AnthroPawlogy Unearthed 103.1: Interview with Sage Grove

In this bonus episode of AnthroPawlogy Unearthed, we talk to Sage Grove about her experience being Native in the southeastern United States. 

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Creators and Guests

Host

Lachlan Vester

What is AnthroPawlogy Unearthed?

Stories from the past and their impact on the present day. This podcast aims to illustrate how the past has a very real impact on the present. "AnthroPawlogy Unearthed" is a podcast from WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1/HD-2.

00:00
Lachlan
When talking about people native to North America, there's a lot of disinformation and manipulation of history in favor of white settlers. The idea of the noble savage has been ingrained in the public education system. From elementary school Thanksgiving celebrations to high school classrooms, these ideas dehumanize the people who really lived and died in the Americas pre1942. Today, we're going back in time to explore the first steps into North America and all the way back to the modern day and the issues that plague reservations and Native communities in general today. Welcome to Anthropology Unearthed. I'm your host, Lachlan Vester. And today we're talking about Native communities in North America. Just a disclaimer before we get started here, I myself am not Native, nor is any of my family Native. I just happen to find Native culture and history to be fascinating and wonderful.

01:06
Lachlan
I also want to mention that there will not be as many jokes on this episode due to the somber tone required when talking about the attempted ethnic cleansing of an entire population of people. And with that, let's get on with the episode. According to our current understanding, the first humans set foot in North America between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago. The most widely accepted theory for the peopling in North America is humans crossing the Bering Strait from Siberia into modern day Alaska, walking their way down the continent. While this is the idea most common in grade school, some scholars argue that people may have been seafaring coast dwellers using rafts to traverse the beaches of modern day Canada, Washington, Oregon and California. California. Okay, before we get any further into the story, I feel the need to explain who the Clovis cultures were.

01:56
Lachlan
The Clovis cultures were a group of Paleolithic people who were known for their distinct Clovis points, which are rather large, uniquely shaped points, AKA arrowheads. Clovis cultures are the oldest confirmed note the confirmed there cultures of hunter and gatherers, North America. With that aside out of the way, let's continue with our journey with our current understanding of people venturing into the new world. All that we know is that we really don't know that much. All we have are ideas of what and where people would have come from. Namely, the Bering Strait. For those who may be unfamiliar, the Bering Strait is the area of water between the coast of modern day Alaska and in the far reaches of Siberia. What we do know is that people crossed the Bering Strait at some point to enter the Americas.

02:49
Lachlan
While this may not have been the only way people made it to the New World, it is definitely one of the ways people made it to America. The way that people were able to cross such a large body of water was that, well, there was no water to be seen at the time. The area was almost completely frozen over and or the global sea levels were so low at the time that there was no land abound for these travelers to make their way across the modern sea. Now theories of how this crossing translates to millions of people inhabiting north and South America are far and wide. However, we know that there was a mix of ways people came to different parts of the Americas.

03:32
Lachlan
A more contested idea of how people may have made it to South America is through island hopping throughout the Polynesian islands and into the Americas in a seafaring manner. While this is not the most popular idea, it is one of the more interesting to me personally. The idea of people braving the Pacific Ocean in order to explore the world and expand their horizons is extremely enticing to me. We often forget that the people of the distant past are still human. Just like us in their lifetimes they had the same curious spirit and need to explore that we feel today. Now let's jump ahead a ways to around the year 0 AD. While an 18,000 year jump may be a little jarring, I just have to point out this specific site in Newark, Ohio, not New Jersey. We are not going to New Jersey.

04:22
Lachlan
That's probably the only joke you will hear today. However, I cannot pass up making fun of New Jersey. Anyways, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are a magnificent representation of the skill and technological understanding of native people of North America. Spanning several acres, these earthworks consist of several different works. The most impressive of the works in my opinion is the Octagon Earthworks. This site was built with the sun and moon in mind and line up with solar and lunar events. This is kind of like Stonehenge, but like on steroids. Like this thing is huge. I. I would request that you look it up and just look at a map. It is bananas. Despite the wonder that this site inspires within me, others didn't quite see it the same way. There was actually a golf course built on part of the works in the early 1910s.

05:16
Lachlan
This is absolutely insane to me personally, but you know, hey, what do I know? I just run a podcast. The Hopo Works are hardly ever talked about in the public school systems, which is a shame, as they are as of 2023, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Now you're going to see this as a running theme throughout a large amount of what we talk about on this podcast, and that is the public school system absolutely failing people. So in my personal experience, coming from North Carolina in a rural county, we learned maybe about the first Thanksgiving and I guess maybe the Trail of Tears in late high school. But until I got into university, I didn't hear about a lot of the things I'm going to talk about and have talked about in this show so far. And I think that's just a shame.

06:11
Lachlan
And I think that it's really a disservice to everybody because Native people in North America have contributed so much culture and just love to the world that, you know, doesn't get appreciated in a way that it should Anyways, with that tangent over, the fact that these works were built at such a scale without the tools available to help those who built the pyramids at Giza or the ziggurats at Ur goes to show how ingenious the Hopewell people were. The lack of recognition that indigenous North Americans get for their genius, skill and overall greatness is abhorrent. There is no reason that these people should be forgotten. Their contributions to global heritage is just as valid as those of the Romans, the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians.

07:02
Lachlan
And again, this is why I'm talking about this, because most people have never heard of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, and that is just a disservice to everyone who hasn't heard of them because they're awesome and you should check them out. Go to UNESCO's website or just the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks website and look it up after. It's again, super duper cool. One of my favorite UNESCO World Heritage sites by far. That's part of the reason that I made this whole episode, because I just found it so fascinating and needed an excuse to talk about it and make people listen to me talk about it. Anyways, let's jump ahead once more to the far less distant past the 1800s.

07:45
Lachlan
By the early 1800s, there was a large amount of violence against Native people being propagated by settlers in the west as well as in the eastern United States. While your high school probably covered the Trail of Tears, it probably did not cover the widespread small scale violence against Native people pre Trail of Tears. Even with us landing in the 1800s, we're avoiding several genocides, including but not limited to King Philip's War, the Tuscarora War, and the Yamasi War. While these are known colloquially as wars, they're more of a slaughter of innocent people protecting their homelands from invaders. Now is the time where I Have to introduce the number one villain of the story, the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson.

08:31
Lachlan
Jackson was convinced that he had the ultimate power to ethnically cleanse North America to create a nation of and for white people minus the people kept as slaves by said white people. Remember this is the before the Civil War, the most talked about of these efforts being of course, the Trail of Tears. In the Trail of Tears, the Jackson administration pushed or removed the Five Civilized Tribes from the east coast of the United States. Another aside here because I cannot stand the phrase Five Civilized Tribes. This was the term used to describe the tribes that adopted the Anglo American. Again, think white habits and cultures. This did not make them any more civilized than their sister tribes. It just made them more attractive to the white colonizers. These tribes were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw Creek and Seminole respectively.

09:25
Lachlan
These tribes were able to sustain a presence in the east longer than others by appeasing the colonizers. However, Jackson wanted more. In particular, Jackson wanted Georgia from the Cherokee. Under the treaties current to 1829, the year that Jackson was elected, the Cherokee had their own nation in Georgia that was sovereign and this was upheld by the Supreme Court. However, Jackson had no intention of letting that slide. The Cherokee were given an ultimatum. Either leave their ancestral homeland or be removed from it. By 1830, one year after Jackson's election, the Trail of Tears was in full effect. While most people know the Trail of Tears was brutal, I don't think many of us have grasped how insane it was. 60,000 people were removed from their homeland in the southeast and forced to walk to the western side of the Mississippi.

10:23
Lachlan
If you let that just sink in for a minute walk to the western side of the Mississippi river from Georgia. If you were a part of the Trail of Tears, you had a 37% chance of not making it to your destination. That is one in every three people who are forced to relocate dying on along the way. This could have been for a multitude of reasons including exposure and just being too weak to keep going. Because again, Andrew Jackson is forcing you to walk from Georgia to the western side of the Mississippi River. I would like to stop here and point out that one in three people is a low ball estimate. The number could be closer to one in every two. That's the thing. The records were not kept.

11:18
Lachlan
People perpetuating this genocide knew what they were doing and did everything in their power to cover it up. If you're not seeing a mirror to the modern day yet, maybe turn on the TV for a minute, look at what's happening around you. This is why I think it's so important to focus on the misdeeds in the past, because they always turn up again and again when people ignore them. Even those who made it west of the Mississippi, their land wasn't guaranteed to them. This is where what today is called checkerboarding would happen, where people would be given a lot, but they could not afford to maintain it. This caused them to sell their land to settlers, leading to the reservation that was laid out looking more like a checkerboard than a cohesive area.

12:18
Lachlan
As you can see, there is a lot that has been buried through the public school system. The disservice to all of us cannot be understated. Once again, we're going to jump ahead in time quite a bit, so hold onto your hats. In the modern day, there are systematic issues plaguing Native communities. I feel like as a young child growing up in the American Southeast, there was minimal talk of the abuses of Native people. There was a focus on the positive interactions between Native people and white colonizers. The only time anyone mentioned abuses and genocides was when lightly talking about the Trail of Tears and the conquering of South American empires. There was virtually no talk of genocide throughout my primary schooling.

13:02
Lachlan
While I could pick up on the fact that there was more I wasn't being taught, there was nobody really breaking the fourth wall on this one. Specifically, in North Carolina, there are still a couple of Cherokee communities surviving in the western part of the state. The only reason most people even know about this is the casino on their land. While there is no reservation per se, the land is in a federal trust and is owned mostly by Native people. So why talk about it now? It's all in the past, right? Wrong. There's still an ongoing war for survival being fought by Native people today. Under the current system, there are no safety nets on the tightrope being walked by the people on and off reservations. Here with me today to talk about modern conditions for Indigenous people, I have Sam Lowry.

13:52
Sam
Yeah, well, I was raised in a place called Robson county that is pretty much the, like, indigenous homeland for my people. We have quite a bit of infrastructure of all indigenous stuff down there. But yeah, I was raised in a place called Maxton. More specifically, it's kind of on the outskirts of where our tribal headquarters is. That's in Pembroke. Maxton's really small. Like a lot smaller. Like a thousand people, two thousand people. It was cool growing up. It was just small. I wasn't really into the culture until a lot later because my Mom's white, and my dad, he's. He's Native, but he. He was, like. He was raised outside of Robeson County. He didn't come back until way later because my grandfather was in the military, so he was base to base. Like I said, you know, I didn't get.

14:46
Sam
I got real big in the culture when I was 14, and then I started doing powwows. I was an Eastern war dancer. So basically, that dance style first took, like, hold up north, so like, the Northeast, so, like, you know, Rhode island and Massachusetts and all that, and then it sprinkled down into, you know, deeper parts of. Into the south. And. Yeah, so that's the style I dance. It's basically just a representation of what our warriors would look like and. Yeah.

15:19
Lachlan
So in your experience, how did the education system, and more specifically the public education system, handle Native culture within the classroom?

15:27
Sam
Well, so I only went to public school until about second grade, but in. In public school, even back. Back home, there was no representation. You know, we would. We would wear the little cut cardboard feathered headdresses and things like that aren't actually representative of the. The indigenous people on the east coast and, you know, things like that. So it kind of felt weird as a kid because I always told I was indigenous, and I lived like that. Okay? Like, you know, this is my people. It's who I am. Lumbee. But when you'd go to school, you'd only hear about, like, you know, the Lakota and the Dakota and the Cheyenne and all these different tribes, and it would kind of. It kind of.

16:16
Sam
It kind of made me feel, like, isolated and not secure in my, like, actual cultural identity because we had no representation as a child, and there's barely even representation now. And, you know, especially because of my skin. Skin tone. It was also, like, an extra struggle because I was like, I don't look like these people in these. In these history texts. Does that mean I'm not indigenous? But, yeah, like, it was pretty rough. I never faced, like, bullying in the school for my. For my heritage, which I know some people have. But, you know, like I said, I went to a school in a predominantly indigenous. Right. Like, population at the school, so. And they're all my cousins. And so, I mean, like, it kind of fit in. But, yeah, it was pretty rough. It was just kind of, like, isolating.

17:05
Sam
Very isolating, because it's like, you know, it's pretty isolating.

17:09
Lachlan
So, not to be too direct, but where have you noticed the system failing? Not only you, but, like, Your loved ones. And like you said, you grew up with like in the communities like your neighbors. How have you seen not only the federal system, but just systems of support in general failing?

17:28
Sam
I think the biggest failure that is in Robeson county, in my personal opinion, all my neighbors indigenous in Robinson County. I just feel like there's just a lack of solidity. There's no actual federal, like solidity promises that you know, and like, you know, you go to Robinson county, there's abandoned buildings, there's crime rates at an all time high. And it's like there's a lot of failures. And I think the biggest one from our government is not funding us in the sense of allowing us to, I don't know, like, have affordable health care and our free health care and things like that and you know, live in poverty, like just live in poverty. And that's like the biggest failure is poverty in Robeson county that I've been through, family's been through. It's just poverty. That's like the biggest issue.

18:30
Lachlan
And do you think that poverty comes from a place of systematic failure in terms of like this, the system's just not there for people?

18:40
Sam
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe that because there's no, there's no system in Robinson. There's no actual solid jobs. There's nothing that we, as, you know, Lumbee or indigenous people in Robinson county could do, could work. Like, there's no, like, it's very, very desolate and like, it's just, you know, overall poor. So I do think it's. I do think that. I do think it's like, from like these, these systems have set us up to fail that the government has implemented because, you know, in the past and all throughout indigenous country, forced relocations, slavery, especially here on the east coast, a lot of indigenous people were slaves. And of course, you know, in North Carolina, South Carolina, you know, you're surrounded by a lot of hate and bigotry in the past.

19:37
Sam
And especially like, you know, our older generations, they were raised in times where racism was an all time high and prejudices and lack of education due to these prejudices. So all of just the whole system has, you know, played a huge role into why indigenous people, especially in Robeson county, for me, because that's what I could speak on, have kind of, you know, like just felt us because there's no, like I said, there's. There's no support and you know, it's more of a widespread thing Too. It's not just indigenous people.

20:14
Sam
Like a lot of, you know, people who are in poverty inner cities or in rural poverty, they all kind of have these same, like, these same struggles where the government doesn't care about them, the government wants them out, the government looks at them more as a nuisance than an actual people group to support. And in Robeson county, like I said, it's kind of the same way.

20:39
Lachlan
And so how do you personally kind of suggest creating a better system or bettering, not tearing the whole system down if that's not necessary, but just bettering the system in general?

20:51
Sam
I don't know. It's. That's a tough one because it's.

20:55
Lachlan
Kind of a loaded question.

20:55
Sam
Yeah, yeah, because it, cause that has a lot of like for me, what I may want, it may not be what other people, you know, Lumbee or indigenous people want in Robeson county for their own communities. But I don't know, I just feel like there needs to be more community based things. There needs to be more parks, there needs to be more things where the youth could actually be engaged and like, because if you don't have engagement, if you, if you don't have these amenities, the youth are going to have to find a way to ease their boredom. And usually that's through not so good means.

21:38
Lachlan
Right?

21:38
Sam
So I feel like to ensure that our future generations, wealth and growth there needs to be strong community implicated things. So better schoolings, you know, more amenities. And I think for the older generation, see, it's tricky because it's like, I think, I don't really know like what could truly fix those things because it's so. It has such a long line, right. Of there's been such a long continuous line of just neglection, abuse and violence and racism and you know, all these horrible things that have happened to indigenous people where it's kind of difficult where like I, you know, I can't personally think of like what could the true root of like the true fix for it because, you know, it's just been such a long, like I said, chain of just violence.

22:43
Lachlan
And so as I've been mulling over a lot of the abuse and hate as I've been writing this and researching, I feel like a good starting point personally and I kind of want your input on this is just better education coming from the government and the public school system. Because I was never taught about. We maybe touched the trail of tears. But like I said earlier in the podcast, we never addressed any small scale widespread violence that was going on or like individual violence because the people who were committing that violence didn't want people to know about it because they knew it was wrong.

23:31
Sam
Yeah. I do think if there is more exposure in the public schools, if there's more deeper education on also the current state of indigenous people and indigenous nations, not just what happened in the past, because I think that's a big fallacy in public school, is that it almost treats indigenous people as something of the past, as an extinct culture group, even though I don't know the exact number. But I think it's in 5 million indigenous people left still alive today. That's not instinct in any means. So I think that's a big fallacy, which I think could ease up on just the, I guess, discrimination and the neglect that indigenous people, that some indigenous people face is due to the. Due to just the fact that in public schools there is just like I said, no modern representation of indigenous people.

24:39
Sam
The only representation of indigenous people we have in public schools is from the colonizers viewpoint, which is extremely flawed and extremely skewed. And that's another reason why indigenous people could feel so alienated, you know?

24:56
Lachlan
For more conversations about this topic, tune into the bonus episode coming out right after this one. Anthropology Unearthed is A podcast from WKNC 88.1 HD-1 Raleigh. Our theme music is produced by Sam White. I'm your host, Lachlan Vester, and I look forward to seeing you next time.