The Origins of Indian Reservations w/Shannon O'Loughlin | Joe Rogan

So let's go to that then, since this is... The United States has a very strange situation with Native Americans, where Native Americans have reservations, and on those reservations they have sovereignty, they have different rules, they can do what they want. It's very strange. It's like there's nations inside of our nation. Like, how do you feel about that? So it's a system that's been imposed by... Maybe the best way to start is kind of start with the beginning. Like, how did we get to where we are today? There... Phew, and there's a lot of information. And so you got to stop me if I start getting too carried away, all right? No, we have plenty of time and a lot of interest, so don't worry about that. So there are three Supreme Court cases that happened in the 1800s, and there was a justice named John Marshall, who was actually buying India land from the US government through US grants. And so he was an interested party. But he was making decisions that set forward the kind of watershed principles that continue to affect who Native Americans and Indian nation governments are today. And so those three cases, the first one was called Johnson v. McIntosh, and it was in 1823. And it didn't involve any Indians. It was a non-Indians coming to court to try to determine who owned a piece of land in Indiana. And there was one guy, Johnson, who was a plaintiff, who had purchased the land directly from the Piankasha Indians, who are related to the Miami tribe today. And then the defendant was McIntosh, and he purchased land from the US government. And so the case, of course, was who had the proper rights. And through that case, through the narrative that John, that Justice Marshall created, he brought forward a piece of international law that affects us today, and that's the Doctrine of Discovery. Have you ever heard of the Doctrine of Discovery? No. So that's, any Christian civilized European nation has the right to conquer Indigenous heathen peoples. So this was the principle that this case was based on, and it set forward this weird relationship that tribes in the US government have today. So if the US, if the Christian European peoples had the rights to take land away from tribes because they were an inferior race, which is, this is language from the case. They're inferior race. They're savages. They're unable to govern themselves, and they only have a right of occupancy. So that was the first of three cases that Justice Marshall decided, and of course, he was an interested party in the whole thing because he had purchased land from the United States, and he wanted to make sure his land was secure. The second case was Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and this was the time during the Indian Revolution and this was the time during the Indian Removal Act that Andrew Jackson had gotten through Congress to remove the Eastern Indians west of the Mississippi River into Indian territory, which is of course now Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas area. And again, this was a case that actually the Cherokee Nation tried to bring before the Supreme Court. And before the Supreme Court could even make a decision on the, and I just realized I didn't even tell you the facts of the case. So there was, I'm getting ahead of myself. I apologize. No worries. This is incredible experience to be here, so I'm a little bit nervous. So in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Georgia was trying to assert its laws over the Cherokee Nation. And so the Cherokee Nation brought this case before the Supreme Court to say, you know, that the state does not have any right to assert any of its laws against us. And what Justice Marshall did is said, well, you're not a foreign nation, so you can't bring a case before the Supreme Court and determine that tribes were a pseudo sovereign nation, that they were still under tutelage and they needed to be civilized. Again, the same kind of inferior, savage language in this case. And held that the federal government had plenary power over tribal affairs and that the Cherokee Nation couldn't bring this case to court. So what ended up happening is some missionaries who were serving the Cherokee Nation actually developed a case and violated Georgia laws so they could bring a case before the Supreme Court and that case was called Wooster v. Georgia and I think that was about 1832, 1831. And in that case, it was ruled that the United States had a guardian and ward type relationship with tribes. And so we were the wards, they were our guardian, and that set up this weird dynamic that still exists today, the Supreme Court's and other courts cite in decisions today to basically take away more and more rights. So that's the watershed basis for this weird relationship that we have. And it's based on racism. It's based on tribes being an inferior people. They not be civilized and so here we are. So help direct me into another question here. Well, that's a fascinating thing. The idea that the United States government is, they're like the big daddy to look over the tribes and the only way the tribes can exist is if they exist the European way. Right, the great white father. Yeah. And so all this was happening while they were trying to conquer the West. So all this was happening around the gold rush time. And this was happening before then. So this was happening in the 1830s. When was the gold rush? The gold rush was 1850s, 1849, 1850s. So it was a little bit before that and they're trying to, they're basically trying to take over land, right? Oh, absolutely. So Georgia wanted that land for themselves. They wanted to remove the Cherokee and of course the other, quote unquote, civilized tribes that were in the Southeast at that time. And that's what's so interesting is because you see throughout time, and this is a little bit why I have a problem with some of the books that you've read, is because they've taken small pictures of what was going on and kind of removed the context of what was really happening. There are so many tribes across the United States that tried everything to resist or comply or assimilate so that they could maintain their way of life, maintain their lands, and continue to prosper as they had been. But the United States was obviously a formidable opponent. And regardless of, for example, the five civilized tribes and their tactic was to assimilate, was to go to school and educate themselves and learn English. And even though they did that and they did everything that the United States wanted them to do, they were forced off their land to the west into Indian territory. The Comanche who you've learned about through the book, those events happened during a point of time and that was their effort at resistance. They saw how disease wiped out their brethren from other nations. They knew that folks were coming to get them. And so that was their way of resisting being assimilated and having everything taken away from them. In the defense of the authors of those books, they did cover a lot of that. These books are in no way taking the side of the United States government. The most amazing thing about Empire of the Summer Moon was just how special the relationship that the Comanches had to the land and about how when Jessica Ann Parker, no, Cynthia Ann Parker, she's the photo out there of the woman that's breastfeeding her child, she was kidnapped when she was nine and assimilated with the Comanches and then was re-kidnapped by the United States government when she was in her 30s and didn't want to go back. She missed the Comanche life and through her and through her depictions and her descriptions of the way they lived, the understanding of it, they got a better sense of what she missed about that life and that they had an incredible relationship with the land. They lived basically just in teepees. They were very nomadic. They just followed around the buffalo and they had in her way of looking at it, a magical existence in comparison to this really boring life that these settlers had. When she looked at it, it was interesting because she was a girl who was born, I would just describe it, a white settler. Then from the age of nine on lived as a Comanche. She had sort of a view of both worlds. She very much took the side of the Comanches and she wanted to go back. She had spoken Comanche in the book. There's an encounter where they bring in someone who was a Comanche to speak to her and she grabs him. She's like, take me back. We're going to leave. Let's get out of here now. Her thought was like, we got to get out of here. This way of life is bullshit. I want to go back to the Comanches. She just didn't understand that that way of life was slowly going away. Her son, Quanah Parker, who is that photograph over there that's on bullets that somebody made for me, I don't even know where that came from. Somebody sent me that. He was the last Comanche chief. During her lifetime and her son's lifetime was the last of it. It's a very sad story. But you know the Comanches still live today, right? Sure, in Oklahoma. There's quite a few of them. I've actually been in contact with some of those guys. Oh, that's awesome. Yes, it's very cool. But they do, but they don't live the way they did, right? I mean, their way of life was removed. I mean, they were wiped out.