The Need for a National Reckoning

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It makes it easy to compare news sources, break free from algorithms, and think critically about where you get your information takeake coverage of, say, the White House reflecting pool If you go to ground. News, you can click that story and explore coverage from ninety one different sources According to the platform, forty percent of the coverage is center or nonpisan If you click, rightite, you can see right leaning coverage, stories that focus on President Trump promising to begin repairs immediately If you click left, headlines note Trump is claiming without evidence vandals are behind the pool's woes, and calling the reflecting pool a seaweed infested basin All of these headlines are real, but they are pretty different Ground News helps you cover your blind spots, and its analysis of ownership data allows you to see who is funding any given outlet before you read their coverage The Washington Post has called Ground News one of journalism's major consumption shifts of the year. The Nobel Peace Center called it an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview Go to groundneews. com slash next to get forty percent off your unlimited vantage subscription groundneews. com slash next. Use our link so they know we sent you. groundneews d. com slash next First off, Rebecca, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself? Tell me who you are and what you do Oso Gohinda Dant Lle Gla Um Hi, my name is Rebecca Magel. I'm a citizen of Cherokee Nation And I am a writer and a journalist and the host of the podcast First America First America is not just an inversion of the Trumpy phrase America first, though it is that Bebecca's attempt to understand why Native people have been written out of American history In this moment when we're about to celebrate a big two hundred fiftieth birthday, be inundated by stars and stripes and eagles and fireworks, Rebecca starts with a different symbol, the visual shorthand used by the founders as they tried to break away from England For the founding generation, that symbol was Native people. the figure of a native person appeared in political cartoons. The founding generation put Native people on guns, on pamphlets, on ships. One of the like biggest examples is when they actually stormed in the Boston Harbor to throw tea overboard, they put on a costume and they dressed up like Native Americans, they dressed up like they call themselves Mohawks Early Americans were working out what does it mean to be American? What is our national identity And they were in a tricky place, right? Beacause they're not English anymore. They're actually literally fighting a war to no longer be English they're not yet something else Right? They're sort of in this in between place And Playing Indian is kind of the bridge that gets them to this new American identity an identity that we as a country are wrestling with now. This summer We will tell ourselves a lot of stories about what it means to be an American And I think the big argument of first America is that without us Actually the story is wrong. It's just straight up not what happened And so you to get to the truth of our founding, to get to the truth of the origins of the United States You have to include the native part of the story Day on the show how America's original sin is written into who we are today I'm Lizzie O'Leary, sitting in for Mary Harris, and you're listening to what nexte. Stick around. When it comes to looking your best, Beachbum tanning does it better. Beachbum delivers advanced sun and spray tanning, luxury skincare, and an elevated salon experience designed around you. It's why so many guests trust Beach Bum for flawless color and real confidence. And now Beachbum is expanding wellness services to many locations, with red light therapy and infrared sauna, with more on the way. Rcharge your body, refresh your skin, reset your day. Beachbum isn't just tanning. It's full spectrum wellness. 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With all trails, you can discover trails nearby or trails worth traveling to and explore confidently with offline maps and on trail navigation. Whether you're looking for a laid back walk with family For something more adventurous to get your heart pumping. All Trails gives you the tools you need to get out there and find your outside Download the free app today and make the most of your summer with all trails. Let talk about the Dclaration of Independence The part that I think so many Americans are taught in school is that we hold these truths to be self evident, you know L, liberty, pursuit of happiness In the first episode of this show, You focus on a different part I wonder if you could explain that to me Yeah, absolutely. So the part we all know is the part that, you know, Thomas Jefferson is pontificating about these enlightenment ideals. It's the preamble. It's kind of the introduction But when you look at the document, the document is actually just kind of a list of grievances against George III, the King of England. the simplest way I think of to think of the Declaration of Independence is kind of like a breakup letter. It's like our founding fathers are breaking up with the King of England and it's that part of a breakup where you tell person that you're breaking up with everything that they did wrong. And so that list of grievances, there are a lot of historians that think that that list has an order and that it starts with smaller grievances and ends with the things that the founders and the founding generation were most angry about And the last complaint, kind of the crescendo in this long list, is about quote merciless Indian savages So alongside those beautiful, lofty enlightenment ideals Native people are called savages, which was a way to say that we are actually less than human. that we actually weren't entitled to those basic human rights One of the main reasons that colonists rebelled against the crown was actually that they wanted more indigenous land. They wanted to move further west into the continent of North America And the king of England was telling them no. You know, that that version of our origin doesn't fit nice into the like taxation without representation, independence, democracy. version of the story. It's as much a part of the origin of the United States as the rest of that. And when we leave that story out, we actually don't fully understand where we came from as a country I think so much of the understanding of American mythology can be explained by a sort of History is written by the Victors. It's a crude expression, but Do you understand where I'm going with this? And yet This goes deeper than that. It really does feel like this foundational American myth that that governments and American organizations have really latched onto. And I wonder What you think gives it that emotional potency that seems to go beyond These were the people in power who wrote down their version of Ultimate myth that we tell ourselves in the United States is that our founders created a democracy And that's not the full story. Um because those men also wanted an empire actuallyctually wasn't wasn't that different than what England was doing They wanted to control land and people who actually didn't have elections, didn't have representation, wouldn't have accountability, didn't have any say in what that government would be And so at the same time, they were building up, you know, while extremely limited, a representative democracy re also building out an empire. And that empire ruled by top down tyrannical rule And I think that's the part of the story that every side of the political spectrum gets wrong. You know, I mean, you see even like in the No Kings protest, like that whole name of the protest is the idea that our founding fathers said no to monarchy. they said no to tyrants, and they threw that off And what is more accurate to say is that they didn't want to be colonial subjects themselves, right? Like they didn't want to be colonial subjects But they still wanted to be an empire. They just wanted to be the center of power of that empire. And they actually, so they call it an empire for liberty. That's how they describe it experiencinging the rise of authoritarianism in the United States And people are looking around and saying Where did this come from? How could this be happening? You know, peopleeople are looking to Hungary and Germany and Russia, For example with authoritarianism And the truth is, Is that? government. Since the founding has been authoritarian. Part of our government has governed people without their consent, without elections, without constitutional norms, without limits, without the kind of balance of power that we're all used to since the founding. And it's changed over time, right? But that first group of people that were governed that way were indigenous people. And so much of what the current administration is doing isn't borrowing , you know right wing leaders from other parts of the globe or other parts of history, It's actually just borrowing from this body of American law. That's all we've existed. and that's actually why it's been so hard to fight because it's already been baked into the system Did that? did that surprise you you've made a lot of pieces of work around Indigenous history and the law and indigenous identity And yet when I listen to you on this show. it did seem like that interwoven authoritarian question was something was a little new to you or maybe the scale of it was? Yeah, I think it's something I learned while I was doing this reporting, you know the project was a collaboration with some indigenous scholars. So a lot of that comes from a legal scholar named Maggie Blackhawk's work. Basically it goes like this. You know, when our government set out to take Iigenous plant, you know, to dispossess us It had to build a government to do that. Like I think we don't think about that, but like it had to build a government to colonize. It had to build a government to dispossess. You know, after we were forced into shrinking reservations, we still had to be governed. so we built a government that knew how to detain people that knew how to detain families, and knew how to place people in concentration camps And that expertise and that knowledge and those mechanisms They didn't go away. The U.S kind of just applied it to different groups of people. So you see it being very consciously applied to you know foreign territories, colonies like Puerto Rico and Guam during colonization. You see it also applied to immigrants. So a lot of this stuff gets baked into immigration law And so you see in this moment, so many things that are happening actually go back to policies that were first created to dispossess indigenous peoples. like bombing Iran bombing boats in the Caribbean, abducting the leader of Venezuela, deploying the military and the National Guard to U. S. cities evenven the way that Trump is using IC and border patrol. I mean, we talk about why is the U. S. border So militarized well, for the first century of our Republic, the border was a literal war zone Right? And so so much of this stuff goes back to that history that we that we constantly leave out. And I think that that's one of the reasons as a country We're really struggling to understand how we got here Is that why you start this show in Minnesota with Renee Goods killing You know that That was just that was pure happenstance. And so What happened was I had traveled to Minnesota to interview a historian named Nick Estes, who's a citizen of the Lower Bural Sioux tribe. And so one of the things Nick and I had planned to do was to go to this fort that today is like there's a replica for it go there on school trips to learn about a fort in the military. And in the eighteen sixties, that fort was a concentration camp for Dakota people during the Dakota Wars And the concentration camp was part of a bigger policy to basically force all Dakota people to leave the state of Minnesota U It was extremely violent campaign And so we're there going, you know, at the fort and it's the day that I sa killed Renee Good and Nick gets a call from his wife that ISa just shot and killed someone. And so we You know, I was supposed to fly out that night. We kind of canceled our flights me and my producer and we decided to just stay and report on what was happening on the ground And the next day we were back at Fort Sneelling but for a protest because on the Fort Snelling campus is kind of a big area Um ISS headquarters. in Minneapolis, IS is there. because that that area, the Fort Slling area is still federal Land And it's federal land because it was once a military reservation. And so it's the same thing is happening in the same place, detaining people are rounding people up There's also that Y there And that's the thing that really that really surprised me is that I think we think of history as sort of repeating itself as almost like this muscle memory rightite of like, okay, our government has done this before, it'll do it again And what I learned is that W it comes to indigenous history. It's also the skeleton. it's the structure of how and why our government is able to do these things We'll be right back after a quick break When it comes to looking your best, Beachbum tanning does it better. Beachbum delivers advanced sun and spray tanning, luxury skincare, and an elevated salon experience designed around you. It's why so many guests trust Beach Bum for flawless color and real confidence. And now Beachbum is expanding wellness services to many locations, with red light therapy and infrared sauna, with more on the way. Rcharge your body, refresh your skin, reset your day. Beachbum isn't just tanning. It's full spectrum wellness. Visit beachbum dot com to find a location near you Hey, it's Paige from Giggly Squad, and you know those moments when you just wanna slow down and actually treat yourself. That's exactly where Hagand' comes in. Hagand' just launched a brand new flavor, coffee almond Tffee ice cream. It's rich, smooth, creamy, indulgent, and honestly too good to rush through. Take your sweet time, That's Ds. find Hagendu's new cooffee almond Toffee ice creream at retailers nationwide thinking about the time in which you are making and releasing this show. go back and look at the Trump executive orrder, restoring truth insanity to American history It basically meant removing plaques that reference the slave trade And things like that And I guess I wondered Do you worry that the Trump presidency has shifted the overton window so far that Okay, let's say he leaves office, those plques go back up. There's a little more context for history And people exhale thinking like, oh, well we have a little more understanding now, and yet all the things you're talking about go unexamined You know, it's interesting. As a native person, I'm not My history not being included when Americans talk about their history isn't new, right? So it's not like it's not a problem. of the Trump era. it it's It's been my whole life. It's like all I've ever known, you know? I mean Um We're constantly left out of the story And I think Like when I started this journey, I thought what I was doing was trying to get thing that people couldn't see was me, right? wasas like my community was Native Americans, was the native part of the story And I thought that that was kind of the project and the service that I was doing was putting native people back into the story And as I God. into the truth of the founding of our government. what I realized is that the thing that Americans can't see is America And if if we really want to guard against this type of government coming back Um we have to get down to that foundation. And that's that that's much scarier problem to face But I think it's one that we have to. and I'll say why is that. I think that if we think feeeding authoritarianism is going to be an easy solution I think it'll be like chopping the head off of a weed and it'll only grow back stronger. And I think we already seen that between Trump one and Trump two, right We all we all voted we voted as hard as we can vote. You know, We won that election And then it just came back, it actually came back stronger. And so and so defeating this is going to take is going take more work than that Is there somethingomet akin to the Canadian model of actually sort of reckoning with fundamental sin that America should do with Native nations. Yeah. You know, it's interesting when you think about our government You know, some like one of the other foundational ss of the United States is human enslavement, right? Right? And they're like they're the two biggies. Right, right With human enslavement, you know we get constitutional amendments and obviously the legacy of that policy is still with us, right? It's not like there's some magic bullet that solved the problem entirely. I mean just look at what's happening with the Voting Rights Act right now U But at least we have gone through some kind of constitutional process to say, This is wrong. this is outside of our democratic values We shouldn't do that as a government With what our government did to indigenous people We've never had that edit. You know, we've we've never had that moment to say, you know what genocide outside of our values as a democracy. Genocide is not democratic. We don't want to do that. And I'll give one example This comes from the scholarship again of Maggie Blackhawk, who's an Ojibwe legal scholar And she looked, she did a deep dive into Japanese internment camps and concentration camps during World War two. And what she found was that some of the first camps were run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And some of the first cants were actually located on reservations. Be the Bureau of Indian Affairs knew how to detain families They knew how to concentrate and detain families and our government consciously took what they knew how to do to Native Americans and applied it to a different group of people. And so the stake of us never having had that edit as a government They're high They're really high. So I w wantanna go back to twenty fourteen, Tonahhasi Coatates writes the case for reparations And it kicks off this series of conversations And I also think is one of the things that starts to kick off this ferocious back. And I wonder How to wrestle with the reaction that often comes from white America of