attend his Indian funeral. This involved a feast and dances that went on for 10 days.

Margaret Newell: So I mean, this is daily life in New England, is to interact with Native Americans in a variety of ways, to actually observe their religious culture, you know, observe their ceremonies, to communicate and form relationships. And in fact, I think it's in some ways it's the very familiarity with Native Americans that enhances their value as slaves, because these are often—you know, they do the work. They know how to do the work. They're, you know, familiar with these households. So that kind of familiarity is part of the story.

Meredith McCoy: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. We can see in New England how the desire for cheap, bonded labor was tied to early colonial interests. To understand more about the systemic role of slavery and colonialism and it’s modern-day permutations, be sure to listen to episode two of this season, Indigeneous Enslavement, Part 1 with Historian Christina Snyder. Again, here’s Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Margaret Newell.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The question that came to mind as you were talking was about, thinking as a teacher, the ways in which teachers can use law in this colonial era in New England in comparison and contrast, to teach about Indian slavery. And we talked about Caesar and filing the freedom suit, and I'm thinking about, as you described, these pressures that Native American communities are under. And obviously, if you're an enslaved Indian, you're under an extraordinary amount of pressure as well. But pairing the two, this consistent pressure, and yet we see these cases, these examples of resistance. What are some of the other ways in which enslaved Indians are resisting, and free Native communities may be resisting the enslavement of their people as well?

Margaret Newell: Well, a little earlier I mentioned this case of Betty Cohees and how I'd found—I got a lot of things out of looking at her long, legal fight to avoid becoming an involuntary servant or slave of the Champlin family. And not just that she had lots of different sorts of relationships with English neighbors, but also that she paid a terrible price for fighting to protect her own slavery. She basically bound her two sons to another English neighbor, who provided her with legal advice and legal support and allowed her to pay and maintain this case. So, you know, a sad outcome. But at the same time, she did everything she could to maintain touch with those boys. And when her husband died, when their father died, she negotiated leave for them to come and attend important rituals surrounding his death. So those boys were given two weeks to come and participate in the funeral and the ceremonies that surrounded it. And I found other examples of people negotiating with their owners similar sorts of things.

Margaret Newell: So there's a man in Massachusetts in the 17th century who negotiated the right to go visit his wife for a couple of weeks every year. Now the contract specified that if he overstayed he would lose his privilege. I mean, you know, these negotiations also are ways of, you know, maintaining control over the situation. There's a cost to the negotiation. But the negotiations to me suggested ways in which Native Americans articulated what was important to them, which was family, and really worked to try to protect and preserve language and ceremonial life, religious life and kin ties.

Margaret Newell: So people, you know, parents made titanic efforts to try to stay in touch with children and family members who were taken away from them or were enslaved. Mothers who were forced in a situation where they had to bind their children out, would try to participate in that system and oversee it to the extent that they could. So, you know, these contracts in which people—so Indian slavery could take many forms. So it could be people, particularly in the 17th century who were war captives, taken in war, taken during wartime during all this confusion, and auctioned off by colonial authorities, or just kept as tribute or booty by the people participating in these wars. So individuals would just take captives and take them home with them as part of their payment for military service. So you've got all these—warfare brings all these people into enslavement.

Margaret Newell: But then the colonial legal system becomes another way that people become enslaved, particularly in the 18th century, but already by the 17th century. All of these threats of slavery that I'd mentioned earlier became real in colonial courtrooms. Once the English colonists were in a position to, through conquest, through warfare, to exert sovereignty over more and more Native Americans, and then claim that they were subjects of English colonial societies, then they could compel these people into court. So, you know, protecting your land might bring a charge of trespassing. You'd have to pay a fine. If you couldn't pay the fine, you'd be sentenced to servitude. You'd be sold at a public auction to pay that fine, plus court costs, plus all these other fines and moneys that would be added to your debt. If you borrowed money as a relative was sick with the, you know, European disease for medicine and you couldn't pay the bill, you could be sold to pay that bill. Or you might have to put a child—you know, sell a child essentially into indenture to pay those bills to keep you free as the breadwinner. So the courts become engines of enslavement, and these become almost entirely racialized situations.

Margaret Newell: So in the 17th century, some English people might be sold at—you know, sold to pay these sorts of debts. And by the 18th century, it's much less common to see that happening for the English. So it's really, you know, people of color who are being sentenced to servitude by the courts. So under those circumstances, I see parents just making sure these contracts have a beginning and an end. That they provide for the children, that there is something in those contracts about food, about apparel, about good care, about training, about literacy. So you can tell the difference between a contract in which a parent's not present and a parent is present. And so I see parents, you know, in terrible circumstances still trying to work the system and get the best sort of—best protection for their children. Parents of children who have been bound into service, the children who are bound into service. A woman in Bristol, so now part of Massachusetts, goes to court because she hears that the man who owns the child's indentures is about to sell this child to another colony. Now once you're out of the locality, anything can happen. So parents trying to sue to just prevent sale of their children outside of the colony, to keep them close, where they can help them and protect them from all these abuses that could occur.

Margaret Newell: So those are ways that—you know, some forms of resistance. You know, other forms of resistance, you know, involved the classic damage to tools or the modes of work. People sometimes run away for short periods of time. You know, just sort of take—you know, take breaks. They tried to retain some control over their own social lives, and created spaces of sociability. So they could be attics, these other sort of almost little private taverns that were kind of known, particularly in urban areas, but in rural areas too, back porches where people could go get a drink, but also socialize with free people, free people of color, you know, fellow enslaved Indians and Africans and working-class English people. English colonists would also show up at these group activities. So there were, you know, areas of sociability and sometimes places to carve out independent life. People created households and got married, you know, and through relationships tried to carve out some independence and to resist slavery that way. I've also found more violent forms of resistance, of infanticide, of child murder, of, you know, arson and other kinds of ways that the enslaved resisted slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: How about flight?

Margaret Newell: Yes, definitely runaways. So even though running away is not as easy as scholars used to think, scholars writing about slavery used to claim that the Indians weren't enslaved because they didn't make good slaves, because they died too easily, or because it was just too easy for them to get away, so the colonists didn't bother. The colonists made it tough to run away. They imposed fugitive slave laws from the earliest period of capture and enslavement. So the treaties that followed the Pequot War in 1638 spelled out enormous fugitive slave penalties for any free Native American groups, even those that had allied with the English in that war. If they sheltered runaways, they themselves could be enslaved. So they really—and they went after runaways. So they sent, you know, interpreters. They went out, you know, got local contacts to go try to find these runaways. But in all of these conflicts and all of these cases over the years, people did run away.

Margaret Newell: There are other cases of runaways. In the early 1700s, the New England colonies, you know, sort of thwarted in their ability to take captives, enslave Indians in the Northeast, began to import Indians from other areas in which English colonial expansion involved slaving and the slave trade. A number of Spanish Indians in Penobscot, Maine, stole a boat and tried to sail it back to St. Augustine, Florida, and had to be captured at sea, basically. A group of Spanish Indians collaborated in a mass escape with some enslaved Africans in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and stole a ship that had guns mounted. And they also had to be tracked down by—a British naval frigate basically had to stop them. But they were headed back home. So I mean, people were trying to get back home, which is pretty interesting. And there were two sort of mass escapes in Boston involving Spanish and Carolina Indians. And I actually have—I can read one of these newspaper ads for you if you want.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Please. Please.

Margaret Newell: So this particular event, I believe it's from 1711. So it's, "Ran away from their masters at Boston on Friday the 14th of this instant, September, the following Indians: from the Reverend Mr. Samuel Miles, a Carolina Indian man named Toby, age about 20 years of age, of middle stature." And then the ad goes on to talk about the fact that Toby has four suits of clothes with him. Clothing's extremely expensive. It's actually a great thing to bring when you run away because it can be fenced and sold and you could use it to make money along the way. Plus, you could do a few costume changes. So a lot of runaways bring extra clothes with them, because that's sort of bringing money with you to a certain extent. Toby's got, you know, a black hat with silver lace and all kinds of other things with him. "From the Honorable Colonel Thomas Savage, a Carolina Indian woman named Jenny, about 40 years of age, pretty, thickset woman." And Jenny's got a number of—a couple of dresses and petticoats and different sorts of things with her. "From Mr. John Stanford Taylor, a Carolina Indian woman named Palice." Talks about what she's got on. "From Mr. John Beecham, a leather dresser, a Spanish Indian man named Manue." I wonder if that's Manuel. It's hard to say. "Aged about 19 years of age." And also their descriptions. And there's four or five more people involved in this particular escape.

Margaret Newell: And, you know, this ad tells you who they're working for, too. One of them is in the household of a very well-known minister. So the people who are likely to own Indian slaves were the wealthiest and most prominent people in these societies. Were the first adopters. So Governor John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts owned nine Indian slaves, has them in his draft will. Massachusetts, established in 1630, he's got nine slaves by the time he drafts his will in 1639. He's got four different estates on land that had been Indian land. And he deploys these people amongst these different estates. So the same thing's true in the 18th century. It's Samuel Miles, a well-known minister. It's Thomas Savage, you know, also an important figure in colonial politics. It's the tailors, it's the leather dressers. You know, so this also gives you a sense of what these people might have been doing in these households. The newspapers also tell me what skills people have, you know? And give me a sense of what kinds of work people are doing. And show me that by this period, you know, Native Americans know how to do dairying. They're advertised as knowing how to do dairying. They're advertised as knowing how to do the kinds of needlework that European people expect. So they bring not only their own skill set of management of resources unique to New England, cooking resources, you know, hunting resources, medicinal resources, they bring this huge skill set to these households, but they've also acquired all these new skills.

Margaret Newell: So there's lots of examples of these sorts of activities. So even in the period in which enslaved Africans are becoming a majority slave population, about a third of the runaway ads from the era's newspapers in New England involve enslaved Indians. So they're also part of that group. And they're running away with other people. And they're combining forces with enslaved Africans in some of these escapes as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It seems in so many ways that those ads can be really useful in the classroom because they're so telling. I mean, not only destination, people trying to go home, who they're running away with, age, what they're taking, but then also who's placing the ads, as you mentioned, right? Sort of that demographic population. It seems like all of this taken together offers a different narrative, not just of sort of the experience of native people in New England during this era, but really the experience of what New England was during this era.

Margaret Newell: I mean, that's what I'd like to convey, you know, on a number of fronts. You know, I just think our image of the household in early America has to consider the variety of people that were living in these households and that were interacting with these households. So I think restoring a sense of the multicultural quality and multi-ethnic quality of these towns and households, and their relationship. And really, their comfort with these relationships. Now, you know, slavery's not an equal relationship, you know? You know, so some of these relationships are mediated by the extreme hierarchy and oppression of slavery, but they're still maintaining other sorts of relationships with people of color, with people of different ethnicities in their communities. And I feel like there has been a literal whitewashing of the New England story, of its economic success, of the culture, of religion, et cetera, that I think, you know, restoring a more accurate portrayal complicates that narrative quite a bit. And like I said, I think we're just at the beginning of teasing out, you know, how the various influences come together, and what the impact of these various influences were.

Margaret Newell: You know, I think at the most basic level, I'm an economic historian at heart, so I tend to look at material things. And, you know, it's really revised my sense of wealth and the origins of American wealth and prosperity that I think, you know, really talking about a giant transfer of wealth, wealth and land, you know, wealth and labor from Native Americans and from African and African Americans to your American population. So that's an important part of the story, as well as, you know, these other sorts of complicated relationships. And, you know, we haven't really talked about another important relationship that emerges out of slavery, and that's the relationship between Native Americans and Africans. So, you know, I mentioned earlier the kind of demographic pressures that slavery and enslavement put on the Native American population in New England. And one of the things I mentioned about was a men's absence and their deployment in these really dangerous activities. And, you know, male captors were more likely to be killed in warfare as well, or just summarily executed. Not all, but some.

Margaret Newell: So the ratios between men and women in these Native American communities become very distorted. So there's a lot more women than men. So the intermarriage and various sorts of relationships between African Americans and Native Americans become much more common in the 18th century. So some of this is happening in the context of slavery, kind of like Caesar's mother, who ends up in a household that has an enslaved African man. You know, the woman that Joshua Hempstead eulogized as such a great servant all her life, you know, who should've been freed, but wasn't. But she married a man named—an enslaved man in another household named York, and had a family with him. So who were the available partners for you? You know, who were you allowed to marry? Who did you interact with? So people who were household slaves, you know, married other slaves in that household or married slaves in nearby households.

Margaret Newell: And then in the communities of free Indians in Narragansett and Mashpee, Massachusetts, Nipmuc, and even in Wabanaki and other groups, there's substantial intermarriage between Native Americans and African Americans there, too. And that had lots of kind of interesting and complicated results. So, you know, one result was that these communities became very—I mean, I like to say they're sort of modern in that they were multi-ethnic. And they adjust to lots of different people's customs and beliefs and practices. So many of these Native American communities had taken in refugees from other Native American communities who already had a fair amount of mixing. So, you know, there's a quality at which they were struggling with and yet achieving the creation of multicultural and multi-ethnic communities in a way that, you know, became a later path for America as a whole. You know, that they're kind of on the leading edge of a kind of modern approach, or modernity as we might define it in ways that I find kind of interesting.

Margaret Newell: But another consequence was that the children of these unions might be at high risk for enslavement. So children of a union between an African American and an Indian sometimes would be just held as enslaved, held as slaves or taken as slaves by a master, even if the mother was a free Indian, if the father was a slave, the master would try to keep that child. And they were often—Rhode Island, there is a little bit of difference within New England in terms of the slave code and slave law. So Rhode Island, after this giant mass enslavement of people in the context of King Philip's War, Rhode Island banned the further enslavement, the subsequent enslavement of Indians. So people violated this law all the time, but one way they tried to get around it was just by claiming that the victims were African or biracial. So, you know, being biracial puts you in a kind of legal limbo in Rhode Island. And none of the other colonies had any laws against enslaving Indians. So, you know, as the population is becoming more African, as the population of the enslaved is becoming more African, you know, any association with Africanness put people at greater risk. So, you know, people were just getting kidnapped.

Margaret Newell: So there's a girl named Sarah Chockham in Rhode Island, and somehow she ended up as a—she probably was an indentured servant, but she might actually just have been the child of a servant in a household in Rhode Island. And she gets trafficked in what had to have been a kind of plot. It involved four different, very rapid exchanges of people who knew each other from Rhode Island, across Long Island Sound to Connecticut. And in the last exchange, sold her as a slave, slave for life in a very elaborate contract that went on and on about what it meant to be a slave for life. And, you know, that's in perpetuity and so on so forth. So this girl's transformed from a free person to a slave by human trafficking. That's really very—a lot of similarities with what we see today. And it's possible she didn't realize. She thought she was an indentured servant and was supposed to be freed at a set time. So she's in this household of a shopkeeper in New London for a couple of years, and then I think she probably realized she was not going to get freed when she hit the age at which servants were usually freed. So she ran away and went back to her community in Rhode Island. And her mother was sort of a known figure in what was called the Indian town there. And she brought suit that she had been—you know, she explained this history and brought suit.

Margaret Newell: And Rhode Island was a colony with a very high proportion of slaves, Indian and African. And the section where the Indian town was was the place that had the most plantation-like operations of any place in New England. So there were people there that owned dozens of slaves, that, you know, engaged in large-scale production of livestock. There's even some tobacco growing there and in Connecticut. I mean, so these were the people that were closest to the planter society of Virginia at the time. So slavery's very, very much enmeshed in these communities. These are communities that are really starting to put the crunch on both free Indians and free Africans in lots of ways. They're just trying to prevent free Africans from keeping livestock. They're trying to prevent slaves from visiting other people's houses. I mean, all these laws are being passed at the local town level. They're trying to prevent Africans and Indians from mixing socially and creating social space and space for exchange. Native Americans are still holding markets and big trade fairs. They're trying to keep Africans from showing up at these fairs and so on. And at that moment, this girl, you know, shows up in a courtroom and tries to sue for her freedom and she wins.

Margaret Newell: I mean, again, I'd expect, you know, in the bastion of slavery, the justice court takes her case, sends it to a jury. Jury says illegal enslavement, and they go back and sort of shame and humiliate all these people in Connecticut. So, I mean, this is a multi-colony case. There's court hearings in New England, too. She wins hands down completely, even after these other people, kidnappers in New London appeal. And she sues for reparations too, and is also awarded reparations. So I mean, these reparations cases just expose all of the seamy kinds of trafficking and show me she's not alone. I mean, how people got—how free people were turned into slaves in this society through really just outright kidnapping. And if the neighbors didn't do anything about it, if nobody protested, if the victims didn't have, you know, the language skills, the money, you know, the legal aid, I mean, you needed money to bring a court case. So, Sarah, once her former master appealed, her New London master appealed, she had to post bond. I mean, she had to post a lot of money, you know, to be able to fight these cases. So, you know, you had to have support to really make these cases work, which is why the cases don't represent the average. They are unusual cases of victory. But think of all the people that, you know, aren't showing up on historical records, who weren't able to bring these sorts of cases because they didn't have the resources to do it or the support.

Margaret Newell: And I have plenty of evidence of other people for whom, you know, they cannot resist these kidnappings. And they become enslaved, you know, in a personal act outside—they haven't been condemned by a court or anything. I mean, this is how slavery's working in a place like New England. It's working in a very personal way. And it's the state's failure to protect and intervene. So sometimes the state is causing the enslavement, it's selling people into slavery. It's participating to bolster the system. It's not really intervening to enforce its own laws and protect people in other ways, because the people who are tasked with law enforcement are the ones who are enslaving people and owning the slaves. You know, and slavery starts as an elite practice in the early- to mid-17th century, and it becomes democratized in the late-17th and 18th century. You know, slave ownership moves down to really kind of very ordinary families, and it lets these families amass wealth. And let's white men engage in politics and other moneymaking activities and, you know, just permits a lot more comfort and wealth for these households.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When I think about the narratives of American history and how they play out publicly, I have been following closely some of the criticism of the 1619 Project, and most recently I see a groundswell coming from the political right, saying that we're going to have a 1620 project and it's all gonna be about sort of New England and the cradle of democracy. It seems that they're going to be in for a rude awakening if they really dig deep into—in looking for a slavery-free society, if you will.

Margaret Newell: Yeah. No, I think that's the story about all these colonial societies that adopt slavery. I mean, it's just—even the ones that come in who are going to do it different this time. You know, Virginia is all over—it's the land of the Negra, the Spanish abuse of Indians, and we're not going to do that. They do it almost immediately. You know, New France, you know, the colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, which initially are set up to exclude slavery, buckle very quickly. And it's often really what the locals want that prevails. And what the locals want is to bind people's labor. So it's a very interesting and very sad—you know, it seems to be the colonial, you know—is essential to the colonial project. So well, you know, the 1619 people also tried to launch the House of Burgesses as the first elective representative body kind of went by the wayside as part of that celebration too. Yeah. No, I'm ready for 1620, you know? I mean, I think these are complicated stories.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely.

Margaret Newell: You know, it's like—you know, this is the thing. Yeah, the democracy did emerge. You know, these are societies with courts and, you know, procedures and so on. I mean, that's all to the good, generally. You know, who gets to take advantage of them and what are they used for? You know, that they're only as good as the people that occupy them, too. Slavery is one of the biggest and most important threads within the narrative of American history. So in a sense, acknowledging the presence of Native Americans in that narrative, then brings Native Americans more generally into the larger narrative of American history in ways that they really aren't involved in much history teaching. Native Americans tend to come in at the beginning and then they don't really come into the narrative too much after that. They might pop up here and there, but they're not in a kind of sustained way. So, you know, integrating the Native American story into the story of slavery is not just historically appropriate, but I think it's a way to, you know, consider Native Americans as part of what is, you know, an essential and formative thread in the creation of America.

Margaret Newell: And finally, I think it's important to understand the ways in which native slavery shaped the slave regime, because that in turn, you know, shaped the regime in which Africans entered and, you know, met different sets of experiences. And then the arrival of enslaved Africans changed life in dramatic ways for Native Americans as well, right? So, you know, Tiya Miles has a wonderful recent article where she talks a little bit about settler colonialism, which is this idea of, you know, the Europeans literally trying to replace Indians, seeking to replace Indians by, you know, bringing in population to settle the land and replace the native inhabitants. And, you know, she said enslaved Africans occupy this sort of complex position because they're sort of the tools of settler colonialism, you know? Yet they're not the people, you know, in power in these situations. So I think in thinking about all the complicated relationships, you know, marriage, community, that Indians and Africans created, it's also true that the arrival of Africans in greater numbers created new pressures. It did bring the adoption of some slave codes in ways that damaged the status of all Native Americans in New England, free and enslaved. And it pushed the relationship and the categorization and the way people thought about differences amongst people more—pushed it more in a direction of the creation of racial hierarchies. Now Indians occupied a different place in that hierarchy, but nonetheless, you know, you now had a racialized society with three categories by the mid-18th century. And so those are all things that I think where the inclusion of Indians makes for a more accurate and a richer portrayal, and helps us understand not only the history of slavery, the history of these colonial societies, but also Native American history.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Margaret Newell, I can't thank you enough for taking the time out to share these wonderful thoughts and insights and observations. It certainly has me rethinking the entire narrative of this early history. So thank you so much.

Margaret Newell: It's been my pleasure, Hasan. Thanks for the great questions.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely.

Meredith McCoy: Margaret Newell is a professor of history at The Ohio State University. She was awarded the 2016 James A. Rawley Prize for her book, Brethren By Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. She is also the author of From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England.

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. 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. Newell for sharing her insights with us. This podcast is produced by Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer, with additional support from 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 Aaron Ximm and Chris Zabriskie.

Meredith McCoy: If you liked what you heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And then tell us 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. And we’re your hosts for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

 

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