45. Season III, Episode VII: Native Sovereignty and Native Removal
A full transcript of this episode is available here.
In March of 2021, Deb Haaland, a member of New Mexico's Laguna Pueblo, became the first Native American Cabinet Secretary in US history. It was was a truly historic first, as Deb Haaland is part of a long history of Indigenous peoples that predates the United States as a nation. And today, we are going to explore the relationship between Indigenous peoples of America and the United States Government.
When the United States became an independent nation in 1776, a new era began, one of constant conflict. Native peoples claimed sovereignty over land and resources across the continent, while the US Government often called for the removal of Native peoples from those lands.
To help us understand this history, we turned to two expert guests. First, we spoke to Dr. Christina Snyder, a professor of history at Penn State University. Dr. Snyder sets the scenes for us by exploring Native sovereignty in the earliest years of the United States. Dr. Snyder also takes us through the most infamous period of Native removal in US History, the era of Andrew Jackson.
To understand how the relationship between Native peoples and the US Government changed in the 20th century, we turned to Dr. William Bauer. Dr. Bauer is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in Northern California.
Dr. Bauer explains the major changes that took place in US and Indigenous relations at the turn of the 20th Century, and he shares some remarkable stories and insight on struggles for Native sovereignty during the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon, and Barack Obama.
Guests:
Dr. Christina Snyder is the McCabe Greer Professor of the American Civil War Era at Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Christina Snyder is a historian of colonialism, race, and slavery, with a focus on North America from the pre-contact era through the nineteenth century.
Snyder’s first book, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America, was published by Harvard University Press in 2010 and earned a wide range of accolades, including the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the James H. Broussard Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the John C. Ewers Prize from the Western History Association. Snyder’s latest book, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson was released by Oxford University Press in early 2017. Her current projects include: a textbook, American Horizons: US History in a Global Context, co-authored with Michael Schaller, Janette Thomas Greenwood, Andrew Kirk, Sarah J. Purcell, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean; a co-authored book with Zara Anishanslin on American history through material culture; and a solo project tentatively titled Slavery After the Civil War: The Slow Death and Many Afterlives of Bondage.
Snyder is also the author of more than twenty-five articles and review essays, and her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Snyder’s work has been featured on PBS, NPR and Slate .
Dr. William Bauer is a Professor and the Director of American Indian & Indigenous Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Dr. William (Willy) Bauer is a professor of history and a citizen of the Round Valley Reservation in northern California. He received his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Bauer offers classes on American Indian history, the history of American Indian gaming, and the American West. He is also UNLV's faculty liaison to the Newberry Library's Consortium on American Indian Studies.
Bauer is the author of California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (University of Washington Press, 2016) and "We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here": Work, Community and Memory on California's Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). He has also edited the third edition of Major Problems in American Indian History (Cengage, 2015) and published an introduction to a revised edition of John W. Caughey's McGillivray of the Creeks (University of South Carolina Press), and essays on California Indian history in the Western Historical Quarterly, Native Pathways; American Indian Culture and Economic Change in the Twentieth Century (University of Colorado Press), and A Companion to California History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
Bauer is currently writing a history of California Indians and working on a family biography, based on the life of his great-grandfather.