Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 84: Big Archaeology w/ Dr. Ken Feder!

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Episode 84: Big Archaeology w/ Dr. Ken Feder! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_03: You must excuse me.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: This isn't easy and you've learned a lesson.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_03: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: That lesson will stand you in good step all your life.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm catching on to why that's so and why that's so and why that's so and why that's so and why that's so why that's greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Ostlantis, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and we help to combat the spread of the disinformation about these very topics.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: And Rubenariano Tlaka Tecat.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on, Dr.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Tlaka Tecot?
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: How are you today?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing great.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a beautiful day out here in Dallas.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have the extreme heat um heat wave that's uh we're undergoing at the moment, but uh it's uh nothing we ain't seen before in these parts, as we say around here.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: And speaking of bringing the heat, we've got a very special guest with us today.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very excited because today we are joined by Dr.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Kenneth Fetter, also known as Kenny, which is funny because when people refer to him as Kenny, it takes me a minute to like are you talking about Ken Fetter?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: But that's me, man.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Kenneth I like to see your name as Fader, like Lord Vader, but it's Lord Fader.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_04: My students when I taught for 40 years at a university, I'm retired from Professor Emeritus.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_04: I used to get that all the time.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, really?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, I'm Darth Fader.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Darth Vader.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_04: My son, my son Jacob, who's out there in Arizona, he gets that all the time too.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_04: Darth Fader.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Is his name Luke?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_04: No, not exactly.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_04: I don't have I have my whole I have both hands, so I'm I'm cool.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: Luke Luxan.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_04: I forget.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_04: Whatever.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I'm gonna pull from your Wikipedia page here.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_04: It says I deny before before you do that, I deny everything.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: It says uh Kenneth L, and then in pr in hypo uh parentheses, Kenny Feder.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: And uh little known fact, the L in his name stands for Laplanjon.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: So Kenneth Laplanjon.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_04: Listen to this.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: This is both whatever is an emeritus professor at of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University and the author of several books on archaeology, many of which I own.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: And criticism of pseudo archaeology, such as frauds, myths, and mysteries, science and pseudoscience in archaeology.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: His book, Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology, From Atlantis to the Wallum Ulum, was published in 2010.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: His book, Ancient America, 50 Archaeological Sites to See for Yourself, was published in 2017.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: He is the founder and director of the Farmington River Archaeological Project, and he has a brand new book out, which I've got in my grubby little mitts right here.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Native America The Story.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: The story of the first peoples.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Your volume's a little bit down, Ken.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Can you can you turn it up a little bit?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what's going on.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe the mic is far from your mouth.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_04: I push the mic right in front of me.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: How's that?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's way better.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_04: Way better.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yeah, man, it's a great book.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, full disclosure, you we do get a uh pretty awesome shout-out in the book.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you for that.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we are definitely um we have our biases.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_04: Uh well, I I figured this is the way I would sucker you into actually covering the book in the podcast, you know.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_04: Just a little payola.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_04: Paola works every time, Carly.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Scratch your back, scratch my back.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I even have a blurb on the back, which uh it writing this blurb made me realize how good a good editor is because I turned in the blurb and they're like, hey, so uh we just got it back from editorial, and then I read it, and I was like, damn, I'm a great writer.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_04: Hey every every author has to credit the editor.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_04: Well I I say when people read one of my books, they'll say, gee, Kenny, your grammar has improved tremendously.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_04: It ain't me.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_04: Oh no, that's the editor.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I was I was very uh I was very happy with the way it turned out.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, damn, so that's how you're supposed to talk.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how they do it in their family.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_04: You know, when you're a professional, Curly.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: So how are you, Dr.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Fetter?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_04: I'm real good.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_04: I was gonna complain about how hot it is here in Connecticut, but then I would seem like a real loser because it's like, wow, it's 89 degrees here.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_04: Man, that's that's Disney.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_04: That's that's like winter for you guys, right?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty much.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's freezing over here.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: 89 is freezing.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: We have to but bust out the the parkas and yeah, gloves and mitts and junk.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not quite there.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like last week uh where I was working, it was 101.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then this week, I think it was like 97, 98 while we were out in the field.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's pretty torturous.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_04: But it's but it's a dry heat, right, Curly?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_04: So it's it's it's fine.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's a dry heat.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the guys on my crew, um, this is like his first time doing legit excavation, so I had to take it easy.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: Take it easy on the young lad, uh, as it were, and just be really mindful because you know, all jokes aside, I do not want somebody on my crew to like get heat exhaustion or pass out in the field or something.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_04: So the paperwork is probably really healthy, but you know what?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_04: You don't need that.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: So all you kids out there working in the field, uh stay hydrated and wear sunscreen and take plenty of breaks because you know that uh that pipeline project or whatever it is you're working on can wait.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: They've got the money to uh allow you several breaks throughout the day uh to sit under some shade.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: The bad thing though is the uh AC in my Forerunner has been acting wonky.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: So we retreat to my vehicle to take a little break, and then like the AC won't work half the time.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: So is there even any shade where you are?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: We our project area is in the median of Interstate 25.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_04: Oh no.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: So we're in the median and there's just traffic flying past us on either side, and for some reason they think it's really cool to blast their horns at us while they drive by.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_04: They're being, you know, friendly folks.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: Hi there, like what were you wearing, Curly?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe I was asking for it.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Those high-viz, those uh that slutty high-viz vest that I was wearing.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_04: Listen, uh, there was uh friends of mine, archaeologist, doing a field, uh doing a uh survey, first uh first uh go-through, first survey, at a women's prison in Connecticut, and all of the guys on the crew were told, do not take off your shirts.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_04: Or there was there was some concern that the women would break out and God knows what.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_04: Of course, I meant a lot of the guys on the crew said, Well, I I could take off my shirt.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, right.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna cause a prison riot.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: For real, right?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: So the book is great.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: I really enjoyed it.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: I really do appreciate it.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And um it's it's different when you when you're able to because I'm rereading it now because the when I first read it for the the review, it was a PDF, right?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_06: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's so much different when you get to hold it in your hand and like kind of it's the tactile sense of reading that makes you pick up a lot more information, I think, than just uh reading.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, being able to go back and forth and go ahead to see a f uh a figure and then go back to see a figure.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's kind of like in the animus sense, right?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because everything has uh energy and and spirit, right, Curly?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you're feeling the spirit of the book when you hold it in your hands.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's very post-processual.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Just like when you're digging up those giants, right?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: You can feel the spirit of those giants.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_04: We're not supposed to talk about that.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_04: Didn't you get the message from headquarters?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_04: For God's sake.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think I think it's uh the the cats out of the bag because there's this thing called NephilimCon or something.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Nefcon.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Did you hear about this?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: The Nephilim convention.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: So there was a convention recently, 2025, this year, right?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nefcon 2025, and some Republican um Congress person from Missouri, yes who is serving on the House Oversight Committee, uh talked about the giants that are being stored, the the giant bones, apparently, that the Smithsonian institution or the or somewhere, right?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: That they have them hid inside the biggest.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, luckily the Trump administration has just announced that uh they're sending people in to review the content of all the Smithsonian.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they're gonna find the bones.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe they'll find the giant bones.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the card-up giant, too.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_04: Dudes, um, I and I've seen I haven't seen this, but I saw somebody photographed it in the wild.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_04: They're putting up signs at national monuments, encouraging visitors that if they see anything they find offensive or that is presents America in a negative way, that they should report that.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_04: And it's like you know, the the Manzenar uh camp, the the Japanese internment camp.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_04: Do they have to say, well, this was kind of like Club Med.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_04: It was like a free vacation for Asian.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_04: What the f I mean, yeah.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_04: Am I allowed to say what the fuck?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_04: They're encouraging people.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_04: This is right out of 1984.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_04: This is right out of 1984.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_04: That's the playbook.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, every time I drive to Colorado, we pass the Ludlow Massacre site.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, what's gonna happen with that?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Are they gonna have to like get rid of the memorial site altogether or rewrite the plaque that stands at the site of the city?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna call it the Ludlow friendly fire incident.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Incident.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_04: The misunderstanding.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_04: It was a misunderstanding.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_04: It was all a misunderstanding.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_04: It was a misunderstanding.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: The Ludlow, uh the mine workers were sort of asking for it, monument.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_04: Good God, right?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_04: What about you know, the uh little bighorn?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_04: What are they gonna call that?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_04: The uh the disagreement among uh among native people and the cavalry?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_04: It was a minor problem.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_04: It all worked out in the end.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_04: Don't worry about it, folks.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's this desire.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's that's a real kind of authoritarian thing where you you try whatever you can do to eliminate any conversation, any discussion about the negative parts of your history.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_04: When I if I say that's out of the Nazi playbook, I'm not exaggerating.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_04: That's they they came out and said we're gonna we're gonna get rid of all that crap and only we're gonna make stuff up to make us sound even better.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_04: This is something I've noticed, even in the few years I've been on social media, that in the open there was a time when if you called somebody a Nazi, they got upset.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_04: They yelled at you.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_04: Now I I think it's getting to the point where you call somebody a Nazi, they say thank you.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's like holy crap.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what didn't that even happen in that that Jubilee video where they said something about being compared to a Nazi and the guy was like, I'm fine with that.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like, call me, call me whatever you want.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_06: Oh good God, right?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, wow, this is really I mean, forget slippery slope.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: We just fucking walked off the edge of a cliff.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like we just wily coyotied our way into the pavement.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's a Nazi toboggan.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_04: Poof.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_04: It's uh it's we can laugh about it and it's funny, and what but in a more important sense, it's fucking terrifying.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it is.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's the only way I could deal with it is if I don't laugh, then I'm just gonna sit and like let it slowly drive me insane or just into depression.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna use that as a segue to get us back to my book.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right, get us back on track, yeah.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_04: But listen, so while I'm writing the book, this listen to this this brief story.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_04: I went to uh there's a museum and at research center in southwestern Connecticut.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_04: It's the Institute for American Indian Studies.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_04: It's a great place.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um involved native people are directly involved, like every day there in the programming.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_04: And they have an outdoor facility where they've got a replica longhouse and a replica wigwam.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_04: And they're really well done.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_04: And I was there, I don't know, a year and a half ago, whatever it was, and I took some photographs and I posted them on my Facebook page.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_04: Right?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_04: So now I got like a bunch of really nice responses.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, those things are beautiful.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, they look so authentic.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_04: I got a response, and I'm gonna paraphrase it because I got rid of it.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_04: This guy's response was, yeah, those primitive Indians living in mud huts while back in Europe, they're living in castles and churches.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_04: What the actual fuck?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_04: My immediate reaction was, well, maybe I should respond to this guy.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_04: But I I didn't because I knew what it would result in.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_04: But wait a minute.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_04: Do you know what medieval peasants were living in?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_04: Do you think those were much better than wigwams and longhouses?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_04: And if you're gonna compare apples to apples, how about comparing a medieval church to Cliff Palace?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_04: How about comparing a castle to Chaco K Chaco Kenya to Pueblo Benito?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_04: You know, let's let's compare similar things.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_04: And it's but you know what?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_04: More and more, I'm seeing that.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_04: Um the Princeton University Press, the publisher, published like a marketing post on Facebook.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_04: The book is available, it's in the hardcover, everybody say great things about it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_04: And they're immediately got a response.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'm looking forward to reading it.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_04: It's astonishing.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_04: And that became like a like a thread of yeah, yeah, you we know what those Indians were really like.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_04: And it's just it's it's it's frightening.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_04: There was a time in America where people would think that, but they'd keep it to themselves.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_04: They at least wouldn't share that.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_04: But now on social media, it's like even by the standards of social media, some of the responses are are just mind-blowing.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_04: Which is and my I take away from that, well, these people have to read the book because they're not a big thing.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: As opposed to, you know, those peaceful Europeans who, you know, sat around holding hands and singing kumbaya their entire existence, right?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that that's that's kind of like the picture that these folks try to paint.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's basic historical ignorance, it's what it is.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this and this glorification of a romanticized view of their own ancestor sister.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can find this in in various strands.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: It pops up uh everywhere, right?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Even even among some of the people that we discussed from Mexico who look at the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples through this very romanticist lens where they could do no harm and it was all, you know, uh rainbows and unicorns, right?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And and it comes from a very uh not only an ignorant place, but a place of xenophobia sometimes, but definitely nationalistic uh firm.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_04: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_04: It's uh I I saw a post on on again on Facebook where somebody at least raised their hand and said, Well, you know, if you're gonna be really crapping on the Aztecs for human sacrifice, how about the thousands of people who were killed in Europe during the same time period for being witches?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_04: Somebody I you I you can't make this shit up.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_04: Somebody responded, well, it's different.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_04: Because in Europe, with the witches, with the witchcraft, they truly believe these people were demonic.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, so that makes it okay, right?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_04: But but with the Aztecs, it just doesn't make any sense.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm thinking, yeah, I bet you that's true.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_04: I betcha, as if you're a witch in Europe in the 1400s and you're lying there, they're piling rocks on you to crush your body alive, you're probably thinking, well, this sucks, but at least I'm not an Aztec.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_04: What?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it it does now.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_04: Listen, I'm I'm with you, Ruben.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_04: There are people out there, and it's mostly non-native folks who romanticize and stereotype native people.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_04: And I have a whole bunch of that in the book.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_04: There's a bunch of that right in front of me.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_04: But hey, you know what?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_04: They're not the this whole notion, they're not paleo hippies for God's sake.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_04: They're people.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_04: And some native societies north of Mexico had one percenters and they sacrificed people uh to to accompany their rulers to the afterlife.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_04: So look, humans are humans, and let's look clear-eyed at them, but let's give credit where credit is due.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it's I'm I'm I'm really sick of somebody posting, well, you know, Native Americans made a huge contribution to the modern human diet.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_04: And then somebody responds, yeah, but the Aztecs ripped out people's hearts.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_04: What are you talking about?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, we can talk about that for sure.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_04: But does that in any way diminish the fact that that like three-quarters of the world's people can can survive because they've got corn and potatoes?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, not only that, but I mean, let's also talk about if we're talking about human sacrifice, and maybe you can point us to some good sources because we're working on on an episode on this.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, eventually we're gonna put it on.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: I know there's people that have been have been waiting for this episode.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry, folks.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're working on it.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's coming.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's coming.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: But um, all the sacrificing that took place also in Europe before the Christianity took hold of your the European continent.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of societies that were also engaged in human sacrifice, and and there's a lot of evidence for this.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, even in the Bible, I mean, there's references to uh, you know, the sacrificial lamb.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, where where do people think this comes from?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't come out of thin air.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's there's a history behind these ideas in the Bible and and why Christianity, you know, like like the the the concept of of positioning the the new religion as being quote unquote better than the old one.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: That was part of the the rhetoric, right, that was being promoted when when Christianity was was imposed on on European peoples because those indigenous ways of those older European folks was not was not uh was frowned upon, right?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because they were doing things that were um you know seen as barbaric or what have you.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so so do you have any any sources that you can point us to that we can we can add to our discussion about human sacrifice?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_04: I have to think about that long and hard, but like even you're right, and even in the old testament of the Bible, there's that story of you know, God wants to test one of the patriarchs' you know, fealty to God.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_04: He says, Why don't you bring your firstborn son up in the mountain?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_04: I want you to kill him, I want you to sacrifice him.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_04: Which and though that doesn't happen, it and here I was I was just testing you.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_04: That's what God says I was.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_04: It must have been a thing that people accepted as okay, that's one way to prove your absolute devotion to God is to kill your kid.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_07: Right.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_04: Oh another thing, just today, I'm sorry I'm going off on this, but today you guys need to know this.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_04: You guys need to know this.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_04: Somebody posted today that it's no co ready, it's no coincidence that that geneticists have now shown that blue eyes can be dated back around eight or nine thousand years ago because it's not a coincidence, because that's when all the great cultural advancements were made.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, he's not even saying the quiet part out loud, he's saying the out loud part out loud.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_04: So it's white people with blue eyes are responsible for the development of humanity.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_04: And it's and again, it's just like these these guys who are saying that.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_04: I want to I want to take one of them and I want to give him a big hug and say, look, and I'm gonna have here's a here's my Ken doll, you know, Barbie and Ken.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna dress him up like a Lakota warrior, and I'm gonna hand it to him saying, Where did the Indian hurt you?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_04: You know, and and then say, it's okay.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_04: Here's what history really shows.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_04: That and then and then you know, my publisher uh I have a thing in my contract, and every time I talk about anything at all, when I'm talking to my wife at night, I have to bring up the book.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_04: I'm contractually obliged to do that.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, so like uh whatever.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_04: Love chatter in the middle of the night is have you read chapter five yet?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_04: But it's that's maybe I'm naive, and I probably am, that a that that the way I have phrased things in the book will actually have people who are already like really out on the deep end.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: They'll say, Oh, I I didn't know this.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_04: I've been wrong.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_04: But at the very least, I think there's a big cohort of folks who don't know, who look at Facebook and go, is that true?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Is it why?
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think this one of the strengths of the book is that it's written in a very conversational style and it's not bogged down with like academic uh speak.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's not a lot of jargon in the book, and it's very straightforward.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that will help to that end of just people picking it up and reading it, because people on the right to tend to be very anti-intellectual anyway, and very like you're you're you know, the academics are the enemies and the professors are the enemies, but the way you've written this book isn't like overly academic and it's a it's a really easy read.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like I I plowed through that book because it's so it's written so conversationally that you could just keep going.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that helps, you know, sort of get the the quote unquote layperson.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um thank you, thank you, thank you, Curly.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_04: That's that's that means everything to me because that's what I'm shooting for.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_04: Um this book is not aimed at the at a bunch of of full professors in anthropology and archaeology.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_04: That's not that's not the audience.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_04: The audience is this uh hopefully there's a vast this horde of people looking to buy a book about what's Native America like?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_04: What's what's their history?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_04: I use that word again and again and again in the book because I I don't like saying, well, it's prehistory.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_04: It's this thing before everything really started.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_04: I so and I I explained right up front.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_04: For me, history doesn't have to be written down, it's the story of a people.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_04: And they pass those stories down, and we we need to look at those.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_04: We have our I'm an archaeologist, so of course I'm gonna look look at archaeology.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_04: We have records written by the aliens who came here, and and and we can use some of that, of course, taking it all with a grain of salt, but it's it's it's it's history.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_04: Um, what I like to tell people is that the the story of Native America is not a a pre uh a preface to human history, it's not a postscript, it's not an end note or a side note or marginal note.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_04: It's an entire chapter in the story of humanity and deserves as much attention and as much reverence as any other chapter because there's great stuff in there and it's interesting and it's fascinating, and and hell, rock art just looks really cool.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_04: So you gotta go with that.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Can you can you explain what you mean by aliens?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because someone listening to this hears that.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was just about to say that.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: And they're gonna say aliens?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, what I think is Graham Hancock's gonna all of Graham Hancock's fans are gonna grab that clip and be like, Ken Fetter slipped up and let the truth through accidentally.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm gonna get a letter from Big Archaeology, and there's all paperwork I have to fill out.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_04: Jesus.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_04: Um Alien, we're talking about people who are not indigenous.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_04: We're talking about Europeans like like the the Norse who came to North America, but then especially in the what 16th century, especially, the Spanish and then the French and the and the English, English-speaking people as well.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_04: Those were aliens.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_04: They were interlopers, they were invaders.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_04: And if you don't like those words, well, I'm sorry, but that's what they were.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_04: They were invaders, and there was an indigenous group, there are indigenous people here.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, we we see that in in Connecticut.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_04: If I can kind of I talk a little bit about Connecticut.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_04: So often in in books about Native American history, the focus, my area isn't a focus in New England because it's like, you know, it's a backwater and nothing happens here, which isn't true.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_04: But I look at the the area where I where I am, the Farmington Valley, Farmington River Valley.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_04: The English first settled in the Connecticut Valley in the 1630 to 1640.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_04: And they immediately began this walkabout looking for more land, and they came to the edge of a volcanic escarpment going west, and there's another river valley there, Farmington Valley.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_04: And they looked at it and they said, Well, that land is all unimproved.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_04: That's the word they used, unimproved.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_04: So therefore, it nobody owns it, so we can go and go live down in there, despite the fact that the place was littered with Native American villages.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_04: They were all you know what they hadn't done, they hadn't cleared all the forests, screwed up the screwed everything up.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_04: They were they were living a way of life that at least for our time was more uh could conform better to what the environment had to offer.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_04: But but again, this notion that, well, it's unimproved.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_04: There's nobody here.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's that's a very Eurocentric uh viewpoint, right?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're looking at it from what they what they know from their perspective, from their background, from their ancestry, and they see things a certain way at that time, and they're saying, well, this land doesn't look like what we would expect it to look like if human beings were in control, right?
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: The scare quotes in control of the land.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so they haven't improved it, right?
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because even the American government, once, you know, after uh independence and once uh the the state gets going in terms of um parceling out the the various territories that are going to become states, they they come up with uh with uh ways to to uh uh dissect the land, right?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: That is uh opposite in many ways to the way indigenous people viewed the land, right?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: They parcel it out, they they coordinate off, they break it up into a grid system, and they say, you, the individual, the American citizen now, can go out into these places.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's free land out there.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, free with the scare quotes, right?
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can improve upon that land, you know, depending on where you were and depending uh of the time and the place, but like the government would give uh incentives to people to go out into the West, right?
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Go out west, go out west, go improve that land.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the process of colonization that you're talking about.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: These people they settle on that space, but it's never enough because you have more people coming in from Europe.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: And as more people come in and as the local population begins to uh um increase naturally from birth rates, they need more land, they need more space on that.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's what begins that that expansion to the West.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so any excuse that they see, right, to to acquire land, if they see that it's unincorporated, it's unimproved, then it's free for the taking.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's that's the story of America, unfortunately, and people don't like to hear it.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: But again, back to the way we started the the show, this idea of criticizing America now as as as a as a an academic, as a historian, you know.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Am I supposed to just like overlook that now and and and and not be honest and give an honest account about our history, our collective American history?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's it's pretty sad what's happening.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_04: Look, even here in Connecticut, uh the town of Weathersfield, which is an old community, old European community in the Connecticut River Valley, they, and I'm not sure how this happens legally, but they took possession of land 26 miles to the west, drew a line around it, called it Bark Hampstead, then they divided it up into 40-acre lots.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_04: And if you were a resident of Weathersfield, you could get a 40-acre lot for free.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_04: All you had to do was pay the property taxes on it.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_04: So if you were paying the taxes, you owned it.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_04: Now, at that very time, there's this community, this amazing community that that that um that uh I've been excavating since the 1990s called the Lighthouse.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_04: And it was established by a Narragansett man from Block Island, his white wife.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_04: They had eight kids, other native people moved in, Mohegan Mohegan folks, uh uh I believe Tunksis folks, again, local, local, local tribes, along with white folks and African American folks.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_04: So they had this thriving community, which one day they looked up and there were white folks saying, Well, we own this.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_04: And they've been living there for 75 years.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_04: And it was just an awful mess.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_04: But again, it's it's this if if you if it bothers you that this sounds negative, look at it from an objective perspective, which is you had two groups of people who defined ownership entirely differently, but you had one group that had the power to be able to impose their definition of private property or property, property rights, on another group of people.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_04: And that's what happened.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_04: You know, if you say, well, that's not what happened, then why is there not why are the descendants of the lighthouse community not living there anymore, but they're in Massachusetts and New York and Louisiana and Indiana and California?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: Spread out, yeah.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's because ultimately their land was taken away legally, by definition, of the colonists, and they had nowhere else to go.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_04: Look at the Tonksis, who I mentioned, they're uh the local tribe in the local group in the Farmington River Valley, and they'd lived there for a long time.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_04: They actually went through the courts, the legal system, and I do talk about this in the book, in the pre the pre-state, the colony of Connecticut, and they went through the courts.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_04: They filed petitions, they filed grievances, each one asking, what the fuck?
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_04: Why are why is this land being taken away?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_04: We never agreed to give the land away, and yet here they are building fences, and we welcome their presence, but their definition of property is different from ours.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_04: They're building fences and they say you can't come over here.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but we always fish.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_04: That's how we go to our fishing place.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_04: That's where we pick we get wood.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_04: Planting whatever it is you want, but we want to be able to go there too.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_04: And that was a no-no.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_04: That the Tuxas, the native tribe in Farmington, you know where they are now?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_04: They're in freaking Wisconsin.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_04: That's there's there's actually there's not a reservation, but there's like a community center, and a bunch of tribal groups from New England are living there together in this kind of combined tribe, and it's like, what happened?
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_04: That's the story of Native America.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_04: They had nowhere to go, and ultimately they made, in some cases, they made the decision we're booking, we're out of here.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, there's no future here for us.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's a you know, uh a very similar incident happening right now in southern Colorado, where this community, this old Mexican-American community that's been there for a very long time, there's this hill that has a sacred space on it that is used for pilgrimage and for religious holidays and events and stuff.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the people from these communities have this annual pilgrimage where they go up to this hill to the sacred space.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: And some very rich people came in and bought all the land, and now they've erected fences everywhere to keep people from that community from crossing through what's now their quote unquote land to get to this space.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the people in the community responded, first of all, they tried to like negotiate, like, well, can we at least once a year, you know, cross over and use this?
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they were like, no, hell no.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is our land.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: See that fence?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: This is ours now.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, stuff like that is still happening to this day.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it it brings to mind what you were saying about the de how we define ownership, landownership.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: It brings to mind uh a teacher.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: So shout out to Mr.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Torres from uh seventh grade.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he told me something once uh that stuck with me my entire life.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, remember, those who have the power to define you have the power to confine you.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that like resonated with me as a young man all through my adulthood.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I still think about those words when people try to impose their perceptions and their definitions of who we are as Native Brains.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of the things that I tell my students uh throughout, you know, the entire semester.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever we're we're talking about, I always bring it back.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and and and I say this at the very beginning.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: I tell students, all the history that you're gonna learn in this class is about power and control.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: About who has the power, and the and those who have the power are the ones who get to control, they control the narrative, they control what happens to the land, they control whatever happens in this country from from that point forward.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's that's again, that's the story of Native America, right?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like the reason why we have Delaware here in Texas during the time of the Texas independence uh um days is because they got pushed out from Delaware all the way into Texas.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the Kicapu tribe who resides down along the border, and then they have communities on both sides, on the Mexican side and the Texas side.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the Kicapu are in indigenous Texas, they're from up in Illinois, if I'm not mistaken, and they ended up all the way down in in Texas.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's been, you know, the story of Native America is one of displacement, dispossession, uh, and you know, genocide, right?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: So with that in mind, I wanted to ask Dr.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Fetter, Kenny, Laplanjon Fetter, uh out of you know, everything that you chose to write about in the book, like because there's a lot.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of stuff to cover.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: How did you decide what would be included in the book and what you're you were going to leave out?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you included everything, this would be like an encyclopedia set.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_04: It's difficult.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_04: Whenever you write a book, you always are faced with that, right?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_04: Where it's like, man, if if I were to write everything I wanted to, this could be a 12 a 12-volume encyclopedia.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody's reading the 12 volume volume encyclopedia.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um The Federal Codex.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_04: There you go.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_04: So it was it was first of all, writing a book is a very selfish act in that I'm writing about stuff that I find fascinating or riveting.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm not going to apologize for that.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_04: These are things, I mean, there's a lot about uh about petroglyphs and pictographs in the book because number one, I personally am absolutely enthralled by this stuff.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's amazing.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_04: But I also think that because I I'm a I'm a pretty good writer, that I can get other people excited about something I'm excited about.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_04: So it's like if I'm writing about something and I go, oh yeah, this is sort of cool, that if I'm not super enthused, the reader won't catch that.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_04: Even though if somebody else were writing it and wrote about that in a way that showed their enthusiasm, it would it would capture their attention.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_04: So so a lot a bunch of it is gonna be, yes, I I'm guilty as charged, but I'm looking at stuff that from a personal perspective I find exciting and interesting.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: And as an anthropologist, that I think is important for people to know that that if you don't know this, if you haven't been exposed to this, you really don't understand the story of Native America.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_04: And that's my goal, right?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_04: That's right in the title.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_04: So that's what I want wanted want to be able to do.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, I mean, there's there there are always gonna be things that are getting left out.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_04: There are I tell you what, there are parts of there are things that I wrote that didn't end up in the book because it was like, you know, the publisher is getting excited and nervous.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_04: Too many, there's too much already, Fader.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_04: You can't have that in there.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, wait for the city.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to limit yourself.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_04: I want to point, I want to respond to something that that that Curly said about this attempting to prevent native people from going to places that they view as sacred.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_04: That absolutely happened to the Ashiwi, the Zuni, right?
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_04: The Zuni, before the Grand Canyon was named a national park, which I think is 1919, I elders of the Zuni tribe living in Helona, which is in New Mexico, would take a yearly um pilgrimage to Ribbon Falls in the Grand Canyon.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_04: That they call that their place of emergence.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_04: That's where the the the Ashiwi, the Zuni, I'll call them Zuni because I probably am pronouncing Ashiwi wrong.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_04: That's where the Zuni say our people come came from.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_04: And so every year the elders would take that voyage.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_04: They would go by Colorado River, whatever, go take that voyage.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_04: It spent several days out there, they would camp along the way, they would come to Ribbon Falls, they would do ceremonies and then go home.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_04: You know, in 1919, the Park Service said you can't do that anymore to National Park, you can't go there.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_04: Now, I tell you what, you talk to Zuni today, and I did, and they say, fuck that.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_04: We went anyway.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_04: We just knew we would get, you know, we could, if we get arrested, we get arrested.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_04: Who the hell cares?
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_04: Now that's that's their perspective.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_04: My perspective, this is the Zuni talking about this.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_04: This is, I don't, I haven't done that that that pilgrimage, but the Zuni themselves have taken archaeologists with them because it was it now is legal.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_04: They're allowed, they're allowed once a year, which even use of the use of that word is sort of offensive.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_04: But along that route, you know what?
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_04: There are archaeological sites where the the rock art and the ceramics, this is miles and miles away from Helona, from where the Zuni, the Zuni homeland is today, and the stuff is pure Zuni.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_04: So what what the Zuni are right?
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_04: The archaeological record absolutely confirms the fact that they've been making those pilgrimages for centuries.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_04: Millennia, even.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_04: And it's like uh that's that's one of my favorite stories in the book.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um, there's a wonderful video put out by um you know, with the with the tribe's acquiescence, they they were involved.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_04: It's even a little weird though, because even when they go, they have to bring a member of the Park Service with them.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_04: Which is, I don't know, what what are they afraid that the Zuni are gonna do in the Grand Canyon?
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like, well, they're gonna find all of the uh Egyptian artifacts.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_04: That cave, right?
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they came with all the Egyptian artifacts.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_04: But the thing that's so cool is we have we have all right, the federal government is preventing them from doing their ceremonies, but that changes.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_04: We have the the Zuni repeating a pilgrimage that they've made for generation upon generation, and you have the archaeological record confirming at least that part of the story.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_04: That yeah, that that's true.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_04: That Bourbon Falls was the place that they that they believe they they emerged from and they made pilgrimages there.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_04: So that's you know, it's it's cool when it works out like that.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_04: It's not cool if the you know when the federal government says, no, you can't do that anymore.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_04: Because again, like like Ruben said, it was considered the we we the federal government, we owe that now.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_07: Uh-huh.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_04: You can't.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_04: You can't use it.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's like, well, you know, but it's better now.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_04: It is better now.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_04: Things have changed for the better.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I was at just at the the Pecos conference um this year.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was up uh north of Blanding, Utah, right by Bear's Ears.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_07: Uh-huh.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we were fortunate enough, the the five tribes that are involved in defending Bear's Ears uh had representatives show up.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think one or two couldn't make it, but there was uh we had Ute representatives, Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi representatives uh all showed up to give a talk about bear's ears and why it's important to defend bear's ears.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a question, you know, during the the QA, and somebody raises their hand and they're like, Well, as a as a white archaeologist and anthropologist, how can I best help you guys?
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the guys, I think he was a Mountain Ute, he's like, Well, first you need to understand we don't trust you people.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's like the first thing that you can do is work to gain our trust by behaving in a good way, by comporting yourself in a good way and treating us with respect and respecting what we have to say.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, it's a two-way street.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm glad he said that because I think some of the people I don't have you ever been to the Pecos conference?
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: No, I haven't.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: So for those who don't know, it's uh I mean it's been happening since like 1929, I believe, or 1927.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's very old.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's coming up on its 100-year anniversary, and it's for Southwest archaeologists, and it's a camping conference.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like you're just camping out in the middle of nowhere with like 200 archaeologists.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty good.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Is it out in Pecos, Texas?
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's it used to be in Pecos, New Mexico.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it the it moves every year.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: Every year it's held in a different location.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's supposed to be held in northern Mexico too, but I think it's only been held there once or twice.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it was really cool because the participants in the Pecos conference tend to be on the older side.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was important for a lot of these people to hear this coming from a native person.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like, hey, you know, you I know a lot of you guys think you know everything about us, but you don't.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a reason why we we look at you with uh untrusting eyes.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: So if you really want collaboration, you know, it starts with you, it doesn't start with us.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can always trust uh an archaeologist.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: Who wrote a book about Native America, right, Ken?
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: Always?
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_04: Here's what you've inspired me to do.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_04: There have been actual that same Princeton University Press post on Facebook.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_04: There are a number of folks, I guess they're native folks, who say, oh, another white guy telling our story.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, I'm really sensitive to that.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_04: I understand that.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_04: I know where you're coming from, which is why the press made a real effort.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_04: Why did they choose me?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_04: Because I've been an archaeologist for 40 years.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's a series about archaeology.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_04: And because my background is in anthropology, and because at least one of my major excavations was a collaborative one with the folks, the descendants of the people who lived at the site.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_04: You know what?
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_04: When publishers say, gee, Ken, you're a real good writer, you know what that means?
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_04: It means when they want it on August 1st, I get it to them July 30th.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_04: They're looking at deadlines.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_04: But that's why what I tried to do in the book is allow native people to share that stage.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_04: Their voices are highlighted or centered in a lot of the book.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's why we invited people like Curley and like my friend Jay Kaplan, who's Mohegan, who's the director of archaeology at Mohegan, and he's a native guy.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's why we got folks like that to look at the manuscript and say, is he is he serving serving native people?
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_04: And which leads me to a story that that is super emotional for me.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_04: Because I admit it, guys, I was the, I think I was the stereotypical white archaeologist who was doing archaeology in my home state of Connecticut.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_04: You know why?
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_04: Because I was, I thought it was interesting.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it was selfish.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_04: It was self-centered.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_04: And which leads me to this story.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_04: So we're digging at the site, a place called the Lighthouse.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_04: It's not a real lighthouse.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_04: It's a descendant community.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_04: Like I said, I mentioned it before, uh, established by a native guy and his white wife.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_04: But the descendants, despite the admixture, identified themselves as native.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_04: So generations later, when newspaper people are talking to them, a hundred years after the place was established, people would tell the people, says, We are Narragansett.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_04: So that was that was how they they self-identified.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_04: And so we were excavating there, and we were uh uh TV News covered it.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_04: You would you and interest story.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_04: The next day, the day after they covered it, um, we're sitting for lunch.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_04: I break, we broke for lunch, I'm sitting on the side by the side of the road with my field crew, and this old pickup truck comes running, running right into the little parking lot there.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_04: Big beefy guy gets out of the truck, shuts the door, tells his black dog Rag, stay.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_04: And because I was highlighted in the TV show, he knows I'm in charge, comes right up to me, and he was a big guy, and he just puts his hands on his hips and he's glaring at me.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm thinking, shit, do I owe this guy money?
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_04: And so I stood up.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_04: Currently, this is gonna be a problem, right?
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_04: Is your field crew gonna back you up or are they gonna go, oh well, Vader, you're on your own, dude.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_04: See you in the truck, Ken.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_04: So I stood up and I said, Can I help you?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_04: And he looked at me for a minute.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_04: Then he said, Shake my hand.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_04: Thrust his hand up.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Okay.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_04: I shook his hand, big smile, and he pointed up to where the site was up on the hill, and he said, You just shook hands with one of them.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_04: I am a descendant of Jimmy Chago.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_04: So I was blown away by that.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_04: And he had, you know, he had his part of the genealogy.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_04: I was doing a genealogy from the other direction, seventh generation descendant.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_04: I knew which of the Chogum's kids was his great, great, great, great, great, you know, seventh great grandfather.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_04: Here's the deal.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_04: I said his name is Mr.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_04: Raymond Ellis.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_04: He has passed away a few years ago.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Well, would you like to come up and see the community, the site, to see what we're doing archaeologically?
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_04: He said, Yeah.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_04: And as we're walking, I say, Have you ever been here before?
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, he lived in the area.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_04: And he said, No, I've never been here.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Oh, why?
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_04: Because I'm stupid and naive.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_04: And he got really quiet and he stopped walking, and he said, Around here, it's a point of shame if you're a descendant of one of those drunken Indians up on the hill.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_04: And that's sad, right?
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_04: So I said, okay, well, I'm going to show you how cool the site is.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_04: And I took him around, I put on my professor pants, and I showed him the the uh the the where the the native folks were making charcoal.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_04: I showed where the houses were located, the foundations.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_04: I showed where there was a stone quarry, and then I took him to the cemetery.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_04: There is a cemetery there with stones, unmarked stones that mark the graves of the people who live there.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm just I'm not looking at him, I'm walking around showing him the stones, and I look up.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_04: He's crying.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_04: And I thought I had insulted him, right?
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Oh my god, Mr.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_04: Ellis, I'm so sorry if I if I b if I said something bad.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_04: And he looked at me, guys, and this this is something you know, you have those moments where that your whole life, your whole perspective changes.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_04: He looked at me, he said, There's no need for you to apologize.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for bringing me home.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I mean, I yeah, I'm a guy who uh I cry at if a dog dies in a movie, I cry.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_04: That's about it.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_04: I I weld up with tears.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Oh, Mr.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_04: Ellis, I uh of course.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_04: And what's really nice is that since that time, I have connected with a whole host of descendants of the people who lived at the site.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_04: And one person in particular, Connie Dubois, who is a ninth generation descendant, who grew up in Indiana because the family got they lost their land, they got thrown over thrown all over the place.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_04: Her father always told her, you know, we're a mixture, but we we heart we are Native American.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_04: We started as Native Americans.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_04: And I want you to track down, he says, I know we were from Connecticut, and he didn't know much.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_04: By sheer happenstance, Indiana, an Indiana newspaper, picked up a human interest story from the AP about our dig at the Lighthouse site.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_04: And she immediately contacted me.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_04: She says, I think it's absolutely miraculous, but I think this is where my people are from.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_04: And we got together, and damn it, right, absolutely she was she was right.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_04: And one of another like key moment for me was when Connie came east, visited the site.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_04: I took her to the cemetery just as I had taken Mr.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_04: Ellis, and Connie had a photograph of her father where at that point was dead, and it's a picture of him in his coffin, open air casket.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_04: And she asked me permission.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_04: I said, This is not my place, Connie.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_04: This is your place.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_04: She asked me permission if she could bury it at the cemetery.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, Connie, that's that's an amazing gesture.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, do.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_04: And now in 2015, Connie arranged uh a reunion of the descendants.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_04: People came from all over the country.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_04: I like to tell people the photographs I have from that reunion, that's that's the real American Norman Rockwell picture, right?
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_04: It's people who look black, who look white, who look something in between, who look everything, but they all know they are descendants of those drunken Indians up on the hill.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_04: And in the reunion, the the town, which actually started feeling bad about how that the descendants had been treated, invited them to be the guests of honor in the July parade.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_04: And so Connie got all the all the folks in their little red shirts that she had made for them.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_04: We have members of the Eastern Pequot tribe in full regalia because they're they're all related.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um and we marched into the parade.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_04: I was I got a place along the parade route because I want to take pictures of all my new friends, the Chagum descendants.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_04: And Connie came over and found me.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_04: Connie's from Louisiana.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_04: Connie is a force of nature, and you don't argue with Connie.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_04: So Connie said, Kitty, she called me Kitty, I want you to meet some people up where the staging area.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Connie, I don't want to miss my place on the parade route.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_04: She goes, Oh, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_04: So I went over there, I met some people I hadn't met before, and I was getting a little nervous because the crowds were getting bigger, and I wanted to go by the parade route.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_04: And Connie says, I said, Connie, I really have to go.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_04: And she said, Kitty, you don't have a place along the parade route.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_04: You're marching with us.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_04: I was just, I was stunned.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_04: And all the people, they all agreed.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_04: They said, No, you're, you know, you're not a descendant of Chago, but you are an honorary member of the family because of the work you've done.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_04: And Connie and I became collaborators.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_04: Connie's the genealogist.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_04: So it's not, it really is a case in which one of the descendants is talking to me and sharing her knowledge.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_04: And I don't dismiss it.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_04: I don't say, oh, Connie, that I go, let's incorporate that into the story because that's your story as it's been handed down to you and as you're finding out by doing genealogy.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so and I think that the press knew that that was the kind of work that I did.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_04: And so with that combination, yeah, they asked me to write the book.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_04: So and I I do apologize if people are disappointed that that it's not a native person telling the native story.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_04: But and I, Curly, you'll probably get a kick out of this.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, my reaction, one of my reactions, and people get mad at me if they want, is that, but if you hired a Danet, a Navajo, to write the book, would the Hopi be really happy about that?
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_04: Uh probably not.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_04: I ran into a couple of Hopi dudes at a fair in New Mexico, and I made the mistake of saying Navajo culture.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_04: You know what the guy said to me?
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_04: He said, the Navajo don't have culture.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_04: Jeez, everything they are from us.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_04: So it's like, I don't want to get in the middle of that.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_04: But uh but that's so there's some beef.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_04: Forgive me for being white.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's some tribal warfare there.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of stories, so in your introduction, you you do start off with a story of a teacher.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_00: Can you tell us a little bit about that teacher?
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: And also, can you kind of maybe segue that into um your favorite story of the book that that you that you included?
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my god.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_04: Now you have to remind me, what teacher are we talking about?
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I believe uh her name was uh was it Angie?
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_04: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_04: So Angie, uh Angeline Mitchell.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_04: So she's she's born in Massachusetts.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_04: So she's born like 130 miles from where I'm living.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and she grew up there.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_04: Her family moved to Kansas.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_04: And as she grew up, she she took classes at Kansas State University.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_04: John Hope's a prof at Kansas State University.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_04: And she took the equivalent of what today we would call a teacher prep major.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_04: So she wanted to be a teacher.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_04: And she taught for a while in Kansas and then her family moved again.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_04: Kansas was getting too crowded, I guess.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_04: She moved again, they all moved again to Arizona, to Prescott.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_04: She was teaching there for a while, but man, she's just an amazing person.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_04: Uh it was 3,000 people, it was too crowded for her.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_04: There was an opportunity for her to become a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in the Tonto Basin, which is in eastern Arizona.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, there's a spectacular national monument there, Tonto National Monument, which actually figures into her story.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_04: So she's she's brought out there by her mother and her fiance.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_04: They leave to go back to Prescott.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_04: And we're talking about it's got to be 100 miles east.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_04: So she's in the really from her perspective, it's the middle of nowhere.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um, it is wild territory.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_04: And she becomes a teacher.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_04: What a cool teacher.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_04: On weekends, she would tell her students that get your parents to saddle you up a horse, get enough food and water, and we're gonna go explore.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_04: And they would go out into the wilderness and look at geology and botany and zoology and archaeology.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_04: And there is a and she writes a diary.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_04: She's keeping a diary, and the diary still exists.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_04: The original is there and it's been published.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_04: An annotated version of it has been published.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_04: And there's a place in the diary where she talks about visiting a cliff dwelling with her kids.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_04: These are these are you know teenagers probably.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_04: And it's the night is falling, the moon is up, and they are actually sleeping in the cliff dwelling.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_04: Her first of all, her description is so uh precise and and definitive that when people at the National Park Service read the diary, they that's Tonto National Monument.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_04: They know exactly where she went with her students.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_04: And she writes this one.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_04: Now again, we're talking about this is the 1800s, so it's it's a more than uh it's more than a hundred years ago.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_04: 150 years ago.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and granted that there are things that are stilted in there, but she says, she talks about how being amidst the the remnants of that house um gave her an uncanny feeling.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_04: She said, think about the people who lived here who were in many ways so different from us.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_04: They worshiped differently, they dressed differently, they ate differently.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_04: But they were people who lived and loved and laughed and raised their children here in this place.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_04: And so she keeps pointing out the commonality in the human story.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_04: She says, Yeah, we are we're white folks and we are in the invaders here, but these people were not they're not that different from us, and how that feeling, the beauty of the place really, really touched her.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_04: And that I was just amazed by her the depth of her understanding of that commonality, that that thread that binds us all together.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_04: And I really wanted to emphasize that in the book that these these the native people are not, you know, they're they're not like this extinct, oh they're extinct, or no, they're not, they're not uh just these these people who have surrendered and given up their way of life.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_04: None of that's true.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_04: They're here, they're still here, and they are still in many cases following the traditions of their ancestors.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_04: In some cases, they've had to rediscover those.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_04: All cool, all good.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so I think that, yeah, I think that Angie, I just think that Angie's a kindred spirit.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_04: This this real, this genuinely anthropological perspective on the commonality of people, despite their differences.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_04: Now, if you ask me, what's my favorite story in the whole book?
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it's it's every page, Ruben.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_04: Come on.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_04: It's like briefly, it's stuff like watching a couple of kids at Mesa Verde on their handhelds and their parents keep yelling at them.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_04: And you're there, it's the short hike to uh the lookout over Square Tower House, which is a just gobsmackingly amazing place, right?
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's just gorgeous cliff dwelling.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_04: And but the kids, they're teenagers, they're just sitting there and they're they're oblivious, right?
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_04: And finally we get to where you turn and there's a fence there keeping you from falling over, and you look down into this the the declivity, the the hole in the cliff where the cliff mountain is.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_04: Those kids stopped in their tracks, put down their handhelds, and stared at it.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_04: And they started talking to their parents.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_04: What's people live there?
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_04: How'd they build that?
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_04: So it it me it, you know, I'm not gonna tell you that they then didn't go back to their handhelds.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_04: They didn't, but it's like, I gotcha, I gotcha.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_04: They've been hooked by that square tower house.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm gonna I I I can't guarantee it, but I'm gonna bet in a year or two or five or ten, they're gonna say, you know, we should we should go back to Vesa Verde because that was incredibly cool.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_04: And they're gonna want to learn more about it.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_04: They're gonna want to read about it, they're gonna want to go online, they're gonna look at the National Park Service website.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_04: I found that absolutely true with my own kids, where you know, I've got I've got pictures of my second set of kids and my first set of kids at cliff dwellings and seeing rock art.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_04: And you know what, they're appreciating it for at you know, whatever level they can.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_04: But now, you know, my son, who was living out in Utah for a little bit when he was as an adult, he sent me pictures of the Parawan Gap, which is this amazing rock art site.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_04: And he why did he go there?
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_04: He went there because he was familiar with rock art because he had been there when he was eight, not at that site, but at other sites when he was eight or nine years old.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_04: So to be able to inspire people to visit those sites, I got two whole books directly focused on that.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_04: But but this book is more about this is why this stuff is interesting.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_04: This is why it's important.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_04: This is why, you know what?
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_04: If you like American history, guess what?
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't start in 1492 and it doesn't start in 1620, it starts 20 freaking thousand years ago.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so that's stuff like that.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_04: Stuff like, oh, how about this this story?
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um at uh uh Fremont Indian Village, which is a a park, uh it's a museum, and it's a state park in Utah.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_04: And it's got a cool museum, and there's there are actually some rock art trails.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_04: And there's one place, and I bring this up in the book, there's one place in which from a distance you can see a pictograph.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_04: And it's a pictograph, it's a beautiful image.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_04: Pictograph means it's a painting of a blanket.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_04: The story that's told about the blanket, and it's right there in a uh a note on a sign, was that uh a group of native folks, maybe 500 years ago, were living in the area, and a woman gave birth.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_04: She had a baby, and the baby died in childbirth.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_04: And the baby was buried on this little area where the pictograph now is.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_04: And they left, they were they were nomadic, and then she began to have dreams that her baby was cold.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_04: And so she returned to the spot where her baby was buried and she painted a blanket for him.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_04: And uh, this isn't made up.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'm getting I'm getting emotional because I have four kids, and I can't imagine what that is like.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, stories like that, if you can read that and not tear up, if you can read that and not say, any preconceptions I had about native people, I I have to dump those.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_04: I have to open my mind.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_04: If you don't do that, I I can't help you.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_04: I really can't.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so there you go.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_04: I'll stop.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_04: I'll stop.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, this is wonderful.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one of the uh Yeah, thank you for for the stories.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: I I know that one of the uh the first comments people had for me about the book were like, how come he doesn't talk about Mesoamerica?
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, I mean, that's that'd be like a whole other book.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she's gonna co-write with me, right?
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_01: See how I did this?
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of relates to the question that we got, Curly.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_00: You want me to uh bring it up?
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um the this idea, and it's related, so just kind of hold on to that thought there, Ken.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: So this idea that uh in archaeology, um, there's a distinction made between North America, meaning mostly Anglo America versus you know, south of North America, and that which includes Mexico, because if you're looking at it geographically, right, North America includes all of Mexico and what is now called Central America, right?
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then South America begins basically where you know, is it is it in Peru or I forget exactly where Colombia and that's part.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and and for the longest time I had I had the same question.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why is it that it's always North America uh in relation to Anglo America, but it's because Mesoamerica has its own distinction.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: Am I correct in that in archaeology?
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_04: Is that what it is?
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so so this book is the first in a series that's edited by Eric Clyde, who's uh extraordinary author and archaeologist himself.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_04: And so when they broke up the world, and they're all intended for a popular audience, so when they broke up the world, they said, Ken, North America is your strength.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_04: We we want you to focus on that because somebody else is going to do the book on Mesoamerica.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_04: And Curly's right.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_04: That, I mean, I don't know how you write a 300-page book on Mesoamerica.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_04: How do you do that?
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_04: It's because there's so much stuff.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_04: But that being said, you can't talk about people in the Southwest without talking about their contact and relationship to people in Mesoamerica.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_04: But I was when I was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, I, one of my professors, first of all, one of my professors had this guy, uh very strong uh Spanish accent, walked with a lip, really nice man.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_04: I had no idea that one of my profs was like a god in Mesoamerican archaeology.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_04: His name is Pedro Arbias.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, for me, he was just this incredibly sweet kind of grandfather type.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, I would walk by his office as a major and he would beckon me in.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_04: Come, come, Kenny, come talk.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_04: And it was like, It was years later I spoke to a Mesoamericanist.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Yeah, I had a Mesoamerican prof when I was an undergrad.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_04: Uh there was Pedro Arbias.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_04: He like fell over.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_04: I said, You took classes from Dr.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_04: Arbias?
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Yeah, yeah, I did.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_04: But I also took courses from Phil Weigand.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and Phil was a Mesoamericanist.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_04: And Phil was super interested in turquoise.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_04: Where were they getting their turquoise in West Mexico?
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_04: Because there aren't a lot of sources there.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_04: And Phil's notion was to trade with folks in uh New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_04: And so Phil started a program at Brookhaven National Labs, which is a federal lab with nuclear reactors.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_04: They had a research reactor, and they had Garmin Harbottle, who was a physicist really interested in history.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_04: And so Phil began collecting turquoise sources, turquoise samples from uh from the wild, from from cave sites and from seams in the southwest, and and they brought it back to the lab and they performed neutron activation analysis.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_04: So it was trace element chemistry.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_04: He then got permission from museums in West Mexico to take the little tiles of turquoise that were in uh in masks to remove them, take a sample, and then return them.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_04: And so he began comparing the trace element signals in the turquoise in the masks and the turquoise in the southwest.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_04: And I kind of lost track of Phil.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_04: He passed away just a few years ago.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_04: But in like 10 years ago, Archaeology magazine did an entire article about how, yeah, they're able to trace this turquoise from the South, from what we today would consider a southwestern United States and places in Mexico.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_04: So you can't not talk about that.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_04: And what is it?
• 1:11:00
  SPEAKER_04: Chocolate chocolate, right?
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_04: Curly?
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_04: You got chocolate.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_04: Dr.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Patty Crown.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_00: What was the name of the scholar who coined the term Mesoamerica?
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_00: I always blink on his name.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I can't remember.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_04: Anyway, I know what you I know who you're talking about.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So so I I think I think the the response uh that Jack D.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Forbes, I don't know how familiar you are with his work, uh Jack Forbes, who did um a lot of the early um uh native work uh on the Mescalero Apache and also on and uh you know Chicano Mexicanos and in his insistence that you know that we should acknowledge them as being indigenous.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he was one of the first people before the Chicano movement um, you know, came about in the late uh mid to late 60s, and and the idea of Astlan, he was one of the first scholars who was suggesting, right, going back to what you were just saying about this connection between quote unquote North America and Mesoamerica, that there's this space in between those two spheres that that isn't doesn't belong fully on one side and doesn't belong fully on the other side.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And his idea was he was taking that idea of Mesoamerica and applying it to that space and saying we should call this, this this should have its own name.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the name that he came up with because it was an indigenous name was Astlan, you know, this idea of how you know the the Aztecs have come from this uh homeland up in the north.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so he took that, right?
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't had nothing to do with with the politics, had nothing to do with nationalism.
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_00: He was just looking for a name that was indigenous, that that you know referred to this idea of people migrating from north to the south and those connections between the two spheres, and he called this place Astlan, and it kind of stuck.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, unfortunately, uh uh a lot of people have uh visceral reaction towards that term because they they see it as uh an imposition, which is I mean, any name is gonna be imposed.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Someone's always gonna have uh uh an uh and uh uh a reaction to anything that's named, you know, for instance, this insistence that you know North America, including Mexico, should be called Turtle Island because it's indigenous.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, as a Coabaltecan person, I'd take issue with that because our ancestors didn't call it Turtle Island.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's it was uh it was Paul Kirchhoff, by the way.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_04: That's one of the things I try to say in the book.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_04: Don't say Indians.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_04: Well, don't say Native Americans, because that's the equivalent of saying Asians.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_04: But there's as much diversity, maybe more here than in these other continents.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_04: So you can't say, well, this is what the Indians believe.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_04: That's bullshit.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_04: That's that you can't say that.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_04: I will complain about one thing.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_04: When I type Oslantis into my my brow browser, the goddamn the autocorrect changes it to Atlantis every goddamn time.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_01: So uh listeners, uh keep typing Oslantis.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_01: We need to uh retrain the algorithm to where it recognizes our word.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_01: But speaking about the connections between what is now the Southwest and Mesoamerica, uh while we were because uh Michelle, my wife, went with me to the Pecos conference, and on our way back, we stopped at the Edge of Cedars Museum in in Blanding.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is Blanding, Utah.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is way up there, you know, pretty far from Mesoamerica.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_01: And they had this beautiful uh scarlet macaw sash.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I've seen it.
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thousands of of feathers, I may be exaggerating, hundreds of feathers, a lot of feathers um woven with yucca cordage, uh beautifully preserved.
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_01: And gorgeous.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, so did they trade for this item?
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_01: Did somebody come up and make this item?
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like it raises all these questions that are coming, you know, that pop to my mind.
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_01: But the one thing that's for certain is there's definitely a connection between the two regions.
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like people were interacting with each other.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like you said, uh Dr.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Patty Crown, who is was my mentor uh in Southwest archaeology, uh she found the the evidence of cacao at uh Chaco Canyon.
• 1:15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then at Chaco Canyon, you have all of this, you know, you had Scarlet Macaw remains, you have cacao, you have uh conch shells, you have, you know, all of this evidence that there was this trade network.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have guys like uh Steve Lexon who even goes so far as to say, well, Chaco, in his in his opinion, it was basically an Altepet that it was like a northernmost outpost of Mesoamerica and that it was run as a Mesoamerican.
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, you know, a lot of people disagree with him, some people agree with him.
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was even uh a presentation given at this past Pecos, is that one of I don't know if it's his students directly, but there's a student who's taking it on is like, okay, uh this is like my project now.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_01: I want to see if Chaco actually was an Altepet.
• 1:16:11
  SPEAKER_01: A city-state?
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like a Mesoamerican city-state.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I mean.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's what Altepet means for the listeners that don't know what that means.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's a city-state.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and it's not Alta Pedal.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to talk to the student because I'm like, man, she's like mispronouncing all the words.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_01: And while I'm sitting there in the audience listening, there was some other archaeologist, and every time a Nahuatl word was mispronounced, they would just like turn and look at me.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_01: And they were like, I bet you that gets old hearing all of that.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_01: So we even came up with the idea that at the next Pecos, I'm gonna submit an abstract where I give like a brief lesson on how to pronounce certain words.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll be like, now you can impress your friends and colleagues by getting these words.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Or you can just make several recordings of words that are gonna be used in the sp in their papers and so whenever it comes up, they can just, you know, play.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Ken, here's a here's a blast from the past.
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Kevin, uh Kevin, Kenneth Laplan John.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um people don't know.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna fully convince everybody that your middle name is Laplan John.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_05: Does everybody know who that was?
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_05: He translated Maya, didn't he?
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_05: Totally fucking made it up, but that's okay.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's on your wiki, uh, and I don't know if this is accurate.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_01: I hope it's accurate.
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_05: I did I I preemptively deny.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_01: It it makes reference to a book that you read as a teenager called Morning of the Magicians.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I just wanted to show you.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_01: So this book, Morning of the Magicians, had a similar effect on me.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I found this book because there's this old horror movie from the 1970s called Shockwaves, and it has like Peter Cushing and David Carradine, I think.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's about the Nazis engineering zombies, like uh as like SS troop of zombie Nazis.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved this movie, it was so batshit crazy.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I read an interview with the director where he was like, Yeah, we got the idea from this book, Morning of the Magicians.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, oh shit.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_01: So on happenstance, like years later, a library is selling off books, and as a teenager, I found a copy of Morning of the Magicians.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I start reading it, and my reaction wasn't quite the same as yours because your your quote in the wiki is I knew it was crap, and it got me really pissed off, Fetter has stated.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: But my reaction like me.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds like you.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was pretty young and into horror movies, so when I read it, I was like, well, wait a minute.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Are they being serious?
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I I didn't know like the frame of reference for this book.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was just like, this is just like a collection of crazy freaking ideas, right?
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that inspire horror filmmakers.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know if they actually intended the reader to believe the stories in this book.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_01: But this book has had a big influence on uh much of the pseudo-archaeology, uh the flat earth, hollow earth, uh Nazi occultism.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like a lot of it can be traced directly to people having read this book, which is a very important thing.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_04: Eric Modonica should send those guys like royalties.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_04: And he doesn't talk about it in the first edition of like Chariots of the Gods, but later on he says, Well, of course I read uh Powell's and Bergier's uh Morning of the Magicians.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's yeah, it's it's a it's a wild thing.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_04: It is batshit crazy.
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_04: It genuinely is.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Weren't they influenced by the the theosophical people?
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_04: That's that's it's absolutely you read some of the theosophy stuff and you do wonder was it all were they getting together, getting high, making a big joke and saying, let's see if anybody believes this crazy shit.
• 1:20:28
  SPEAKER_04: I I you're thinking of Discordians, uh thing.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Wait, I I thought you were talking about Christianity.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I lost track of my um fictitious beliefs here.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we're talking about your book and how important it is to respect indigenous history and culture and center indigenous voices and and approach these things with with uh you know respect.
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of want to bring this up because we we asked people on the Discord if they had any questions uh for you.
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_01: They were like, hey, so here's your shot.
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what should we ask him?
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_01: And one of our listeners brought up uh Dr.
• 1:21:13
  SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth Weiss.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even like calling her doctor.
• 1:21:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and how she is really like the antithesis of everything that is in this book, in my opinion, she represents the exact opposite of having respect.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_04: That's good to hear.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh, you know, and and for our listeners who don't know who she is, she's become like, so she was this professor, um very disrespectful of uh indigenous remains.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_01: The way she looks at it is like, hey, look, I get I should have access to whatever the hell I want, to do whatever research I freaking want, native people, you know, who cares.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_01: She had a UCSD, right?
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_01: San Diego?
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Is that where she was?
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is that where she was from?
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Or uh no, San Jose.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_01: San Jose, okay.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um and now she's become like this darling of the right wing for speaking out against woke archaeology and cancel culture archaeology, how they're canceling my my xenophobia and my racism.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_00: How dare these people.
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_04: Do we really believe that the that pol that politically right super right-wing people really give a shit about Native American bones, like who can study and who can't study them?
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's just it's something it's something to point to and say, ah, ah, ah, we're mad about this.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_04: They're looking for something to be pissed off about because they don't care.
• 1:22:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and her whole thing was she knows that certain groups do not like it's taboo to look at images of ancestral remains.
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And she makes it a point to take photos with ancestral remains and propping them up.
• 1:23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like she'll hold a human skull up in her hands and be like, hey, look, me and my buddy here getting ready for a new semester, you know, ha ha.
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And when people complained about it, she was like, Oh my god, they're trying to cancel me.
• 1:23:23
  SPEAKER_01: That this is the woke mobs coming after, you know, our archaeology is failing now because now we have to listen to Native people and their concerns.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_04: Look, I have multiple responses.
• 1:23:39
  SPEAKER_04: The first is all four of my grandparents are dead and buried, my parents are dead and buried.
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_04: How comfortable would I be for Jews, right?
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_04: How comfortable would I be if some German scientists came to America and said we have this, and it's even if it were a really a v interest, that's an interesting uh project looking at dietary changes and Jews who migrated into the it's all cool.
• 1:24:08
  SPEAKER_04: How comfortable would I be though with them, whatever their intentions, good or bad, digging up my my parents, my grandparents, and treating their their their remains as if they were just things.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_04: Because native remains are those are people's mothers and fathers and brothers and grandparents and maybe great-great-great-grandparents, and the the site the the the lighthouse site that where the cemetery is, I would never dream of excavating those remains.
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_04: That's a point of respect.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_04: So there's that.
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_04: The Pequot in Connecticut have a big uh a big reservation and they have uh their casino.
• 1:24:51
  SPEAKER_04: They were doing construction and they came across human burials from 150 years ago.
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_04: The Pequot have their own archaeology team, mostly white folks, but they're employees of the Pequot.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_00: They can afford it.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_00: They have a is it the Foxwood casino?
• 1:25:11
  SPEAKER_04: I always said that I just want for archaeology of the state of Connecticut, just give us the proceeds from one freaking slot machine, you know, every year.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_04: But the Pequot were perfectly okay excavating those remains respectfully, photo documenting everything, and then re-interring them in uh you know, uh encrypts or I I think of the ground actually.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_04: So, because but there's the deal.
• 1:25:39
  SPEAKER_04: These are Pequot ancestors, modern Pequot decided what was going to happen.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_04: And one of my favorite stories, Kevin McBride, great archaeologist, for years worked as the Pequot's archaeologist.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_04: He lived on the reservation.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_04: He lived, you ready for this?
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_04: He lived in a historical house where the reservation's white overseer lived back in the day.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_04: And the Pequot, when they would bring people, you know, foreign dignitaries to see their setup, they would drive by the house and they would point to it and say, That's where our overseer used to live.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_04: Now one of our employees lives there.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_04: Now that's you know, take that metaphorically.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_04: It was like they had taken charge of their own history.
• 1:26:29
  SPEAKER_04: So they were okay.
• 1:26:31
  SPEAKER_04: Now that this might not come not might not apply to multiple native groups, but they were okay with their ancestors being disinterred and then respectfully analyzed, but then placed back in the ground.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_04: So that's that's very different from you know me coming along and saying, I'm gonna dig up your great-great-great-great-grandparents.
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_04: I trust me, I got a really good reason for doing it.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_04: And I might, but that's Jennifer Raff, who's a friend and colleague who wrote the book Origin, the genetic history of the the human of humanity, or whatever.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Shout out, Jennifer.
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_04: It's a great book.
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_04: And Jennifer is really good at working with indigenous people.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_04: And indigenous people have agency in this, and some of them become involved in studying human skeletons.
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_04: Not all people are comfortable of any about particular ethnicity, but it's again, it's when it's because they're involved, because they have agency, they're able to decide what's going on.
• 1:27:33
  SPEAKER_04: And this has happened a number of times.
• 1:27:35
  SPEAKER_04: This this notion that all Indians are opposed to any cognitive skeletal analysis is total bullshit.
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_04: It's not, it's uh they react negatively when people who are not them impose it on them.
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_04: And there's that that makes a huge difference.
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_04: And which of course that makes makes sense, right?
• 1:27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just you gotta be respectful and you have to defer to the people whose ancestors you're you're you're you're messing with.
• 1:28:07
  SPEAKER_01: And this idea that you're stopping science or you're targeting uh, you know, my research because you're not allowing me to do whatever the hell I want.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, tough shit.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what to tell you.
• 1:28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like find something else to research.
• 1:28:23
  SPEAKER_01: There's plenty of stuff out there uh for you to research.
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's and listen, I knew a person who knew a person who went to a small community in India and they're biological anthropologists, and they wanted to take they're gonna do genetic analysis through butt blood samples.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_04: Guess what?
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_04: They get there, the people are inalterably opposed to anybody taking blood.
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_04: So that that anthropologists didn't have to say, oh, too bad, guys.
• 1:28:50
  SPEAKER_04: I'm taking your blood.
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_04: No, the people have agency, they have a right to just make that decision.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_04: By I don't know if this story is true.
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_04: I hope it is.
• 1:28:57
  SPEAKER_04: When I was in grad school, somebody told me that um a bunch of Native American grad students in in biology submitted a grant to the NSF for excavating burials, and they had a really good project laid out for paleopathology and paleo diet, and it was it there was no reason it should be turned down on the basis of of the actual uh research.
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_04: Problem was it was the cemetery where the people who settled Plymouth I said, well, that would be great.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_04: These are the first white Americans living in Massachusetts to know their diet, to know the genetic connections.
• 1:29:36
  SPEAKER_04: It's a great project.
• 1:29:37
  SPEAKER_04: It was illegal to do it.
• 1:29:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's against law.
• 1:29:42
  SPEAKER_04: Well, wait a minute.
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_04: Why was that against why is that against the law?
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_04: But it's not to excavate the remains of similarly aged Native folks in Massachusetts.
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's because in Massachusetts they passed WagPra.
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um WagPra.
• 1:29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why the WagPra laws.
• 1:30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the cool thing about uh the mountains, uh indigenous people.
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_01: The the really funny thing about well not funny, but people like to bring up because we were talking about the like the the overall demonization of Mesoamerican cultures, right?
• 1:30:16
  SPEAKER_01: You can't bring up anything about Mesoamerica positive without somebody pushing back immediately, like, well, what about this?
• 1:30:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd been doing because I'm preparing an episode for the future, um, about cannibalism.
• 1:30:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been reading a lot about what they're calling the starving times uh at Plymouth and all the pilgrims that were committing cannibalism.
• 1:30:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, if it had been our ancestors who were, you know, did that for whatever reason, you know, in that same circumstance, people wouldn't shut the hell up about it.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_01: But very few people actually know that I'll tell my students.
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_00: All my students would take my thirteen oh one US history when we're talking about those early settlements about the English, we go into how they failed and And we discuss cannibalism and how they were eating each other to stay alive.
• 1:31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Tastes like chicken, I understand.
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:31:16
  SPEAKER_01: How do the students react?
• 1:31:17
  SPEAKER_01: Are they surprised to hear that?
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of them, a lot of them are very uh, yeah, they they're very surprised.
• 1:31:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because I guess none of this is taught to them in their primary school, secondary.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Especially here in Texas, you know, this regressive state that we live in.
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_00: So regressive in everything, and and they're just coming down on education harder than they should for no reason.
• 1:31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Just to again back to the whole control issue.
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, I digress.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, well, let's not digress entirely.
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because I have a question for uh for uh for Ken.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_01: For LePlan.
• 1:31:52
  SPEAKER_01: LePlan John Fetter.
• 1:31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Give me some high glyphs.
• 1:31:56
  SPEAKER_05: I'll give them right off the top of my head, Carl.
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's gonna stick now.
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we were talking before we started the recording about like the current state of the educational system in the United States and how all this weird shit going on at the Smithsonian, where now they're sending people to investigate the Smithsonian and see if make sure it all falls within the correct pro-American narrative.
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_01: And now we've got fucking Prager U being proposed as the replacement for PBS.
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_01: Prager U as a replacement?
• 1:32:28
  SPEAKER_01: Are you sure?
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:32:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're they're pushing it hard, and they've got like these cartoons meant for kids where they're like, uh, and I was talking to Ken about it.
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_01: They've got this one cartoon about slavery where it's basically uh apologetics for slavery, right?
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, well, it wasn't really that bad.
• 1:32:47
  SPEAKER_01: And they don't even call them slaves, they call them the workers.
• 1:32:50
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, the workers.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_01: The workers, the happy little workers, right?
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: And what's funny is the video starts with Columbus, and he's got like this hokey fake accent where he's like, Well, slavery was a not so bad, eh?
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, is this like Super Mario explaining slavery to little kids?
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_01: What the hell is going on?
• 1:33:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and I shake it to me, Columbo.
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh almost verbatim, he says, Well, just to think about it, wouldn't you rather be uh captured and taken somewhere as a slave instead of killed?
• 1:33:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's a much better, right?
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, holy shit, this is insane.
• 1:33:33
  SPEAKER_01: So with that in mind, everything going on right now, this total attack, and you've got like this propaganda coming out right now, reinforcing this narrative of manifest destiny and civilizing the untamed, you know.
• 1:33:50
  SPEAKER_01: How do we, as people in the field, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, how do you think we should counter this if it has to be done outside of institutions?
• 1:34:09
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know, man.
• 1:34:10
  SPEAKER_04: One of the things that I have found out, especially doing the you know archaeological pseudoscience stuff, is that yeah, there are people there's a continuum, right?
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_04: I said there are people on one side, you are never, ever, ever going to win an argument with them.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_04: It's it it it's it's how they define the world and themselves.
• 1:34:30
  SPEAKER_04: And you're not you're just not gonna end up I mean, you know, once or twice, but for for the most part, you're not gonna convince them.
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_04: Everything you say is a lie.
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_04: Everything you say is fake.
• 1:34:42
  SPEAKER_04: And so they're out there.
• 1:34:43
  SPEAKER_04: Don't aim at them.
• 1:34:45
  SPEAKER_04: Ignore them.
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_04: They're assholes, you're not gonna help.
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_04: Then there are people way there on the other side, and I'm not saying left or right, but on the other side, who they get this.
• 1:34:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they they took a bunch of anthropology courses, they understand what what this is about, right?
• 1:35:01
  SPEAKER_04: They understand about oppression, and they understand they they they understand there's genocide, they understand there's inequality in everywhere, right?
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_04: And but there's this vast group of folks I hope I I think it's the the certainly the maybe the majority, certainly the plurality of people who just find this fucking fascinating and want to know.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_04: But if you if you only give voice to the people way there out there on the fridge, that's all they're gonna hear.
• 1:35:33
  SPEAKER_04: They're gonna hear, oh, so Indians didn't have the wheel, so that makes it primitive, right?
• 1:35:38
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, the Inca, they could they didn't have a writing system, so that's that means they're backwards, right?
• 1:35:44
  SPEAKER_04: Because that that's what they're being told there.
• 1:35:46
  SPEAKER_04: But if if those of us, if this podcast, if in my writing, I can say, hey, wait a minute, we're people who know something about this.
• 1:35:57
  SPEAKER_04: Here's what really underlies human history.
• 1:36:02
  SPEAKER_04: Here's what really uh underlies the development of cultures in the new world.
• 1:36:07
  SPEAKER_04: Here's what they were really like, because here's the evidence.
• 1:36:11
  SPEAKER_04: And at that point you have to hope that that and I think it's true, that people's minds are open enough that if you present them with a good argument and maybe something that's really interesting and exciting, they'll walk away saying, at least saying, I don't know about those either fridge, but that makes sense.
• 1:36:32
  SPEAKER_04: So it's not about disparaging people, not about calling them idiots and assholes, although I just call those people on the one side assholes because they are.
• 1:36:41
  SPEAKER_04: But it's it's it's meeting people where they live, right?
• 1:36:45
  SPEAKER_04: They're they're they find the this these stories interesting, but they don't know what to accept as knowledge or as truth.
• 1:36:54
  SPEAKER_04: And so our job is to help them along.
• 1:36:57
  SPEAKER_04: And we can do that, we can do that.
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I start I would start the semester with a hundred kids in introduction to archaeology, most of whom were there because they couldn't get into intro to psychology, because that was a gut class.
• 1:37:08
  SPEAKER_04: Everybody can stay into that.
• 1:37:10
  SPEAKER_04: Archaeology, what the hell is that?
• 1:37:12
  SPEAKER_04: And by the end of the semester, I'd have kids who wanted to major in anthropology, and I'd have kids who say, What's the next class you're teaching?
• 1:37:19
  SPEAKER_04: Or I'd have kids who say, This is really kind of this was cool stuff.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't know it would be cool.
• 1:37:24
  SPEAKER_04: We have that ability, we have that potential.
• 1:37:27
  SPEAKER_04: We just have to take advantage of it.
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:37:31
  SPEAKER_00: We have to definitely try to reach the people that are willing to listen for sure.
• 1:37:38
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 1:37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully we can we can countervail some of this nonsense that that is currently occurring, um, especially in the education uh sphere of things, right?
• 1:37:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it it's it's gotten to the point where I mean I haven't gotten any recently in recent recent years, I haven't gotten any students who are very adamant about certain things that they believe in and want to sort of uh be that student that is uh challenging the professor, which I you know, I'm I'm okay with with students challenging professors.
• 1:38:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was I was that student that would you know go toe-to-toe with some of my profs.
• 1:38:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure that by the way.
• 1:38:17
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, I've had students in the past who want to bring up conspiracy theories and want, you know, want to take up space, and and I tell students, look, I'm all for uh entertaining your ideas, but let's do it outside of this classroom because this is a history class, this is not a conspiracy class.
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way that that I try to you know bring students back into the conversation and keep them on track because the minute we start entertaining uh conspiracies and and nonsense and and just complete utter bullshit for lack of a better term, then we're kind of placing it on the same equal footing as knowledge and and as evidence and as proof.
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's it's a challenge for us, those of us, and as you know very well, uh Ken from all your years of teaching that that oftentimes it's it's it's uh almost um uh it's it's a challenge to to not only reach the students to try to impart some some knowledge to them, but it's also challenging to try to help them steer away from ideas that that are negative or that uh aren't gonna lead them to to a path of success, right?
• 1:39:27
  SPEAKER_00: For for their future endeavors.
• 1:39:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it's and and with everything that's going on with with the Prager U nonsense, it's gonna get tougher because the the powers that be are the ones that are explicitly trying to push this.
• 1:39:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's not it's not something that's coming from the bottom up now, it's coming from the top down.
• 1:39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:39:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's the crazy part.
• 1:39:47
  SPEAKER_00: When it's from the bottom up, you can at least you can you can play whack-a-mo.
• 1:39:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it gets it gets tiring after a while playing whack-a-mo.
• 1:39:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it won't but if it's coming from the top down, I mean that's an oppressive system that that is gonna be difficult to to um to counter, but hey, you know, I'm I'm up for a challenge.
• 1:40:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, Curly.
• 1:40:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm down.
• 1:40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do this.
• 1:40:11
  SPEAKER_00: I got I got my macwaites right here.
• 1:40:13
  SPEAKER_01: I know, I saw that.
• 1:40:14
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna bring that up.
• 1:40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, where'd you get those?
• 1:40:18
  SPEAKER_00: So a couple of years ago, we went to uh the Lowrider Super Show here in Dallas, and there was uh these um two brothers from I believe they were from uh Phoenix, who had a bunch of uh, I guess they use some kind of machine, some leading machine that that cuts uh various designs, and they had this, and so I I got it from them.
• 1:40:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 1:40:37
  SPEAKER_01: Are those Macquawites, are they separate from it or are they attached to it?
• 1:40:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:40:42
  SPEAKER_00: So they're just leaning up against the and so I'm gonna take this to campus because I'm I'm re-uh decorating my my office.
• 1:40:50
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 1:40:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I'm gonna do is is I'm gonna get like a uh a wooden frame and I'm gonna attach the uh the centerpiece and the makawites and then hang that on my wall.
• 1:41:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first thing people see when they come in, they're gonna see that.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's my coat of arms.
• 1:41:07
  SPEAKER_01: Very, very cool.
• 1:41:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Ken Fetter, the book is Native America: The Story of the First Peoples.
• 1:41:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great book.
• 1:41:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um there it is.
• 1:41:19
  SPEAKER_01: You could buy it anywhere fine books are sold.
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_01: I recommend that you go to a locally owned bookstore and uh place an order there.
• 1:41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um they always appreciate that, and you'll be supporting a good book.
• 1:41:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh is there anything that you would uh like the audience to know before we end this episode?
• 1:41:43
  SPEAKER_01: And are you on socials?
• 1:41:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like, can people find you on social media?
• 1:41:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:41:46
  SPEAKER_04: I got I got I got the Facebook, um, Twitter, which I Twitter is just like at this point, it's like looking at a car accident.
• 1:41:54
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you want to look away, but you go but you keep keep looking back.
• 1:41:58
  SPEAKER_04: It's really awful, some of the shit that's on Twitter.
• 1:42:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um I so I got Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
• 1:42:03
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, come say, give a shout, say hi.
• 1:42:06
  SPEAKER_04: I want to thank you guys for inviting me on here.
• 1:42:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's always a pleasure talking to you guys.
• 1:42:10
  SPEAKER_04: Um, thanks for coming on.
• 1:42:12
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:42:12
  SPEAKER_04: And it was, you know, do I do I have to pay you guys for putting me on the show to sell the book?
• 1:42:19
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, okay, okay, cool.
• 1:42:21
  SPEAKER_04: I'll I'm good with that.
• 1:42:22
  SPEAKER_04: And uh people, you know, I say I'm gonna go on the Tales of Oslantas, and people say, Oh, so you're shamelessly flogging the book.
• 1:42:29
  SPEAKER_04: I said, No, no, no, I'm I'm very much ashamed.
• 1:42:32
  SPEAKER_04: It's but I'm proud, but I'm but I'm okay with it.
• 1:42:35
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, listen, I you know, buy the book, get it in the library, um, open yourselves up to some really cool stories about people uh people whose part of history has been neglected, uh, has been ignored, has been disparaged.
• 1:42:52
  SPEAKER_04: None of that's deserved, man.
• 1:42:54
  SPEAKER_04: These people deserve respect.
• 1:42:55
  SPEAKER_04: They're the many, many cultures.
• 1:42:57
  SPEAKER_04: Why it's why the title of the book is Peoples, uh, Native American Story of the First Peoples, because it's not one group, one person, one culture.
• 1:43:04
  SPEAKER_04: It's lots and lots.
• 1:43:05
  SPEAKER_04: It's a diversity of adaptation, of art, of worship, of history.
• 1:43:11
  SPEAKER_04: And I hope you, you know, I hope you enjoy it.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and they're a joke scattered throughout.
• 1:43:16
  SPEAKER_01: I noticed.
• 1:43:17
  SPEAKER_01: Nice.
• 1:43:18
  SPEAKER_01: Not surprising.
• 1:43:19
  SPEAKER_04: And remember, the truth is like medicine.
• 1:43:21
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.