Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 069: Dr. Dan Flores

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Ep. 069: Dr. Dan Flores · The MeatEater Podcast

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  Speaker 1: t shirt out and go leave your review, which is
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  Speaker 1: real helpful. Now watch this segue, get ready, because when
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  Speaker 1: you go there, you'll find notes about books and whatnot.
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  Speaker 1: And some of those books are written by our guest,
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  Speaker 1: Dan Flores, whose house we're in right now. Can I
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  Speaker 1: see the road you live on? Uh? You almost see? Well,
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  Speaker 1: you can? I mean, so we're seventeen miles southwest of
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  Speaker 1: Santa Fe, New Mexico, not in Madrid. Now, we're not
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  Speaker 1: in uh Madrid, We're not in Syria's uh but kind
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  Speaker 1: of in the vicinity and within looking distance of what
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  Speaker 1: might be the oldest mine a turquoise mine, the oldest
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  Speaker 1: mine in North America. Yeah, very possibly the oldest mine
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  Speaker 1: and what is now the United States. I mean, we're
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  Speaker 1: sitting here on the couch looking out the screen door,
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  Speaker 1: and that mine is in view about four miles away.
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  Speaker 1: It's called Chalcey wheedle, which is an Aztec word. Um.
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  Speaker 1: Not that the the Aztec Indians lived here, this was
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  Speaker 1: Pueblo country, but the Pueblos traded turquoise all the way
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  Speaker 1: down into Central America, and uh, that turquoise made a
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  Speaker 1: really big splash among the Aztecs, who have a glyph
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  Speaker 1: for this little mountain where the mine is in the
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  Speaker 1: Temple of the Sun in Mexico City or or did
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  Speaker 1: have it. And so, yeah, this is a pretty major
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  Speaker 1: site for ancient North American archaeology. What did the what
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  Speaker 1: did the people here call it? Well, is that not known? Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I don't think they don't. I'm not sure what the
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  Speaker 1: word was that the Pueblo Indians had for. But there
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  Speaker 1: was a pueblo here about five or six miles away
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  Speaker 1: that was basically a pueblo of miners responsible for mining
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  Speaker 1: the turquoise in the Surreos Hills. That pueblo was called
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  Speaker 1: sam Marcus Pueblo and it was part of the Chaco
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  Speaker 1: Canyon complex a thousand years ago, and this part of
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  Speaker 1: the world there was a major civilization that was basically
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  Speaker 1: orchestrated by a place we now called Choco, which is
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  Speaker 1: a National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. And it
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  Speaker 1: had far flung communities all over this part of the world,
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  Speaker 1: all the way over into Arizona present day Colorado, Utah,
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  Speaker 1: New Mexico. And this was a mining town that was
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  Speaker 1: part of that complex. Is it uh? Is it true
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  Speaker 1: to that Chocko ca. I think he told me this before,
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  Speaker 1: that it Chaco Canyon in present day. We didn't really
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  Speaker 1: understand it until you get up above it and aircraft
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  Speaker 1: and look down on it to understand how it's configured. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I think uh, I mean I might have said something
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  Speaker 1: like that and some of our conversations from years ago
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  Speaker 1: when we were in Missoula. And the reason that's the
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  Speaker 1: case is because what archaeologists have learned about Choco fairly
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  Speaker 1: recently in the last twenty five or so years, is
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  Speaker 1: that a lot of the buildings Pueblo Benito, for example,
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  Speaker 1: which was kind of the Indian version of the Vatican
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  Speaker 1: really uh in North America thousand years ago. It was
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  Speaker 1: laid out according to solstices and equinoxes. The sun rises
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  Speaker 1: over the Chaco Valley at solstice and equinox, and so
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  Speaker 1: the lines of the buildings were laid out in that way.
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  Speaker 1: And what archaeologists realized when I mean, I think they
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  Speaker 1: knew this for quite a while, but looking down on
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  Speaker 1: it from aerial views, they realized that this is a
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  Speaker 1: civilization that built an elaborate road network across the Southwest.
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  Speaker 1: And um, I mean, you can kind of see those
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  Speaker 1: roads when you're on the ground, when you're over there
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  Speaker 1: hiking around the cliffs, but you can really see them,
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  Speaker 1: I think, a lot better from the air. And what
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  Speaker 1: people realize looking down on the Chaco and Complex from
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  Speaker 1: the air was that these roads were built, probably for
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  Speaker 1: religious reasons, just straight as an arrow across the landscape.
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  Speaker 1: And so unlike modern road engineers who will take roads
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  Speaker 1: around mountains and follow streams up canyons and things, these
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  Speaker 1: guys just for whatever the reason, they shot these roads
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  Speaker 1: straight through the countryside, and if a butte got in
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  Speaker 1: the way, they just went right over the top of
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  Speaker 1: it and maintain that straight line. And these were roads
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  Speaker 1: that were used. I mean people were hauling the vegas,
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  Speaker 1: the beams that they used to build all these giant
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  Speaker 1: constructions in Chaco from the Chusca Mountains fifty miles away
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  Speaker 1: over these roads. And these guys who were basically pissing
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  Speaker 1: these logs from the mountains, great big Ponderosa pines, who
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  Speaker 1: are having to go up and down the topography because
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  Speaker 1: the roads just went straight, and there was probably a
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  Speaker 1: reason for it. I mean, it wasn't just done because
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  Speaker 1: that's like the practical way to build a road, because
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  Speaker 1: it's not practical. No, it's not really practical. I mean
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  Speaker 1: what you would you know, what animals do and what
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  Speaker 1: most road engineers to do is you see a beaute
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  Speaker 1: in front of you, you go around. But so that's
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  Speaker 1: what Steve, you might have a little of that blood
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  Speaker 1: in you, because that's kind of the way you hike. YEA.
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  Speaker 1: Most of us tend to go around and with the
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  Speaker 1: flow of the landscape, and when you see a beaut
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  Speaker 1: you're like, oh, just go right up and over it. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: that's why they call me the inconsiderate mountain Go higher
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  Speaker 1: and considerate mountain go hiker. And and Dan, you were
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  Speaker 1: saying that some of that, so some of the turquoise
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  Speaker 1: taken out of here. You you're saying that, uh, there
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  Speaker 1: was awareness of this mind all the way down in
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  Speaker 1: the Aztec Empire, and that it seems as though, just
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  Speaker 1: based on faunnel remains, that these guys were getting maccaws
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  Speaker 1: and things from the jungles and they had those materials
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  Speaker 1: up here and in turn their rocks their turn turquoise
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  Speaker 1: was down there. Yeah, it was. It was a luxury
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  Speaker 1: good trade. I mean, we don't think, you know, of
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  Speaker 1: native people so much in the context of luxury goods,
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  Speaker 1: but I mean they were, you know, they were just
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  Speaker 1: like us. They were motivated by the same human nature
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  Speaker 1: impulses that we are to express status. And so turquoise,
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  Speaker 1: both turquoise and the things that the Pueblo people in
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  Speaker 1: the American Southwest traded farther south for turquoise were all
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  Speaker 1: luxury goods. And the mccause I mean, and this is
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  Speaker 1: a kind of a phenomenon of this part of the
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  Speaker 1: world because you can go into Santa Fe. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: I've got some scattered around here. There's a pot with
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  Speaker 1: McCaw feathers in it right there, and most of the
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  Speaker 1: shops in Santa fe still today you can go in
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  Speaker 1: and buy mccaugh feathers, because this is a bird we've
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  Speaker 1: known for the last thousand years around here, that was
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  Speaker 1: a sacred bird to the native people. They doesn't range here, obviously,
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  Speaker 1: this is a desert. They haul these things live up
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  Speaker 1: from the jungles of Central America, and the priests kept
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  Speaker 1: them in cages and treated them as kind of sacred beings.
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  Speaker 1: I think because of the brilliant plumage, the coloration of them. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: and so yeah, it's a for their beautiful song. Oh
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  Speaker 1: my god, this is out the inconsistency between a macaw
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  Speaker 1: his appearance in his song where it sounds like like
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  Speaker 1: he's the most beautiful bird and he sounds like like
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  Speaker 1: a dying what I had imagined a disease dying tero
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  Speaker 1: dactyle to sound like. But we're just down in South
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  Speaker 1: America with some mkushi guys and they still hunt mccaus
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  Speaker 1: with the feathers. Yeah, I don't doubt it. And now
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  Speaker 1: you're like, we're in the world where's like we have
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  Speaker 1: dies and all these fabrics and you can buy like
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  Speaker 1: blaze pink ship on the internet, right, But they're like still, like, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: those feathers are amazing looking. And they were saying that
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  Speaker 1: macaus are difficult to hunt the hum of the bow.
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  Speaker 1: They're difficult to hunt. But there's a particular type of
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  Speaker 1: of date tree or I'm sorry, a particular type of
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  Speaker 1: palm that has like a date like fruit on it,
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  Speaker 1: and they said that the macaws like those so much
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  Speaker 1: that you need to watch for one of those trees
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  Speaker 1: the fruit, and that's the only time that a macaw
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  Speaker 1: will let down his guard. And if you wait under
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  Speaker 1: the tree, you might get a macaw with your bow.
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  Speaker 1: And the rig they use, it's just a little barbed
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  Speaker 1: point that they try to hit the macaw with it
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  Speaker 1: and then the tip falls away from the arrow, but
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  Speaker 1: it's connected to the arrow shaft with a piece of string.
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  Speaker 1: And then McCaw get tangled up and they were able
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  Speaker 1: to climb up, able to climb up and get it
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  Speaker 1: and get their feathers. And they still produced. They still
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  Speaker 1: out of the cause and two cans and stuff. They
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  Speaker 1: produced ceremonial head dresses. Yeah, well that was you know,
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  Speaker 1: even a thousand years ago, and quite likely farther back
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  Speaker 1: than that, because there are macaus on the rock art
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  Speaker 1: all around us. I mean there's a rock art site
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  Speaker 1: UM about twelve miles away from here, uh that has
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  Speaker 1: a hole kind of base relief of Macau's painted on it,
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  Speaker 1: and it Petroglyph National Monument, which is out west of
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  Speaker 1: Albuquerque on the Mesa on the west side of the
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  Speaker 1: Real Grand River. UM. I mean, I've seen Macau's painted
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  Speaker 1: there too, And some of this rock art is older
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  Speaker 1: than the Chaco and civilization, so that indicates to me
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  Speaker 1: that there's been a fascination with Macau's and obviously a
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  Speaker 1: trade going down all the way into Central America from
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  Speaker 1: the southwest for longer than the Chaco and civilization existed
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  Speaker 1: in this part of the world. Another interesting connection between
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: New Mexico and and maybe further south is that the
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: first time a European described buffalo or bison, it was
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Cortez or one of his chroniclers ran into it in
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Montezuma's personal collection and his zoo, maybe five six hundred
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: miles south of maybe more than that, south of the
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: furthest southern point that the animal could have range. That's right,
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  Speaker 1: because they didn't. They clearly didn't cross the Chihuahuan Desert,
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  Speaker 1: which is hundreds of miles of pure desert now, and
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: we think that bison did uh range sporadically down in
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  Speaker 1: the northern Chihuahua state into some of the grasslands there.
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  Speaker 1: So definitely in Sonora, Sonora, Chihuahua, but not as far
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  Speaker 1: south as so that would have had. That would have
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  Speaker 1: been an animal that courtez some that probably was taken
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  Speaker 1: as a calf down to the courts of the Estet
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  Speaker 1: capital and became part of the officials was gifted to
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: him or traded to him some probably. Yeah, that's always
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  Speaker 1: been my thought about it. You know, there's nothing I
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: want to I want to talk more about that stuff,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: but they want to ask you about you mention this
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: one time and you haven't explained to me yet. You
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: were saying that you're gonna tell me or could tell me.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: We're open to discussing why uh why people's houses are
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: seventy two degrees. The thing I often tease my wife
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: about is, I'm like, I've identified my wife's like general
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: comfort range. I'm like, there's a four degree window on
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: which you don't you that you don't take steps to
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: like change your clothes to accommodate, And she like from
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: sixty eight to seventy two. When it falls outside of
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: that four degree thing, I always find she's doing something
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: to like, she's like losing layers or gaining laryerous to
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  Speaker 1: keep up with it. Yeah, well, I used to pose
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: this question to classes at the University of Montana, and
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: I would often do it at the end of the
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: first class meeting, sort of for further cogitation after they
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: left the class. So I want you to think about
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: this question. Why is it that, no matter whether you
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: live in Tucson, Arizona, or in Fairbanks, Alaska, you set
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: the thermostat of your house when it's when it can
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: be controlled at seventy two degrees And we do this
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: all around the world. So why do we do this?
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: And I will say that I don't know that anybody
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: ever came back on the second day of class and
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: said I know the answer to that. But if you
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: think about it, it's a fairly obvious one. We are
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: native as a species to only one part of the world,
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: and we've colonized every where else. And so in order
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: for us, in fact, to colonize out of equatorial Africa,
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: I mean, we had to invent sown clothing we basically
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: had to harness fire in order to keep ourselves warm.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: We had to build structures to keep ourselves either warm
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: or cool. And once we had those things, once, once
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: we had clothing and structures, we were in fire. We
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: were able then to spread around the world, to go
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: into northern Europe, to go into Scandinavia, to spread into Polynesia,
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: to end up crossing Siberia into North America. But everywhere
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: we went, that migration hasn't been long enough. It's only
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: taken place in the last forty five thousand years. We
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: haven't gone anywhere long enough to actually change who we
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: originally are as a species. And so what we've had
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: to do is to take our original habit hat with
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: us everywhere we've gone. And of course what it's meant
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: is that if you live in Canada, are you live
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: in Scandinavia, we have to consume an enormous amount of
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: energy in order to keep ourselves warm to live in
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: places like that, or if you live in Phoenix, Arizona,
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: we have to consume an enormous amount of energy to
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: cool ourselves. Because what we're doing everywhere we go, and
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: we're gonna have to do this when we go to
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: Mars too in another couple of decades. We've got to
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: set the thermostat at seventies because that's the ambient temperature
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: under which we evolved as a species, and that's why
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: we are only comfortable in your wife's four degree range
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: from six eight and seventy two. So we've got to
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: recreate that everywhere we go. I read somewhere there's something
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: about the human migrations around the world, and it was
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: like to come at least the current on standing to
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: come into what's now the Western Hemisphere, to come into
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: the New World. The scholar the scholarly consensus is still
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: that the first Americans passed across the Bearing Land Bridge,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: and to get to that point you needed to be
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: able to live in the Arctic. Okay, so you're you're
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: passing through the Arctic. People didn't get here until and
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: the number could change through time, but it's sort of
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: generally it's considered to be that people's first step foot
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: here fourteen fifteen thousand years ago. That could change by
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: a handful of years um as more sites emerge, but
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: that the limiting factor what kept us out of here
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: was that our our movement up into Siberia, which allowed
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: us to come across into Alaska, was sort of stalled
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: out until the invention of the eyed needle. Yeah, at
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: which point, yeah, son clothing, Like once the archaeological record
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: in Eurasia starts to turn up son close thing with
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: the eye needle, and then people are ready to shoot
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: up and crossover, and that that very likely was a
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: female invention. I mean, you know, we pride ourselves as
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: men on Okay, we invented at adols and things to
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: be able to hunt more effectively, but the the eyde
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: needle was probably an invention of women sitting there working
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: hides and figuring out how to attach them one to
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: the other and make an effect fitted clothing. Because what
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: you need is clothing that's going to fit tightly enough
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: around you that it maintains your body heat. And so
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: we had to create sown clothing before we could ever
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: basically not not even just live in these northern latitudes
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: are extremely for southerly latitudes in the Southern hemisphere, but
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: even to travel through them, because we suffered from frostbite
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: so easily. I mean, we're basically semi equatorial apes and
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: we have a hard time functioning in these really cold situations.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: I was just reading. I'm reading a book about d
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: extinctions and it's written by a geneticist. It's about the
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: possibility of like de extinction bringing back through people. Hear
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: the word cloning is just like not at all like
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: what they would do to to to recreate a passenger
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: pigeon or recreate a mammoth is not at all has
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: nothing to do with ship you saw on Jurassic Park.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: It's it's way more nuanced than complex. But Um, in it,
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: she was explaining that the authors explaining that the wooly
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: mammoth is about as far removed from the Asian elephant
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: as we are from Chimp's meaning about we're about like
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: genetically about nine eight percent the same, but there's still
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: two percent pretty major man, Yeah, t percent at you
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: Mozart and Einstein. Yeah, so you know an everything, And
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: this is gonna lead to a question I want to
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: ask you about. But Um, when I read about the
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: people in the New World, like I've read the books
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: that the anthropologist, the paleo anthropologist David Meltzer and and
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: David Meltzer talks about that passageway that humans when humans
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: went through the Arctic and passed through Siberian into Alaska first,
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Like important to realize that they weren't like thinking like, hey,
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: let's go to America. There was no there was no
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: like end the goal. They weren't like you, weren't like
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: you were kind of you were going somewhere on a
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: maybe a daily basis, but there was no like, hey,
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: let's go colonize, like on the burying what's not the
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: bearing what we think of when we look at like
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: Burringia or what's not the burying land bridge, It's reasonable
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: to think that generations might have been born and died
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: on that land chunk with no concept of them being
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: coming from somewhere and going somewhere. I mean, for one thing,
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: it's six hundred miles wide. I mean we call it
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: a bridge, and so that makes you think of it
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: as this this narrow passageway from one continent to another.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: But at the time when h the the oceans were
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: at their lowest, ebb Beringia was six d miles wide.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: So I mean it was you know, as wide as
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: present day Texas. You wouldn't be crossing through Austin and
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: San Antonio and think that Texarkana and El Paso were
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: the edges of a bridge. I mean, I think probably
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: you're exactly right. There would have been whole generations of
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: people who would have just thought of that as a homeland.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: But I think what would have motivated them to go
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: in the direction that carried them into North America is
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: that I mean, I think this is one of the
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: reasons we left Africa and began moving around the world,
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: is that we were endlessly looking for places that other
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: people hadn't been yet, because that meant the resources were rich,
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: the animals were stupid, they hadn't been hunted yet, and
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: so what you're looking for is a place where, wow,
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: I haven't seen any other human camps for the last
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: several days I have, I don't see smoke from campfires
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: up ahead, And so you go in the direction where
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: there appears to be an absence of prior human activity,
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: and that's what naturally led them finally into North America.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: That that's kind of what I wanted to get out
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: to ask you about is so of your feelings on that,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: because you just can't discount the idea that some point
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: there was like some element of curiosity because population levels
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: like like, for instance, there's this there's this idea that
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: the reason that Native Americans were so susceptible to European
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: diseases when when when Europeans arrived much later, it was
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: because they had passed through this like big disease free
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: corridor where you didn't have like in the Arctic, it
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: was cold enough and it wasn't densely populated, so communicable diseases.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: Like people lost contact with communicable diseases and and lost
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: their ability to tolerate them. So you can't be like, oh,
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: like the Arctic was so filled up with people that
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: there was warfare, right, It probably wasn't like that. It's
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: probably just people moving. I think it was people moving.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know around like bacall And and uh,
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: Russia there did seem to be where we think some
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: of the Siberian populations that ended up in North America
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: and became the ancestors of Native people. That I mean,
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: there is some evidence of uh, you know, possible conflict
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: that might have sent some groups on the move, but
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: like like like over resources, probably over resources. I mean,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: I think that's probably the ultimate motivation for these migrations
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: that carried us around the world, is that, as I said,
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: a few minutes ago. I think human populations were sort
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: of endlessly looking for places where the resources were going
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: to be available solely to them and they weren't going
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: to have to compete with other people for them, and
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: so that would have that would have drawn people in
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: these grand migrations northward, for example, out of Africa, through Turkey,
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: around the Black Sea, all the way up into northern Europe.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Originally because I mean anatomically modern humans us Holmo sapiens,
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: we realized when we got there, the first people who
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: arrived there found only Neanderthals. There, only these you know,
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: I mean related hominins, but at least not us. And
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: I think that's what fueled the migration into North America too.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: I will say, though, I mean, I'm I'm completely with
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: you on this impulse that we have to see what's
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: down the river and around the next mountain range. And
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's why, you know, we're that
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: kind of species. We've been doing this kind of spread
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: out of our homeland and around the planet for so long.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, and not just our species, but prior hominant
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: species like Neanderthals have done it, that it's part of
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: our genetic legacy to to go and see what's there.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: I think that's why we we're gonna end up going
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: to Mars uh and probably in other places in the
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: Solar System as well. But I think that's why everybody
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: is so excited about Mars at the moment. Is I mean,
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: this is just one of those genetic pulls that we've
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: had as a species, and I think it's been It's
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: a tribute to us in a lot of ways. It's
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: one of them, maybe the most noble things that we
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: have about us. It's that we are curious enough that
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: we want to go see what it's like somewhere else,
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: even though we know, in the case of Mars, we're
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: gonna have to wear helmets and suits and we've got
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: to live inside polyurethane structures and you know, but I
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: think people crossing uh Siberia and the the Baryngia and
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: into North America said, Okay, we're gonna have to bundle
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: up like you've never worn clothing before, and we've got
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: to invent tight fitted clothing with you know, with eyed needles. Um.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: But if we need the technology to enable us to
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: go there, damn it, we're gonna invent it because this
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: is who we are. To me. It's one of our
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: great tributes, our attributes as a species. The guy that
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: I'm interested in his story get is the guy that's
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: coming down the coastline. Like people used to be big
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: on this idea that there was the ice free corridor
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: that would have dumped the like the first the first
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Americans to hit what is now the Lower forty eight.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: There used to be this idea and made you can
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: speak to other this idea is dead dead or kind
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: of dead? Is uh? That they would have hit that
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: they would have emerged on the Great Plains south of Edmonton,
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: Alberta through what this idea that there's this ice free
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: corridor where everything to the east was glaciated and the
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: coastline was glaciated and the Rockies were glaciated, but you
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: had this this dry chunk of land that would have
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: just eventually funneled human traffic down with this little belt
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: and spilled them out onto the primo hunting grounds of
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: the Lower forty eight and from their reeked havoc on
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: willie mammoths and mask dons. And now it seems that
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: there's a lot more thinking or or that this a
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: more fashionable idea. The people were coming down the coasts
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: and probably had basic boat technology. But I'm interested in
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: the feller and there was a first like like if
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: you had a time machine you could go see if
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: you're standing in any place, any place, and you're standing
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: in California on the beach, there's a time you could
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: have gone back in time and seeing the first dude
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: or more likely a family group coming down the shore
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: right and would have happened what happened. And I'm interesting
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: the guy coming down the shore that hits like a
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: calving glacier. So here he is never been here before.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: He's on this coastline and all he can see ahead
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: of him is here's an ice field, alright, which still
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: they still exist to day around you know, southeast Alaska,
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: and there's a calving glacier. And he's like, kids, um,
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna trust that this ends,
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: and we're gonna battle out and around and see what's
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: on the other side. Because that was a leap and
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: ship like that had to been happening. I think that's
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: probably in a way, it's that's the you know, and
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: and and Christian and Jewish theology. That's the Adam myth.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's it's the first man, the first woman
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: to see the world. And you know, in that myth,
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: Adam gets to name all the animals even and so
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: you can extrapolate, you know, from the Bible and the
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: Book of Genesis to your you know, captain of his
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: boat with his family going around this calving glacier and
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: hoping there's something on the other side, and landing on
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: the other side and finding some land and seeing animals
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: that they've never seen before, and getting to name the
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: animals and so like be like hunting Yellowstone Park. That's right,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: that's with no park rangers, with no park rangers, and
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: and all these new beasts. Because I mean that's one
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: of the things that as we went went around the
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: world we confronted not everything was the same. I mean,
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: we were seeing this this grand diversity of life on
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: a planet that was billions of years old, where life
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: had evolved as a result of shifting uh and continents
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: breaking apart, so that we ended up with everywhere you
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: went there were there was there were different life forms.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: You saw birds that you had never seen before, you
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: saw animals you had never seen before, And I think
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: that's probably one of the things, Especially people who were
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: as closely tuned to nature and observing nature as these
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: folks would have been because they lived off the natural world,
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: I think that would have been an ultimate fascination to
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: land on the other side of a Calvin glacier and
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: see a whole host of creatures you had never seen before. Yeah,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: like with the first guy idea, after people had after
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: people had passed through the Arctic and started coming south,
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: they were probably hundreds of generations removed from snakes. Alaska
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: has no snakes, so you can imagine that there was there. Again,
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: there was like a guy. That's the thing I always
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: returned to, is you get like you get when you
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: think about history, you always think of it becomes faceless, right,
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: But there was like a person who had no idea
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: that a rattlesnake, right was like bad ship. And he
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: would have had to have have been like the guy who
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: made it and to the point where there is one
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: and saw that first one. Yeah, that's like what you're
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: and and there was no thing. There's no cultural No,
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: they did have cultural awareness, but their cultural awareness is
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: probably more confined to like a stead of experiences by
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: just a handful of past generations like you weren't like
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: always reading about wildlife on other continents now in some
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: like real time way. Yeah, and I think that would
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: have been tremendously exciting. I mean, it excites me to
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: think about it too. Step into a brand new world.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, and I I've read enough. For example, you know,
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: just from in a sort of a minor key version
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: of this, people passing in the nineteenth century from the
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: woodlands of the east onto the Great Plains and encountering
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: for the first time pronghorn antelope, for example, or coyotes,
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: or huge herds of bison. They may have seen bison
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: in small numbers in the woodlands in eighteen hundred, but
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: getting two hundred miles farther west out of the grasslands
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: and seeing herds that spread to the limits of the horizon.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: I mean. And and those people, of course left us
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: a written account, and so you can read how exciting
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: they found that. I mean, you know, John James Ottobon,
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: who spent his entire life studying nature, hunting animals, shooting birds,
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: painting birds, gets to a new setting on the Missouri
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: River on the Great Plains in eighteen forty three, and
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, I've always loved this passage. He wrote his
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: wife that summer about all these animals he was seeing
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: that he had never seen before, and finally close one
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: of his letters with the line, I've got to stop right.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: I'm too excited to write anymore. I can't say anything else,
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, And so there was that excitement is palpable
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: through the written word of what people left us, you know,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: in the last hundred and fifty or two hundred years.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: So it must have been the same thing when someone
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: emerged into North America and saw, you know, giant herds
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: of camels for the first time, or I mean, they
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: would have seen wild horses, no doubt plies the seen
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: horses in Baryngia, and they would have seen mammoths and
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: mastodons in in Baryngia, but they probably wouldn't have seen
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: giant ground sloughs or hyenas or camels. And so they
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: emerged into settings where they they saw creatures like that
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: must have been exciting as hell. Some people have I
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: think a hard time with the camel thing like that.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: We have like camelids on the great plants, but it's
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: really like you kind of take for game like the
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: in the Andies that you have llamas, alpacas, Yeah, and
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: then something and then those are like domestic versions of
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: some wild things. But yeah, so when you think about that,
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: it's like not as surprising that we did have a
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: number of camel species on the Great Plants and du
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: hunting for him and dudes were hunting them. Yeah, we
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: had one humped camels and not the double humped camels
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: of of Africa. But the camels from South America had
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: migrated u up the the Andes chain, crossed into North
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: America and basically spread across the plains as far probably
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: as the Canadian border, at least Montana. I mean, they
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: were animals that could exist at fairly high latitudes in
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: the Andes and so they could take fairly cold weather.
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: So coming out of I mean, if these early UH inhabitants,
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: these early arrivals in North America either came from the
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: coast in land or emerged from an ice free corridor.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: And I don't think the ice free quarter is totally dead.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: I think they're dead now. I don't think it's dead.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: I think there are plenty of people who still believe
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: that's the case, but I think they would have encountered
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: as soon as they emerged from that quarter a suite
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: of animals that they had never seen before. And I
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: love the description I read fairly recently about um who
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: these people might have been. I mean, we don't know,
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: for example, if if the dates go back to fifteen
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: sixteen thousand years, I mean we we haven't really assigned
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: a name to maybe the first three or four thousand
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: years of arrivals, because they didn't seem to leave a
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: technology like the later Clovis people lad. But the Closed
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: people left us thirteen thousand years ago and down to
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: about eleven thousand years ago. I mean, they left us
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: a technology that seems to make it apparent that uh.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: In the words of a recent scholar who described them,
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: he described them as nor Are in hemisphere wild people,
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: kind of like Vikings, but coming out of Siberia. And
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: these were people who would who it was probably a
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: very male dominated society, maybe dominated by warriors or hunters,
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: and they were people who would have thrown themselves, uh
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: into this new setting. And you know, if Paul Martin
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: is right with his plies to scene the Bloods Creek hypothesis,
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: Craig hypothesis. I mean, it would have only taken them
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: three or four hundred years to go all the way
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: from the vicinity of Edmonton down to the tip of
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: South America to Tyral del Fuego and wipe out millions
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: of animals along the way. That's the thing that's so
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: puzzling about. There's two that you just brought up that
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: that maybe you can speak to a little bit. Is
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: uh One the way Clovis, the Clovis culture, they have
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: this like diagnostic spear point. Okay, so when you when
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: you excavate an old site and you find this spear point,
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: the spear point is so peculiar. It's called a fluted
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: spear point, where they would knock a channel out of
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: each face of the projectile point. Um, it's it's so
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: peculiar that it's regarded as diagnostic. And there are many
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: projectile points there this way where people made it for
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: a long time. They made it the same way every time,
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: and then they moved on and started making different points
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: that they're probably using in different ways and stopped making
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: them that way. So when you find a clothe what
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: what how you know a Clovis site, it's kind of
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: like what did their spear point technology look like? Whoever
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: arrived from There's nothing like trying to think out how
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: to put this. There's nothing like the Clovis technology in Asia.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: So people think that it either is an American invention,
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: that the people that first came down and colonized the
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: New World, colonize what we now think of as a
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: Lower forty eight and elsewhere, that they sort of coalesced
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: into or developed into the Clovis culture and developed this
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: projectile point suitable to the type of hunting they found here,
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: or like an anthropological conspiracy theory is that the paleolithic
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: people of Europe who quinn who Some whould argue it's coincidence,
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: someone would argue it's not coincidence, who had a point
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: kind of like the Clovis point much earlier, thirty forty
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: years ago. They were making a point and hunting the
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: same suite of mega fauna in Europe with a projectile
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: point that's kind of similar. So there's this idea that
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: these fellers uh hopped in some skin boats and came over.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: It's called I think it's called the salutary and hypothesis
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: or the salute connection came over, showed the people here,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: what's up. The Europeans came, showed the people here, what's up?
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: How to do this deal? They died out, and then
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: what we regard as Native Americans came down afterward or
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: had picked up their tricks of the trade from these
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: European seafarers. What do you is that? What do you
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: think of that? I mean, like, based on your career
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: long exposure to this stuff, well, I mean it is
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: in a way. I mean, it's a it's kind of
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: a conspiracy theory, but it's a conspiracy theory that actually
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: got a national geographic and so you've got to have
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: some bona fides, some credentials to to make it into
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: a magazine of that ilk um you know. I I
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: some people call it racist. Well, I mean if you
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: make the argument that, you know, it's the Europeans who
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: kind of invent everything important and the Native people just
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: glom onto the critical technological elements, then it does have
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: sort of overtones of uh at least a kind of
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: an ethnocentrism um word. Yeah, you know, so I I
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: realized that we've not yet found a kind of a
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: precursor to Clovish technology in Siberia, and frankly, I wonder
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: if that's just because you know, there hasn't been great
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: archaeology done yet in Siberia and that we're gonna find it. Um.
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: I tend to think myself that this is somewhat coincidental
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: in part because of the difference in time frames. The
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: salutary In point, as you mentioned, is like a thirty
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: thousand year old point. Uh. It's one of the points
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: that you know, anatomically modern humans had in Europe within
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: ten thousand years or fifteen thousand years of coming out
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: of Africa. Uh. And the Clovis point, of course, occurs
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: in time almost twenty thousand years later. So it's the
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: kind of thing that that the time frame connections make
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: me think it would be hard to to come up
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: with the linkage, although you know you could. I suppose
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: it's in the ram of possibility to argue that some Clovis,
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: that maybe these Europeans got into North America left some sites,
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: and people who became Clovis found those sites and attempted
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: to emulate this kind of technology and did so very successfully.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: I don't know right now what the explanation for this
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: particular gular mystery is. But one of the things I
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: really love about science in all its forms is that
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: we endlessly have mysteries. And you know the mysteries. I mean,
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: in my career, Uh, quite a number of mysteries have
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: been solved, but there are plenty of them out there
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: that and all the time I've been doing this, we
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: never have figured out what the answer is. And so
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: that's kind of the great thing about all this is
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: that there are things still to be resolved in the future. Uh,
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: that other generations, uh maybe can come up with a
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: really fine explanation for this is one that I have
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: to say, you know, I can't come up with a
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: plausible explanation for why the Salutary and culture and Point,
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: which is a big game hunting culture, resembles the Clovis
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: culture of twenty thousand years later in terms of some
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: not just superficial but fairly close similarities of the technology. Uh.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: The one thing I will say about the two groups
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: is that even though they're separated in time by almost
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: twenty thousand years, they kind of seem to have the
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: same effect on the fauna of the places they inhabit.
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, it looks to me as if we finally
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: invented agriculture in Europe because essentially people ultimately killed off
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: all the major animals. And I think at a chronology
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: that occurs at a later point in time in North America,
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: because we entered we humans entered North America later in time.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: The same pattern follows. The big animals once our presence
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: is fully established, uh in a location are going to
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: go away. They disappear. And we began, in what's called
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: the archaic phase, to sort of spread into too smaller
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: micro habitats and hunt smaller animals like deer and elk
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: and so forth. But eventually everywhere we go we're kind
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: of forced in the direction ultimately of adopting agriculture. Because
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: we tend to over hunt animals, we tend to ultimately
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: take them out, so it's simply not as easy to
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: live as a hunter anymore. And uh, we end up
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: becoming farmers. You know. I want to get back that
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: and and press you on a part of that, but uh,
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: before I don't want to bring out like you're talking about,
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: the mysteries is kind of the greatest mystery to me
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: about the peopling of the New World, probably the greatest
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: mystery to everyone is that we have we've most people
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: have settled on this idea of the Bearing Land Bridge
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: as the entry point. But the oldest rock solid site
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: we have, Okay, the oldest site that like archaeologists and
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: anthropologists just universe really agree on as being the oldest
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: human settlement site in the New World is in Patagonia. Yeah,
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: it is. And how much ship is missing between right,
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: like it really, you know, And if you talk to
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: anthro apologies about making more fines, they're not always like
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: super optimistic about that we're gonna make more fines because
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: there's been so much just like we've done so much
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: road building and so much excavating and stuff that like
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: that like the stuff that's gonna get found has maybe
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: kind of been found, you know, you don't you don't
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: feel like people are like in the Arctic, like in
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: Siberia right now, there's a lot of enthusiasm about what's
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: the next thing that's gonna thaw out of the perma frost,
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: you know, like we don't even know, like mysteries are
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: going to continue to like we're gonna be excited about
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: what's to come, but most people are like not real
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: excited about the prospect of finding really good intact iron
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: ad paleo sites, but the oldest one we have is
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of miles from the point of entry.
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: So between Baryngia in Chili, it's like, where were those
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: people hanging out? Well, I think that that site in Patagonia,
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: which you know, the latest dates I've read for it, uh,
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: you know, seemed to place it between fourteen and sixteen
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: thousand years ago, that it very likely is good evidence
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: that people were working their way down the coastlines. And
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: I think the reason we don't have intervening sites along
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: the coastlines is that as a result of the end
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: of the Wisconsin ice Age and the rise of the oceans,
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: many of those camp sites have ended up off shore
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: and buried probably under two hundred feet of water. And
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: so what we get then is an inland site in Chile.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: But they're probably were campsites, fairly regular campsites along the
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: coast leading down to that that particular point, and we've
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: just we've lost them as a result of the rise
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: of the seas. A detail I like about that site,
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: as they seem to have had tent steaks, tethering, some
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: sort of tent structure with a strip of mastodon hyde,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: which is a nice detail. No, it's wonderful in it
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: um but so so again what you jump in? What
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: you gotta do? Why is it? Like you mentioned that
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: we could have hunter gatherer cultures that went ten thousand
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: years without over hunting, Like, what is it to happen?
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: Like if we accept that some species were driven to
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: extinction with the arrival of humans, right, and we like
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: and as debatable, but let's just say that that was
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: like it almost certainly was a contributing cause, right that
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: that a lot of these big animals, mammoth masodonds, like
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: their demise is contemporary at least contemporaneous with the arrival
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: of people, suspiciously so suspiciously. So but then what why
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: did how did we then go ten thousand years about
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: losing a continuous stream of creatures? Well, I think you know,
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: so again, this is kind of the plasto stine extinctions
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: are are one of our big mysteries. And there are
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: a big mystery in part because this is our most
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: profound ecological disturbance since humans arrived in North America. I mean,
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: we talk all the time these days about the effect
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: that modern society has on wildlife on the habitat destruction.
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: But I mean we lost thirty two genera of large
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: animals in the plies to sine. I mean charismatic big species,
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: Africa type analog animals, and hundreds of smaller ones. And
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: so it was a kind of a sea change for
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: North America. And suspiciously we arrived at just the time
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: that this was happening, we humans did. But the other
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: thing that happened, of course, is that this was the
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: end of the Wisconsin ice Age, and so the climate
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: was changing. And that's one of the great debates is
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: whether or not climate was the primary cause, whether or
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: not humans entering a landscape that had humans had not
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: evolved in, had not been in before, where the animals
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: had not evolved any kind of ability to resist us
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: as hunters. I mean, that kind of thing is a
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: debate that has been going on now for more than
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: a century, and it's very likely that nobody is ever
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: going to definitively resolve it. Some people argue that, okay,
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: it's partly climate, and it's partly the human fluence. The
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: best example we've got for the human influence is probably
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: with the mammoths um Paul Martin and his his great
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: book the you know, really the last book he wrote,
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: and and the book that if people want to read
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: about this, I think I would encourage them to read,
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: is called The Twilight of the Mammoths. And Martin was
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: the major advocate of Plistocene overkill, but he did concede
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: that the best evidence we have is for this single species.
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: For some species, we don't have very much evidence of
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: human overkill at all because it doesn't turn up. It
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: doesn't turn up in campsites, it doesn't turn up at
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: camp sites. We don't find archaeological sites where people were
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: processing horses, for example, and horses during the Plistocene seemed
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: to have comprised in some places, like twenty of the
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: biomass of large animals. They became extinct, and yet we've
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: barely found any kind of archaeological sites at all that
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: indicate that, in contrast to the Solutrean people in Europe
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: who were run them over cliffs, we were running over
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: cliffs and corralling them. Mostly what they were doing was
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: corralling them and killing them, and they nearly wiped out
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: Europe's horses. In fact, some people believed that it was
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: only the domestication of the last few horses that enabled
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: Europe's horses to survive extinction. But unlike those solutary and
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: hunters in Europe, I mean, we, the North American hunters,
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: don't seem to have produced the kind of archaeological sites
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: that show, at least so far, a large scale destruction
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: of horses. And yet horses became extinct here. So I mean,
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: we're still puzzling this out as to exactly what happened.
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: But we somehow lost all these animals. Probably humans were
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: involved in some significant way for at least some of them,
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: and once they were gone, what we essentially had to
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: do was to reinvent ourselves. Two, to make the step
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: from being Paleolithic big game hunters to the step of
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: beginning to hunt smaller animals, beginning to rely more on
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: gathering fruits and food stuffs from the plant world, and
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: sort of instead of doing probably what the Clovis and
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: fulsome people did was, which was to migrate widely across
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: the landscape in search of animal herds, we had to
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: start settling down into local habitats and I think and
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: learning probably learning plant life too. That's exactly. The reason
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: I think, to answer the question you pose to sort
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: of launch this, why we don't just keep causing extinctions
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: is because once we settle down and start living locally,
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: we start learning landscapes at a more intimate level. And
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: what we begin to learn is the the classic law
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: of a bology, Lee Bigg's law, which argues that you
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: have to to base your population for sheer survival on
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: the worst years that you experience in your landscape rather
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: than the best years. If you calibrate your population based
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: on the best years, then when the worst years come along,
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: you're going to be devastated. And so these archaic people
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: who survive for seven or eight thousand years without wiping
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: animals out and with with a very effective functioning kind
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: of economy seem to do it because they become consciously
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: aware of what a local habitat is capable of providing.
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: Not that they don't trade with people from other settings,
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: but they understand what it's like to live locally, and
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: that gives them these kind of packets of cultural information
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: about what the local habitat is capable of producing and
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: what the limits are in both directions, the best years
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: and the good years and what they seem to have done, frankly,
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: was to have deliberately control their populations, mostly by engaging
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: and infanticide, by killing excess babies when they were born,
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: a kind of a form of abortion really kind of
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: a draconian form of abortion that enabled them to keep
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: their populations small enough that they weren't wiped out whenever
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: bad years or a sequence of bad years came along.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: But starvation was still like certainly a factor in these societies. Oh,
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: I think people certainly suffered from starvation. I mean, I
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: think we've gotten genetic evidence today of people with you know,
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: some of the groups in the Southwest. Native people in
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: the Southwest have what's called starvation gene, where basically, uh,
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: in contemporary times eating modern foods, they tend to become
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: quite a beast because they had been in their past.
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: Their populations selected for a type, a kind of a
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: genetic type that was capable of storing food to enable
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: them to get past these starving and lane times. And today,
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: when they've got abundant food, they tend to if they're
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: not careful, they become pretty OBEs. You know, this brings
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: us something We touched on this a little bit before,
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: But I'd like you to to to explain it more
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: because that balance you arguing one of your and one
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: of your papers, and the paper has been cited many, many,
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: many times. You are like that that balance the people achieved,
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: that that ten thousand year balance the people achieved between
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: um humans and animals that they were hunting, was disturbed
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: or interrupted by the introduction of the horse. Yeah, maybe unsustainably.
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: So can you sketch that out for people? Yeah? I think, Uh,
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: And this is what I argue in this long dure
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: a story of of Native people in North America. I
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: think the coming of Europeans bringing with them I mean,
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: and I think it's a suite of things. I think
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: it's it's not just the horse. I think it's the
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: arrival of the market economy, which, as the Europeans introduce it,
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: it essentially compels people who had been who had sort
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: of lived off a diversity of resources in a landscape
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: to specialize in the resources Let's say bison robes that
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: the market economy wanted. The market economy might not have
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: been interested in all the things they produced. It was
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: interested in one or two things. And the market economy,
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: as Europeans introduced it into North America five years ago,
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: was very interested in the skins of animals, and so
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: it tended to as European traders approached native people, they
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: brought with them not only a desire to have these
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: native people specialized in a particular product out of their
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: resource base, but the Europeans also brought with them the
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: goods of the industrial revolution, because Europe had gone through
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: this progression of reaching a point where you couldn't live
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: by hunting animals alone, and therefore having to become hunter
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: gatherers and then eventually farmers. Europe, having been occupied by
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: humans out of Africa forty five thousand years ago, had
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: reached that sequence earlier in time than people in the
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: America's had, having been occupied by a migration out of
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: Africa only fifteen thousand year yars ago, And so the
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: whole chronology of Europeans had carried their pattern through these
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: various kinds of economies farther along to the point where
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: they had begun to produce an industrial revolution metal goods.
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: They produced iron, for example, and native people's all over
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: the world who had not yet reached the iron age
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: when they were first exposed to iron implements, knives, hatchets, axes, metal,
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: arrow points, spear points. They were absolutely captivated by those goods.
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: I mean. One of those stories I've often told is
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: how when Captain Cook appeared off the coast of the
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: island of Kawaii in the Hawaiian Islands in the seventeen eighties,
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: the Natives who had been ex supposed to nails as
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: a result of driftwood coming ashore. When they went out
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: to meet cooked ships, they clamored aboard, and Cook's men
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: reported that the Polynesians immediately started pulling the nails out
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: of every plank on the ships, and they finally had
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: to had to push them overboard and make them go
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: back ashore because they were afraid they were gonna dismantle
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: the damn vessels they were so eager to get metal.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: Another story I told I think I told this to
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: Joe Rogan when I did the podcast with him, is
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: about uh. I was once a an editor for a
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: journal called ethno History, and we received a manuscript that
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: was basically the editor journal of an early trader who
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: was in the Amazonian basin. And this fellow had said
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: he that he had replaced a trader who had been
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: working among the native people for two or three decades,
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: and when he asked the question of his predecessor, how
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: do I get people who have never been exposed to
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: the European trade to trade with us? This guy said,
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: it's as simple as anything. You just go into an
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: area where Europeans haven't been before and tie an axe
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: to a tree, and a month later go back. And
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: he wrote in his journal that he did this several times,
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: and when he would go back, there would be throngs
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: of people gathered around, hoping for another example of this
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: kind of miraculous metal that they had found hanging from
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: a tree. It's in some way, it's it's still happening
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: right now though, because if you read about groups first
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: contact groups coming out of the jungle in Peru, in Brazil,
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: it's like oftentimes they're they're they're coming out to the
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: rivers machetes and pots. Yes, that's it, it's metalware, it's metal. Well,
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: I agree that stuff is nice. It's nice, and so
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: I mean here in in the southwest, among these pueblo
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: and people who made these gorgeous pots, I mean, and
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: they made them hundreds of years before the Spaniards ever
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: arrived here, and of course now sell them. I mean,
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: I've got pots from the various pueblos all over the
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: house here. They sell them in Santa fe Uh to
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: people who want um to take home some beautiful object
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: from the cultures of the Southwest. But when the Spaniards
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: arrived with metal, these Pueblo people almost completely lost the art,
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: and some of them at least of making pots, because hell,
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: here's a metal pan. I don't really need a pot anymore.
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: Here is an object made of metal that these Europeans
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: will trade to me, and I don't have to engage
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: in the painstaking work of making a ceramic pot. I mean,
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: I was just telling the story to a group of
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: people a few days ago about how uh Adolph Bandalier,
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: the archaeologists who came out to what is now a
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: Bandalia National Monument in the eighteen eighties, hired Indians to
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: help him dig up some of the sites, and they
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: were unearthing pot shards there, and those people took them
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: back to pueblos like Sanduel Defonso Pueblo and showed these
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: pot sharks to people like Maria Martinez, who became the
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: first of the great modern celebrated pottery makers again in
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: Pueblo and New Mexico. So it's like fixing up an
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: old car. It's like fixing up an old car and
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: learning how to do it again, basically reacquiring the skill
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: to be able to do it, but having the availability
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: of metal they had they had lost it. So when
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: Native people confronted these kinds of things, this market impulse
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: to specialize in particular resources, plus the availability of goods
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: that were made of metal I mean, and those included things,
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: of course, like the implements of war, like firearms. So
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: if you trade someone a firearm, I mean, in the
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: first few firearms that are traded a Native people are
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: usually status goods, kind of like the turquoise we were
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: talking about a minute ago. Only the head men end
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: up with guns. But once you get them a gun,
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, think of it. They can't produce powder, they
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: can't produce flints or percussion caps. Later on, they don't
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: have molds to make lead bullets, and they don't have
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: gunsmiths to work on the gun if it breaks, And
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: so suddenly they're snagged by the market economy. They've become
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: dependent on it. From the point at which they start
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: using guns they now have to have someone supply them
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: with gunpowder, with cap percussion caps, with lead balls, and
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: from that point on basically tell us what you want
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: us to harvest for the market economy, and we'll do it.
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: I mean in the way. Another factor had to have have been,
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: like when you talk about that reliance to what it
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: would have meant to neighboring groups that you were in
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: warfare with, well, I mean, I was just gonna say
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: that would add your that would like add to your
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: incentive to acquire this stuff. It does, and it means
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: that the people who don't acquire it who and there
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: were some groups, for example, who who sort of saw, okay,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: this is a this is kind of a zero sum game,
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: because if we get caught in this, we're never gonna
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: get out of it. We're always gonna have to have
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: these these goods, and we're just gonna go further and
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: further and further into this kind of economy, and we're
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: going to forever be pulled out of our ancient traditions.
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: And so occasionally you would have a band or a
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: tribe led by someone who would sort of see the
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: consequence inst is and say, okay, I'm not gonna do it.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: But the people in the next valley, if they did it,
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: and they armed themselves with with guns, and they had
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: the resources that the European traders gave them as opposed
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: to the group that was resisting entering the trade. I
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: mean it became an unequal struggle and the group that
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: resisted ended up being overpowered and overcome by those who
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: cooperated with the market economy. You know, things you're saying
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: keep resonating me with With this article, I've been bringing
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: up a lot, lady by the journalist John Lee Anderson
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: who who wrote this piece in The New Yorker about
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: this group, this Amerindian group who's in the process right
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: now of coming into contact with the wider world. And um,
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: you know they're they're living the borderlands Team Prue and
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: Brazil and the young ones will come out and are
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: interacting and and the young ones that even explain because
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: through some through various translators, they're able to communicate, and
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: the young ones explain, Um, when we get close, you know,
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: when we go back, the old people burned the clothes.
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: Like there's that resistance built in where they're they're they're
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: talking about people, Um, other generations being like, don't get
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: tangled up with these people. But it's irresistible. It's irresistible.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: They're coming out of the jungle naked. Yeah, it's irresistible.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: And you know, so there, I think we can identify
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: with it if we just understand that everybody is motivated
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: by the same human nature, regardless of the cultural overlays
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: that we have. These people that that you've just described
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: from South America and that I was describing basically sort
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: of using North American and examples from the eighteenth and
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: nineteenth century, these they're just like us. And so we
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: can if we think about it, we can find ourselves
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: in exactly that kind of situation. I mean, I think
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: we probably do, you know, in our modern lives on
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: almost a daily basis, it's hard to resist a damn
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: cell phone. I mean, I know a handful of people
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: who say, Okay, I'm not gonna have one of those things.
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: But I mean, you're kind of disadvantaging yourself in a
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: way if you resist the march of modern technology. Yeah, Like,
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: if all your buddies are out drinking nowadays, you can't
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: find them without a phone. You can't on a bar,
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: and everyone went there and stayed there. But now you'd
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: never catch up with them, That's right, you gotta text
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: them and find them. And so you know what I mean,
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: it's the same principle at work, and I think it's
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: been at work among us for two hundred thousand years
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: and maybe in I mean that that that's as far
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: back as we know right now that our own species
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: has existed. You know, if we knew more about the Neanderthals,
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: it probably was at work among them as well, these
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: same principles. So do you feel that, like like, and
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: I know you focus a lot of your scholarly attention, um,
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: not exclusively, but a lot of it on bison. Do
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: you feel that, let's say, just the market had been introduced,
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: would they have wound up at in the same place
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: that we did eventually, where we had effectively ecologically speaking,
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: we had exterminated the animal. Well, I think it would
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: have been possible. Yeah. So, I mean Native people obviously
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: they have an economy. They haven't exchanged economy before Europeans
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: ever arrived. I mean, we know that there were trading
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: networks just like I was describing. For this Turko is
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: going from the mountain out the door here all the
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: way down into Central America and the Caribbean. There were
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: trade networks that stretched all over the America's so that
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: people that were producing goods, sometimes utilitarians, sometimes status goods,
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: were able to trade for things they their local area
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: didn't produce, uh, and that they wanted, that they desired.
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: And so that had been going on for for thousands
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: and thousands of years in the Americans. And that's probably
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not an economist, but I don't doubt
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: that that may not be the first step toward what
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: ultimately becomes kind of a global market economy where everybody
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: specializes in something and you have trade networks that spanned
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: the world. I think in some ways what native people
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: in the Americans were engaging in was kind of a
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: prototypical version of that. But uh, and of course they
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: they also had what the market, you know, is characterized
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: by in our own time, where some people accumulate lots
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: of things for purposes of status, and so again to
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: make these native people who were here for thousands of
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: years kind of more humanly understandable to us now, I mean,
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: over in Chocko Canyon, when they were doing excavations over there,
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: they discovered that the difference between the elites and the
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: peasant population in Chocko Canyon, and the elites were probably
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: priests and their families, was so dramatic that in some
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: instances the elites had such better food, such better nutrition,
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: that they were living twice as long as peasants who
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: were working the fields only of a few hundred yards away.
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: And there are instances where well, there was there was
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: one uh vault where evidently the wife or the wives
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: of one particular priest in Chaco at one stage of
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: the high development of that civilization. Uh, this room was
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: found with sixty thousand pieces of turquoise jewelry. I mean,
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: so this is a woman who was the Choco and
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: version of Amelda Marcos with all of her hundreds of shoes.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, no individual needs sixty thou pieces of turquoise jewelry.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: But that was kind of a status statement on the
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: part of native people. So in other words, I'm saying
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: that they also had that. It's not that they were
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: trying to make everybody somehow democratically equal. There were status divisions,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: but they hadn't reached the point that the capitalists market had,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: where so much of the natural world has been converted
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: into kind of soulless commodities when Native people confronted the
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: capitalists market economy. For the Europeans, the animals whose hides
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: they were trading for had no real relevance in Christian religion.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: Those animals lacked souls, they didn't have a plan uh
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: in guard God's larger scheme of things. The Native people, though,
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: still accorded kind of sacred rights to a lot of
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: those uh animal species that Europeans saw is just kind
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: of a congress of resources. So one of the places
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: where you have a kind of a jarring difference is
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: there where the European point of view is that you know,
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: these are just resources. These things are kind of inert
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: matter of These animals are alive, but they're just dumb
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: brutes and their lives don't really matter. And Native people,
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: on the other hand, they sometimes struggle with this trade
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: exchange because they still did regard these animals as being sacred,
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: soul filled uh ken really to them. So it was
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: that's part of the psychic kind of disaster that I
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: think Native people go through in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries.
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: And this happens all over the world and it'll be
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: happening in among these groups that that New York or
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: journalists would described was describing in South America too. It
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: induces a kind of a a psychological crisis that undermines
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: your worldview. And I think it's one of the reasons
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: that Native people in the America's and I mean they
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: had almost no choice but to participate in the market economy,
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: but it really kind of rendered a catastrophic effect on
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: them ultimately, from which I think some people have yet
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: to recover. Are you through with the book Keepers of
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: the Game? He he does a good job in there
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: with the impacts of the beaver trade a native populations
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: where here you have an ant like like like the
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: bison or buffalo loose so large in the mythology of
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: the tribes, I mean on the planes if you just
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: look at like artwork and belief systems and oral traditions.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: But he talks about these groups in the Northeast that
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: didn't really pay that much attention to the beaver. You know,
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: it was it was like a reliable resource when you
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: needed it, but it wasn't like this defining thing. And
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: in Keepers of the Game he gets into some of
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: their uh, some of the people's like just kind of
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: puzzlement about why is it that they're so interested in
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: the animal, and kind of the awakening to the idea
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: that you could get a lot of money and get
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: a lot of goods from this thing that we had
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: really paid that much attention to before. Yeah, that's a
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: like the guy who says, the guy who's like been
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: stomping on Morrel's down in his cotton would grow up
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: his whole life and never thought about them. One day
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: some guy knocks on his door. He's like, you know,
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: he's just like really ship man. Yeah, they're everywhere, They're everywhere,
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: but people really want these things. Yeah, I think, uh
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: you know, I mean, that's a very interesting book. Calvin
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: Martin was the guy who wrote it, trying to that yeah,
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: and uh you know, and his his argument was a
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: really intriguing one because he kind of argued against some
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: of the things. I was just explaining that the fur
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: trade had an economic basis. He argued that it was
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: based on it it was Indians participated in it for
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: spiritual or religious reasons rather than economic reasons. And what
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: he came up with was this very interesting idea that
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: on the eve of the arrival of the Europeans, uh
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: In the in the northeast, um Indians began contracting disease,
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: and they were diseases they had never encountered before. And
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: what Calvin Martin argued was that from uh itiner at
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: European fishermen, they were being exposed, these native people being
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: exposed for the first time to European diseases against which
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: they had no immunity influenza, and they're dying of these
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: diseases that their shamans can't cure, that they've never encountered before.
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: And in their religious traditions they had uh Some of
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: these Algonquin speaking people of that region had this tradition
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: that they had a sacred pack with the animals, and
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: the animals were supposed to keep humans healthy. And so
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: Martin argued in that book that the circumstances of when
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: these people were getting these diseases without ever having seen
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: Europeans necessarily before, these are diseases that had worked inland
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: with no explanation other than their own cultural beliefs, that
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: they blamed the animals for those diseases and therefore engaged.
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: And he found one Jesuit priest who said the Indians
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: are engaging in a war against the animals and retaliation
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: for making them sick, and they discover that these Europeans
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: want the skins of those same animals. So it was
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: kind of a blockbuster idea when it came out, which
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: was in about nineteen eighty. But I have to say,
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: was it was it Lampoon? Well, it wont a bunch
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: of prizes when it came out as being this very
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: imaginative and new inter rotation of why Indians participated in
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: the fur trade. But what happened very interestingly is that
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: another very famous anthropologist named Shepherd Craik came along three
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: or four years later and called on a bunch of
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: his anthropologist friends to see if they could find some
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: evidence anywhere else in North America that something similar had happened.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: And they couldn't find any evidence anywhere that there had
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: been another incident like this, And so Craik published a
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: book consisting of all the studies of himself and his
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: anthropos anthropologist friends trying to extrapolate Calvin Martin's argument elsewhere
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: and finding no reason, uh that it seemed to work
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: anywhere else. And he basically said, I think Calvin Martin
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: took one document and he basically leveraged it into this
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: argument hut without having additional supporting evidence for it. And
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: it looks like he leveraged it too much. When you've
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: put out your ideas, um and published them and previously
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: in in journals and now in popular books, some of
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: them are kind of controversial. Like what sort of negative
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: feedback or or criticisms do you get when you call
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: him to question something such as, you know, the relationship
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: between Native Americans and buffalo when you call him the
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: question that it was maybe a little more complex than
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: we are taught in elementary school. Yeah, you must, you
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: must get some you must get attacked. I will say
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: it kind of worked like this, and yeah, I you know,
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: not necessarily attacked. But I've had some interesting experien arians
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: is um particularly I mean I first published, um, that
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: bison ecology article in the journal American History, and so
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: sort of in the aftermath that, uh, some big news outlets,
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: uh you know, found out about it, and the New
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: York Times did a story about my interpretation what had
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: happened to the to the bison and so um. This
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: was in the early nineties. I just got to the
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: University of Montana UH to teach the history of the
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: West there. And one day I was I was at
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: home in my apartment. I hadn't moved out in the
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: Bitter Root Valley and I was still living in Missooli
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: in a little apartment. I was screwing around with something
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: in the and the phone rang, just you know, And
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: so I picked up the phone. And I mean, I
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: would say it that way because the truth is, with
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: a cell phone, I mean, I don't keep the ringer
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: onto my phone, so a phone ringing is an unusual
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: thing for me. This was back in the nineties before
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: I had a cell phone, so I actually had a
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: landline and still didn't ring very much. And I don't
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: talk on the phone a whole lot. But the phone rang,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: and I picked up the phone, and this sonorous, deep
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: voice says, is this Dan Flores? And I said, yes
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: it is. And and the voice on the other hand said, well,
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: this is Vine Deloria. I have just read your article
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: on bison ecology. And what I thought he was going
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: to say next is that, you know, you son of
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: a bitch, How in the world could you ever argue,
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: UH that Indians were involved in the destruction of the
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: Bison because Vine Deloria, I mean for the members of
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: your audience who don't know who Vine Gloria is. He was,
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: I'm guilty this. I'm waiting to hear. Okay, so let
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: me tell who he was. He's was one of the
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: most outspoken Native writers in the period, from probably the
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventies through vind Vine died about just a few
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: years ago, so he was still alive into the twenty
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: first century, but especially from about the nineteen seventies. He
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: wrote books like God Has Read and Customer Died for
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: Your Sins Yes. And he was teaching in the law
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: school at the University of Colorado and Boulder when he
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: called me, and what he said was, I would like
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: for you to come to Boulder as my guest, because
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: every year I have a gathering of people from the
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: tribes and we discussed the relationship between Native people and animals,
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: and I want you to come to the next one
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: is my personal guest, the next one I'm having. It
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: was just a couple of months away. But what I
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: expected him to say was, I want you to speak
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: to the assembled group. He said, I want to tell you,
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: I don't want you to say a word when you come,
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: I want you to come as my guest. You can
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: sit right beside me. I'll introduce you to everybody there.
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: But I don't want you to say a word. I
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: want you to listen to what people say. And I said,
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: I would be very happy to do that. And so
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: I went to Boulder and UH set up beside Vindeloria.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: Out of the group of about thirty five people, there
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: was one other white guy in the audience. Uh. And
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: did you know his sorry interrupt his motive or what
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: did you think his motive at that? Well? I I
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: thought what his motive was and I and I was
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: right about it. He he just wanted me to hear
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: what Native people said about their relationship with animals. Um,
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: but not in an adversarial way, not an anniversary show,
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: you buddy, you know. And what he actually said to
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: me when I was there is Uh. He said, that
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: piece you did is the most interesting piece I've read
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: that anybody has ever done on bison. He said interesting.
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: He didn't say the most accurate, the best. He said
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: he found it interesting. Now, Delia went on over the
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: next few years as friends of mine in the profession
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: began to adopt my argument about what happened to bison,
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: And for the sake of your readers, I'll just say
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: that the bison ecology article from was basically a recasting
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: of what happened to bison in the West, and it
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: argued that, in opposition to our simplistic view that we
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: had had for a long time, that after the Civil War,
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: white hide hunters had gone out and slaughtered these animals,
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: slaughtered forty million of them are sixty million of them
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: in the space of about twenty five years, and that
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: was what had happened to them. I argued that in fact,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: the decline of bison had begun much earlier than that
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: that it was caused by multiple reasons, in part a
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: changing climate in the nineteenth century that produced the end
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: of the Little Ice Age and therefore less conducive conditions
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: to having large herds of bison on the grasslands of
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: the Great Plains because the grasslands weren't as productive anymore.
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: I argued that competition from horses for grass and water.
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: As horse numbers had grown, wild horses and Indian horse
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: herds had competed with bison, and that had drawn the
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: numbers of bison down. That introduced European livestock diseases like anthrax,
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: for example, and bovine tuberculosis had gotten among the herds
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: as a result of UH, the overall on trails, taking
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: oxen across the west and spreading these diseases, that that
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: had reduced the numbers, and that there was in effect
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: a whole host of reasons, but that one of the
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: reasons was also that Native people had gotten involved in
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: the market economy and had begun hunting bison not just
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: for subsistence, but in order to produce bison robes for
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: the market economy. And so among these various causes, the
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: role of Indians in the hunt was one of them.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: And other scholars in the field of Western history, within
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: the next five or six years, UH, people like Elliott
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: West at the University of Arkansas and Drew Eisenberg, who
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: at the time was at Princeton. Yeah, I read one
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: of his books, Yeah, began writing books and articles basically
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: using this same interpretation. And so during the nineteen nineties,
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: I would say by probably two thousand and five, about
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: fifteen years after I published that article, essentially just about
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: everybody in the field had adopted that argument, and so
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: it's become the standard argument for what happened to bison
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century now has has replaced this earlier,
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: more simplistic view that we had for a long time.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: And so as that's happened, one of the things I've
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: noticed is that I haven't it's been a long time
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: actually since anyone from the Native community has, you know,
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: sort of stopped me in an elevator or at a
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: conference or something and wanted to express some concern that
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: I was dissing how Indians had interacted with bison. So
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: I think the Native people, over time, and there have
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: been some of them I've talked to who I mean,
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: they were very perceptive about all this, and they understood
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: that this very likely was absolutely what happened, because they
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: had gotten enough evidence from their own traditions that people
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: had hunted buffalo in fact for the market. Uh. So
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: I think that even the Native people, I mean, there's
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: no doubt if you you know, they're always as I've
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: learned from writing Coyote America, I mean, there are people
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: who are gonna troll you whenever they don't agree with
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: your particular interpretation. So they're probably some trollers still out
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: there on this this particular line of argument, but it's
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: become the primary explanation for what happened to bison. But
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: and it's not entirely isolated, because there's there's this idea
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: it Europeans wiped out Muscos in Alaska without ever stepping
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: foot on the land, just by saying, hey, if you
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: get a minute, we'd like meat and hides. That's exactly Yeah,
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: And that was all that it took. Yeah. Well, so,
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'll give you another example that's directly related.
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's a part of the bison story. I mean,
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: we had argued that it was the hide hunt, wide
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: hide hunters after the Civil War that had wiped out
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: bison in the United States. There never was a white
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: hide hunt in Canada. Canadian bison were hunted only by
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: Native people and by the may Tee. And yet the
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: same thing, explain explain. The Maytee are a group of
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: Uh mixed blood Canadian people who were French from their
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: European backgrounds Um and several different tribes of Sinnaboins and
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: Uh Sue and speaking people's Uh from the Indian background.
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: And they had become a kind of a third culture
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: in Canada. And they had but they had an almost
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: like industrial precision to their hunts they did, I mean,
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: you know, and they had the same I mean, when
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: you read their traditions from the Indian side of the mix,
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: they had inherited many of the same explanations of the
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: sacredness of the animal and the use of all the
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: parts of it and everything that you find among the
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: the Lakotas or the Cheyennes, or whichever group farther south
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: you want to study. All of that was intact. But
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: indeed they did have a kind of an industrial approach.
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: They went out in carts, uh the famous Red River carts,
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: out onto the plane and hunted bison and hauled the
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: products back to places like Ottawa, for example, and sold them.
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: But there was never a white hide hunt in Canada,
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: and yet the exact same thing happened to bison there
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: has happened in the States. Interesting about those guys that
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: I read about was they would on the northern planes
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: in the winter, when things started to freeze up, they
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: would dig these giant pits and fill them full of
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: quarters like bison quarters, wait till it all FROs good,
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: and then bury that stuff. And they'd be eating frozen
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: meat into July digging it out of those the ground.
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: I mean if you think about it in the nineteenth
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: century and earlier, I mean all the way back to
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: the time of you know, head smashed in in Alberta,
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: which where bison jumps go back ten thousand years. I mean.
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: The great problem with killing large numbers of animals like
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: bison is how do you preserve them? Because if you
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: if you drive four hundred bison off a cliff and
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: Alberta in August, I mean, you can only dry and
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: salt a small percentage of the animals if you don't
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: have a way to refrigerate those carcasses. And obviously ten
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: thousand years ago or even two hundred years ago, they didn't,
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: And so you had to be very circumspect about trying
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: to drive enough and or small enough group of animals
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: off a cliff that you didn't end up wasting an
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: enormous quantity of that kill simply because you lack the
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: ability to preserve enough of the meat. But there seems
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: to be cases where it's spun out of control, like
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: the Southernmost jump. I believe this is the Southernmost jump
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: on fire Shelter used a couple of times, and one time,
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: it worked real well, and it got its name because
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: all those rotting carcasses combusted and a spontaneous combustion, hundreds
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: of animals and some small number were as they say
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: in the archaeological parlance, disarticulated, I think is the word
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: they disarticulated for. But then, but even then it was
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: like there was probably so few people and such strong
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: resources that you did there was no need to even
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: like consider finiteness now, and there were you know, they
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: were even arguments some people who did Boston jumps set
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: so you can't really let any of them get away
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: because if one of them gets away, they're gonna go
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: tell the other bison what your stratagem was. And so
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: when you jump them, you've got to make sure that
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: you kill every one of them that goes off the jump.
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: Nobody sense because look at like the power of the
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: lead cow and a herd of elk who carries institutional
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: knowledge about where to go. And we know that there
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: are damn sure a lot of cow elk running around
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: that are twenty years old who have done big migrations
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: that many times they put together where it's okay to
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: be where it's not okay to be and how to
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: respond to certain stimuli. And yeah, they are creatures that
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: figure out what to do and what not to do.
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: So I could totally see that you have a population
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: in a valley that would get to be like, uh, yeah,
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: we're not going on push this off that We're not
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: We're not gonna do that, and you know, and I
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: think that that harkens back to what is best called
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: native science. I mean, it's an observation that native people
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: made prop a blife from real life examples. We let
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: that cow get away, and damn it, the next time
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: we tried to drive, I heard off that cliff some
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: cow looked like the same one, swerved him away and
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: took him off in a different direction. And so I
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: think it's it's kind of an observational uh kind of effect,
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: which is a version of science where you observe and
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: effect and you you related to a cause and you say, okay,
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: that's why that happened. So kyote America. So that made
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: the best seller that that was the New York Times bestseller. Yeah,
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: the paperback is about to come out, and as one
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: of my friends uh has put it, I cinema, the
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: dust jacket of it and it's got New York Times
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: best Seller across the top. And it also was a
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: finalist for the E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Prize
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: from Pan America. And so they put a big badge
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: on the front and my my buddy wrote me back
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: when I sent it to him. He said, Man, that
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: coyote is wearing an awful lot of blaying this time around.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: Who told you on that? Like, who who didn't like
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: the ideas in there? Like what sort of person was
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: upset by the ideas of Well, it's been kind of
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: and I'm basing this on the reviews on Amazon. Oh yeah,
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: so right, but please yeah, but you've been reading those well,
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: I mean I yeah, I do look at him because
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: because I'm interested in that. Uh yeah, that just that
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: could be just like okay, never mind, Yeah, it's right.
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: It's somebody who's having a bad day. I mean, I
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: had somebody write a review the other day that went
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: something like, there was a review of American Serengetti and
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: this guy says, or this person says, I think it
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: was a guy says this is on Amazon says this
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: book is flawlessly written. It's a quick read. It it's
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: just It's marvelous from start to to end. Three stars
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: out of five. Yeah. Yeah, well you know why. He
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: was probably pissed because it took an extra day. Okay
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: are you familiar are you for with Poco pads? Okay,
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: so Poco pads. This guy with Jack's welding. Jack's plastic
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: welding makes a like a sleeping pad. Okay, a very
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: heavy duty sealed welding raft. Yeah, you can use it
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: to as a bench cover. Um, the heaviest ship. Not
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: a backpack raft, but indestructible sleeping pad that when you
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: get away, you just dried off the top. So I
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: was looking at it. I was not at the super
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: there's the biggest one there, and I see it, like
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: and you know, everybody knows these are great pads. But
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: it's got a it's got like a two and a
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: half star review. Okay, so, um, that's weird how it
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: had because it's only been reviewed a couple of times.
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: And I read him in like five stars, five stars.
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: And some guy who's mad at Amazon about some delivery
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: problem that he had had in the past and had
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: given Amazon a one star review. Um, but gave it
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: to Jack's plastic Welding, who hasn't sold many of these
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: pads and therefore gave the illusion of this being a
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: shitty pet. That's an example. But I don't think that
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: when you read the reviews, I don't think you're capturing
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: the general conversation around something. Well, yeah, I would agree
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: with you absolutely on that. I mean, the reviews are
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: you know, they're a slice, but they do give you,
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: I mean one of the things that you know, Amazon
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: reviews I think do give you as a as a author.
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: It's a little bit of an impression of how something
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: is getting received. And so to me, for something like
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: Coyote America, Uh, what I kind of say is that
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: there are camps of takes on a book like that,
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: and I relate that to the fact that coyotes themselves
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: are extremely political. Political is being gluten intolerant. Yeah, And
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: so the fact that this is an astonishingly political animal
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: means that there are people who have picked that book
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: up or ordered it from Amazon and didn't really look
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 1: too closely at what was going to be in it
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: and opened it up and said, well, and this is
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: what some people have said. I was expecting a bunch
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: of animal stories like Ernest Thompson Seaton used to ride
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, and instead I had to read
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: about how I mean and I had just I had.
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: I was forced into reading this. This author forced me
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: to read how kyotes have been poisoned relentlessly for decades,
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: and I just I didn't want to read that, but
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: he forced me to read it. One star out of five.
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: So if listeners want to go, we Uh interviewed Dan Uh.
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: I believe episode thirty four or thirty six. Yeah, you
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: haven't wait, can you? I was gonna say thirty three,
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: but yeah, when he scrolled through it will say Seattle, Washington,
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: and they'll say Dann Flores. But it was thirties somewhere
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: right now. I might come back and tell you what
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: it wasn't a second here. And we talked at length
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: about both the Dan's books that were calling at the
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: time Coyote America, I call him kyotes. We talked about that.
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: Dan tells me um during that interview why I call
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: him coyotes, Why he calls him coyotes? And he said
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: something that I have I have referred to quite a
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: number of times since, which was that anybody who shoots
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: one never calls it a coyote. Yeah, yeah, anyone who's
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: killed one calls the kayo, which I'm sure there's some deviations,
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: just like there are political conservatives who are gluten and tolerant,
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: but generally it's a left wing disease, so there's some
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: variation there. But uh so go listen to that. If
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: you want to hear about the two books, you have
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: two boks go at the same time. American Serengetti and
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: and you're in America Cowardy America and Coardy America is
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: now coming out in paperback, and American Serengetti is already
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: in paperback. And they're both also in audio CD form too,
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: So check those out, and check out the interview that
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: we did. Did you find the number? You've been off
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: a quiet yet? Just listening? Just listening, Go back and
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: listen to episode thirty three, which was really was one
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: of It was a very pop of the episode for us.
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: People loved it. That was demanded and demanded more. Yeah,
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 1: that was really Uh the first interview I did for
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: either one of those books, um, because they hadn't come
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: out now, they hadn't come out yet. I mean I
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: I ended up getting an interview on Morning America or
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: a good Morning, uh morning edition I'm sorry on NPR
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: with David Green uh for the Coyote book. Uh, and
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: quite a number of other things on various regional NPR
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: stations and so forth, and another podcast or two. But
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: that was the one that you did, was the first one.
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: Do you mind real quick? Um, just sketching out with
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: each of those books, just so people understand. Yeah, Cayote
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: America is, um, a biography of the animal in effect,
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: is what it is. It's an attempt to write a
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: biography of the coyote from its evolution in North America,
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: which goes back to the the beginnings of the canad
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: family five point three million years ago, through it's long
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: roller coaster like history in America, including about ten thousand
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: years of time when it was revered as a principal
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: deity by the native people of the American West everywhere
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: that coyotes were found. UM. And I do a chapter
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: called Old Man America in the book which takes on
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: that story and and relates uh in my own prose
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: four different what I think are sort of representative old
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: Man coyote stories, which are, if if one stops to
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: think about it, this is the oldest literature in North America.
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: This is our our oldest body of literally stories. They
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: were handed down orally and then finally set down UH
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: in print at the beginning of the twentieth century. So
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: the story can the Coyotes biography continues from that through
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: its UH first encounters with Europeans in the nineteenth century,
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: people like Lewis and Clark Uh Mark Twain didn't quite
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: know what to call it. Yeah, they don't. In fact,
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: the coyote has called for most of the nineteenth century
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: the prairie wolf. That's the name that Lewis and Clark
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: gave it, and so for most Americans through about the
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: eighteen seventies or eighteen eighties, that's what the coyote was called.
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: But by the middle of the century, as as American
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: settlement had begun to get out to the Southwest to
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: places like here Santa Fe, New Mexico, they encountered people
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: who were using the old Aztec word for the animal
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: that had been hispanicized into coyote. And so by the
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: time Mark Twain and rights Roughing in in eighteen seventy three,
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: coyote has become at least among people who read his books.
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: UH kind of the accepted form of pronunciation, although a
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: two syllable form had survived in much of the rural
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: parts of the country as a result of the mountain
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: men who were in the Southwest and who encountered that
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: that same sort of transition from prairie wolf to a
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: new form, and they called it. I think they thought
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: coyote was a little bit too fancy. They called it
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: a coyote. If you're from Arkansas, maybe coyote sounds a
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: little fancy. So uh, anyway, we ended up with two
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: different pronunciations, one sort of in the rural middle part
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: of the country and then around the coast, uh coyote.
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: And of course when the Wily Coyote cartoons come along,
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: they began to convert a lot of people who uh
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: hadn't thought about how they were going to pronounce the
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: animal's name and the kai yote pronouncers. But anyway, the
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: story goes on through our attempts in the twentieth century.
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is an animal that we actually in
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: the United States attempted to exterminate through a federal agency
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: known as the Bureau of Biological Survey. It's still around now.
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: It's called wildlife services, and this agency poisoned and invented
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: poisons for the purpose millions and millions of coyotes in
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: the twentieth century, only to have us discover and this
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: is the rare environmental story that goes in this kind
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: of direction, that no matter what we did, we not
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: only couldn't get rid of coyotes, we not only couldn't
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: exterminate them, but in fact, our efforts to do so
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: ended up spreading them out of the West across all
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: of the rest of the United States. And so they
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: now ended up in every single state except for a
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: white uh, and are in every large and small city
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: in the United States. They've even moved into urban areas.
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: So um, it's the story of I argue in the
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: book kind of really America's other than us, probably the
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: most interesting mammal in North American history. No other creature
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: has a biography that even approaches uh, something like the
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: coyote has. And I kind of ended with talking about
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: uh wily coyote and what effect Wily has had on
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: American culture more than you would think. And even Walt Disney,
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: who helped sort of change attitudes towards coyotes in the
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: sixties seventies and uh those decades by doing six different
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: pro coyote Disney films in those years. So that's what
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: that book is about. American Serengetti is a book that's
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: about the region of the United States, the American Great
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: Plains that once was the analog of East Africa, the
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: Massaia Mara and the Serengetti with I mean, it was
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: one of the ecological wonders of the world up until
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: about nineteen hundred or so, with this marvelous aggregate of
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: large grazing animals, the bison that we've been talking about
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: a lot tonight, Uh, that you, of course have written
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: about in a very successful book, and I've written about
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: some too. And along with bison, wild horses that were
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: reintroduced having evolved on the Great Plains, reintroduced by Europeans
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: back to America thousands of years after they had become extinct,
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: and that just spread in uh an instant across this
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: old ecological homeland of theirs uh prong horn antelope, gray wolves,
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: grizzly bears, which we think of them as mountain animals now,
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: but they were originally were a Great Lanes animals. Yeah,
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: didn't Custer kill one in South Dakota, Custer Kill one
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: in South Dakota. And one of the stories I tell
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: people when I talk about this book is everybody has
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: seen The Revenant with Leonardo Dicac that oh my god,
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: you're ruined my night. Well, I mean the story that story, Yeah,
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: opened the dank gass BC forest instead of where it
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: belongs rightfully on the Willow line by Perian Zones. The
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: American West was just like people should be hung for that. Yeah,
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: on the great planes. This story was a real story.
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: It happened to you glass, but it happened out on
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 1: the planes rather than in the glass. Had no child, Yeah,
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: he had not not exact revenge. He had no Indian
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: child's and did not take revenge. Confronted the people that
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: left him, and was satisfied knowing that they had to
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: live the rest of their lives that he was still
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: alive and they had left him. Yeah, with the guilt
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: of having left him. But it happened down on the
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: plains because that's where the grizzly bears were. So anyway,
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: this is a book about all these these creatures of
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: the Great Plains uh in the primarily the eighteenth and
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: nineteen centuries, and uh, I sort of take them one
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: at a time. I do prong horns in a chapter,
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: wild horses in a chapter, gray wolves in a chapter, uh,
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: grizzly bears and a chapter, bison in a chapter, and
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: I do a chapter on coyotes, which were the jackals
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: of the planes too. And then the book finally ends
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: up going to our possibilities in the twenty first century,
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: primarily through what's known as the American Pray Reserve Project
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: in Montana of trying to recreate and rewild on Americans
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: serengetti that will ultimately have all those animals in place
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: again in a wildlife park that will be we hope,
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: something like twice the size of Yelso it's a long
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: term project, but it's spent under wife for about fifteen years,
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: not not without speaking of controversy. Now without controversy itself,
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: plenty of controversy surrounding it, to be sure, weirdly seems
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 1: to be like the main story that is picked up
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: in the media is the controversy, at which imagine a
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: lot of ideas probably go through that phase. I would
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: like to remind people when I'm talking, when I when
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: I do when I give public lectures and I'm talking
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: about the conservation history of this country, I always like
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: to remind people how pissed everyone was at Theodore Roosevelt
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: for laying out the national forest system. Pissed and then
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: a couple of years go by and they carve his
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: face in a big giant mountain. But at the time,
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: live it. Yeah, I live it, I mean, and live
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: it for I mean, when he set aside the Grand
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: Canyon as a national mon month, I mean, you know,
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: so we've got a review of the national monuments going
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: on now, all the way back to the Escalante Grand
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: Staircase in years and three, reviewing George W. Bush's Monuments
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: review and Clinton's monuments as well on Obama's monuments. Yeah. Well,
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: when Teddy Roosevelt decided that the Grand Kenyon he was
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: going to set aside as a national monument, I mean,
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: there were people who were absolutely furious at the idea.
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: And of course it's basically a world class site. Became
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: a National Park fourteen years later and is a world
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: class site. So I mean, what I really would love
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: to see, I think it's this American Prayers Air Project
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: is the great conservation project of the twenty one century.
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: It's gonna take decades, but I would love to see
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: it as our version of Yellowstone National Park. I mean,
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: we're the first country ever creates a national park system,
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: the United States is, but we passed over the Great
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: Plains in doing it, and I think now is our
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: opportunity to circle back and take this area that once
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: was one of the great spectacles of the world in
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 1: terms of wild animals, and do like Africa has done
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: and acquire for ourselves. Uh, this marvelous historic Great Plains
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: animal park. Yeah, I should touch. Actually I brought up
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: the idea of it, of its controversial nature, and I should.
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: Rather than leaving that hangout, I just want to explain
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: a couple of points about it. Where you already have
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: some large federally managed landscapes up there. So you have
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: the Charles M. Russell Refuge along the Missouri Breaks, and
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: you have some some monument, some some national monument, national
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: monument that was designated on the Clinton administration, the Missouri
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: Breaks National Monument. And what what the Prayer Reserve is
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 1: doing is taking money. And critics of it always like
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: to point out that it's generally outside money. It's money
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: that's very important for people to express for whatever reason,
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: that they're taking money from people donated around the country
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: to buy land that just comes up for sale. So
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: we're talking about willing seller willing buyer. This is not
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: it's not no one's like getting land for free. It's
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: not the government giving anyone land. It's just they're starting
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: out with existing parcels of public land. And when properties
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: come up for sale in the vicinity, they go and
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: say what you're asking for the place, The person names
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: the price they're asking and it goes to auction or Hawevard.
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: Also happens in the American Prayer Reserve buys the land,
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: so the seller got exactly what they're after. They got
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: market value for the land. Oftentimes the land you'll you'll
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: also attain grazing rights on joining pieces of land, and
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 1: so they will take over grazing rights and an opt
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: to not opt to not always exercise them through the
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: grazing of cattle. So they do have a program out
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: there that deals with grazing cattle on land. The criticism
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: comes from people who look and they say that and
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: the and it's understandable, and yeah, and I think you
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 1: need to be sympathetic to it, where someone's like, so
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: my great grandfather, my grandfather, my father invested very heavily
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: in this idea and sacrifice a tremendous amount um of
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: work and effort to make the desert bloom right that
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: that we came in and raise cattle and help feed
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: the nation and establish an economy that would allow either
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: to be schools and towns. And we built this out
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: of nothing. And to now have someone say thanks, but
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: no thanks, it's insulting to people. Um, the American praiser
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: at one time used to it has this long line
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: of ideas that are kind of strung out. At one time.
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: There's this idea the Buffalo Commons, which is similar. Remember
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: the writer Bill Kittridge in his book Hole in the Sky,
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: Um pointed out that going to Jordan, Montana and mentioning
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: the Buffalo Commons was a sure fire way to get
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: your ask it. So that when I said, that's the
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: controversial part is it's controversial and spirit only. It's not
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: that someone's like stealing someone's lands, just someone's saying, like,
• 1:57:45
  Speaker 1: how can you come and act like what we've done
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: here isn't the best thing for the country. How can
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: you say that you want to tear up our roads,
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: raise our buildings, rip out our fences because what was
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 1: here before us is more precious to you than what
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: we created. Like, that's the idea. And I don't even
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: really need to articulate the other side, because the other
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: side has to do with, you know, more n like
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: some fairly unassailable notions of of wildlife, habitat and and
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: in this case, free market economies. But that kind of
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: sketches out for you why it pisses people off, is yeah,
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: um yeah, I think that's that's a good expression of it,
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: you know, And like you, I think we can all
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: be sympathetic to that. Um you know. I mean I
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: come from Louisiana, where my grandfather and my father and
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 1: my brother were all in the oil business. But that
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: is a business in Louisiana that uh doesn't It doesn't
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 1: have a continuing application into the future. It's not. I mean,
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: primarily the oil resources are depleted, and so in my generation,
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: there's no possibility to continue to do that. I mean,
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: it might be possible, I suppose at some point to
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: go in and frack or horizontal drill and manage to
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 1: extract those resources. But what I'm saying is I'm from
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: a generation that can't do what my father, my grandfather
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: ended up doing for their livelihood. I think in Montana,
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: on these ranches, there is a sense that they can
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: continue to do this, and so that's I think, as
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: as you said, Steven, that's kind of why there's a
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: a sort of a spiritual resistance among some people to it.
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: Um I would say, you know, on the other hand,
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: that it's a good thing to remember that this is
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 1: not a federal project. This is not the federal government
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: coming in and creating a new national park or a
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: national monument. This is private enterprise doing what it's always
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: done in America, taking private land and then doing what
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: they want to do with it. So it can be
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: in a way, the American Prayer Reserve can be defended
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: as part of this traditional kind of private enterprise, capitalist approach.
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: It's just that what they want to do with it
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: is not what private uh developers have often attempted to do.
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: So it seems fishy. Two people, Yeah, it seems quietly
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: bought a ranch and then over time people realize that
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 1: you didn't run cattle on it, and that you tore
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: up the fences. Um, it might go unnoticed. But articulating
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: a grand vision, yeah, makes people uneasy. Um and you
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: But anyways, you probably explain a lot of this, But
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: I do. I mean I and I try to place
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: this whole story in the context of how in the
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: twentieth century we tried on numerous occasions, realizing that the
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: great planes had been passed over for a kind of
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 1: an African or Yellowstone like wildlife park. We tried on
• 2:01:27
  Speaker 1: several occasions to make it happen, and uh, and every
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 1: instance up and down the plains from West Texas to Montana,
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 1: we've failed so far. And so this attempt by the
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 1: American Prayer Reserve is probably the most promising attempt that
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: we've had in a long time, and it's taking the
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: the possibility on in a whole new way by doing
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: this kind of private enterprise buying up ranches when they
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: come up for sale, with the idea of ultimately cooperating
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 1: with the managers of the federal lands that are in
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 1: the vicinity along the Missouri River and somehow managing this
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 1: as a whole in order to reintroduce all these classic
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 1: animals that we sort of thoughtlessly, heedlessly a century Ago
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: obliterated from the landscape. I mean, we did it almost
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 1: without a second thought a hundred years ago, and now
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 1: we're rethinking what we did and hoping that we can
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: somehow restore this. And so, as I said to me
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: and those of us who are conservation thinking kind of people,
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: this is one of the most exciting things that's happening
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: in the West these days. You know, uh, when you
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: talk about doing without thinking about it. I recently had
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: occasion to speak with the with the conservation leader Jim Pozits,
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: and he spells out that time of us realizing what
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: we were doing through the story of Theodore Roosevelt, the
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: first buffalo he killed and the second buffalo he killed,
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: and sort of how he how he interpreted those two actions,
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: one being near is it Medina Madora, Madora, North Dakota,
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 1: and one around Henry's Lake. Um. The second time and
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: sort of the first one he does award dance around,
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: dance surrounded right, and the second one um, and by
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: this time there are like none left. And the second
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: trip he has a conservation epiphany. UM. And that's one
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: of the many things that makes that guy's life interesting
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: that ties into things we're talking about is being this
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: trans like one of these guys who was alive at
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: this like very transitional moment where he was in some
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: ways engaged with the end or kind of aware of
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: the end, and then was one of the people who said, like, whoa,
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: at just the right moment, I mean, just the right moment. Yeah,
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 1: And it became the seed when he became president for
• 2:04:10
  Speaker 1: those National Bison Refuges that he set up, and the
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: first one in southwestern Oklahoma, the Witch of Toam Mountain Ones,
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: and then the next one in when they did that one,
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: they were trucking animals from the Bronx Zoo. That's how
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: bad things got. When they were trying to set up
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: some buffalo parks in the West, they were they were
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: getting animals from the Bronx Zoo and shipping them by
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 1: rail back out west. Well, William T. Hornaday, who was
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: the director of the Bronx Zoo, had had the foresight,
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 1: I mean, he had written the first great book about
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: what had happened to bison extermination oftermination of the American bison. Yeah,
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: and he had had the foresight to start through people
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: like Buffalo Jones and Kansas Charles. Buffalo Jones who had
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: and a former buffalo hunter, and then was stricken by
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: guilt and said, as a result of my wickedness and
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 1: killing so many, now I'm going to try to do
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: everything I can to save the last few that are there.
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: Not roped him and fed him on cow's milk. He
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: did and provided Hornaday with some of these animals that
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: went to the Bronx Zoo. So one of the reasons,
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 1: as you know well and have written about, they were
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: trading them around, of course, is they were trying to
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 1: make sure, I mean, the the animal population of bison
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: had had gotten so small that they were afraid of
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 1: genetic bottlenecking, and so they were trying to spread the
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 1: few animals that they had left widely to get as
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: dispersed a number of genes from the original population. In
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: these particular little groups of animals they were trying to
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: build herds up from. There was a there was a
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: hunter during the big slaughter in the southern plains. There
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: was a hunter that was who grew sickened to buy
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: it like what buffalo Jones later clan grew sickened by
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 1: it and swore to call it off. But then in
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 1: the morning he explained how he was hearing all the gunfire.
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: It was like, funk, man, they're doing it. They're gonna
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: do it whether I'm there or not, and jump back in. Yeh.
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: Not too many of those buffalo hunters ever seemed to
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 1: express much remorse, you know, and some of them actually
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: became pretty combative about what they had done, you know.
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: That's the interesting thing is like when Hornaday was out
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 1: trying to get someone, he was trying to collect specimens.
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: So at first he was trying to collect dead ones.
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: And he he took the Northern Pacific I just recently
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: made its way to Miles City, Montana, and Hornday took
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: it out and then struck off with a wagon and
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: cart and a guide he was traveling with, and they
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: went up into the Pumpkin Creek area to see if
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: he could shoot a handful as zoo specimens. And he's
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: riding through the bone fields trying to find one. And
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: in his book he points out that there was still eyes,
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: there were still hide hunters in Miles City convinced, and
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: that was like, that was I should put out. That
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: was the last of them, That was the last big congregation,
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: and I think it was killed. They started killing it
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: in the Winner. The summer of eighty two, I think
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: a bunch were killed on one of the reservations. Some
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: of the Sioux got there where they gave them some
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 1: of their guns back and let him leave the reservation
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: to go on one last hunt, and they killed a
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 1: thousand and then that was it to the point where
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: Horny was out scrounging around hoping to find a couple.
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: He points out that many of the people in Miles
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 1: City were hide hunters who just were waiting for the
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: next big push to come down out of Canada. Yeah,
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 1: well some of them. And they had seen I heard
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 1: cross the medicine line into Canada, and they were convinced
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: that that herd was coming back soon. And I think,
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 1: as harned, he says, he already knew when they were
• 2:08:06
  Speaker 1: telling him that what had happened to that hurt because
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: the mate had wiped out, that had gotten onto it. Yeah,
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: they were that herd was already gone. But these hunters,
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: I mean, and he he met one guy sitting around
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 1: a campfire one night, Doc something or other who wandered
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: into his campfire and sat down, And this guy was
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 1: firmly convinced that all he had to do was sit
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 1: around and wait for a few weeks or a few
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 1: months or maybe the next year, and there was a
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 1: gigantic herd or bison that was gonna come down from
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 1: Canada and it would all resume. And instead, as he explains,
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 1: these guys kind of fell into shopkeepers ranchers and they
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 1: had to retrain. Eventually they never did come back. Well,
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: when they did come back, they came from the east
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 1: by rail. That's right. Yeah, Yeah, all those guys had
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 1: to retrain. And so this is yet another one of
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: those says in American history where the resources finally gone
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: and you just have you have to face it. You
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: gotta retrain and do something else. Yeah, there's another one
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: you might know about. To another little remnant herd is
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: the story from the story of the guys Sam walking Kyo.
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 1: Sam walking coyote perhaps had gone, had gotten in a
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 1: fight with his wife or divorced from his wife, and
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: gone out to the Milk River and hunted and somehow
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: came back home with a couple calves. Calves that followed him,
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 1: and that became the source animals for what is still
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 1: the National Bison Refuge for National Bises at the reserve refuge.
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 1: It's uh, I think it's properly a refuge, just they're
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 1: they're supposed to be administered by the Fishing Wildlife Service
• 2:09:50
  Speaker 1: as a National wildlife refuge. And that so that became
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 1: sam walking coyotes, animals from the milk became that source herd.
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: Then later that heard in the Flathead Valley became the
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 1: source herd for the original Alaska introductions, not reintroductions, but
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: introductions as those animals spun off and the Canadian herds too, right,
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think the Canadian government ended up buying
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 1: that for that wild herd, and that and that was
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: the I can't remember the name of that what that
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 1: what that herd when that sprang off with that herd
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: became all right, So check out dance books. You learn
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 1: about all kinds of stuff. Um and uh and and
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: and dan was hugely influential and and um fostering my
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 1: interest in these subjects. Uh. Yeah, you haven't said ship
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 1: are you building? Are you like built up with like
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: bent up thoughts? Had those nice thoughts when we took
• 2:10:55
  Speaker 1: our teat break there earlier, But um, which were that
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 1: dan us talking about the the trade goods? You know
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 1: that the market brought across the Atlantic and we're just
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 1: down in Guyana, and how the parallels were so similar,
• 2:11:12
  Speaker 1: Like they're still using their native bows, arrows. They like
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: making a lot of that stuff, and they're they're big
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 1: on um, like they know the importance I think now
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 1: of sort of keeping that culture around because people like
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: us are interested in that, you know, and there's value
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: to that. But the one thing that has changed is
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 1: like the metal, right, like they like files and machetes,
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 1: and when the machete wears out, they turned that into
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 1: ah an arrow point. I think you were saying right,
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 1: you talked to Roving about how he made Did he
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: ever learn how to make the points? I don't know.
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 1: He remembers people using um where their bow and arrow
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 1: gear was all native material. Now the only non native
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 1: material is tip, which is steel. But he remembers the
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: people using the basically a point made from cut from bamboo,
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: and we saw those in Bolivia, those bamboo tips. So
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 1: in one generation, that entire progression he's experienced. Yeah, we'll
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 1: check this out. So I was there five or six
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 1: years ago, and they do they hunt for fish with bows.
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 1: It's one of the main ways they fish is bow fishing.
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 1: I was down there five or six years ago, trying
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 1: to sell them on polarized sunglasses. Okay, not ever already
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 1: put them on, but check this ship out and put
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 1: these you can see those fish well there didn't like
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 1: the field, okay. And also shoes didn't want shoes five
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 1: or six later, five or six years later. I'm not
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 1: I'm not, I'm not even kind of joking. Everybody polarized
• 2:12:51
  Speaker 1: sunglasses all day long, and and inn five or six
• 2:12:54
  Speaker 1: years shoes, so you sing replicate me and many other
• 2:13:00
  Speaker 1: people and many other people liking But it was just
• 2:13:04
  Speaker 1: like it was. They were, you know what it is,
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 1: and and the honest brought us up earlier it was
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 1: ego tourism. We're just a constant, steady exposure to well
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 1: healed outsiders who are coming down, and a lot of
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 1: them like because it was still cutting edge location. A
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 1: lot of them industry folks, okay, who come down with
• 2:13:30
  Speaker 1: tons of ship and and just like, hey man, I
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 1: brought a bunch of sunglasses done when I got back.
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: When I went down the first time, the first thing
• 2:13:39
  Speaker 1: I did when I got home was sent down. I'm
• 2:13:41
  Speaker 1: not kidding. I sent down a shipload of files because
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 1: they were talking about what a bitch it was to
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 1: get a file, and that's how they made their fish
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 1: points and ship and files were the dope, right, But
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 1: it was very expensive to get a file and hard
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 1: to find a file, and I sent down files. Now,
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: I also point out that um, my main friend on there,
• 2:14:07
  Speaker 1: he has an email address, so it's all very confused
• 2:14:12
  Speaker 1: where he has an email address but makes his own
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 1: bows and arrows from native jungle material. And if he
• 2:14:20
  Speaker 1: wants to catch a fish, he goes to a to
• 2:14:24
  Speaker 1: a palm and finds the fruit on the ground and
• 2:14:28
  Speaker 1: cuts the fruit out open and pulls out a larva
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 1: and takes the larva and puts it on a hook
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 1: and catches the fish and uses that fish to catch
• 2:14:39
  Speaker 1: another fish, and that fish catches the big fish that
• 2:14:43
  Speaker 1: he eats, and he hunts and fishes. He hunts, fishes
• 2:14:48
  Speaker 1: and farms year round except for on occasion when dudes
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: like us go down and want to go out and
• 2:14:57
  Speaker 1: see how they do ship, and them taking guys like
• 2:15:01
  Speaker 1: me out to show how they do ship corrupts how
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 1: they do ship absolutely or from their perspective, it doesn't
• 2:15:09
  Speaker 1: krupt at all. It's just great stuff to know. It's
• 2:15:11
  Speaker 1: the same way if someone came to me and they're like, hey, man,
• 2:15:14
  Speaker 1: um uh, you know you guys wash your dishes by
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 1: hand every night. Why not when you buy a new house,
• 2:15:21
  Speaker 1: fit that sun bitch out with a dishwasher. And I'm like, hey,
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 1: that's a great idea. These dishwashers are sweet. So from like,
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: it's like a kind of colonialism, not colonialism, but it's
• 2:15:32
  Speaker 1: like a colonial perspective to sort of be like, I
• 2:15:34
  Speaker 1: hold the power to decide that you will or will
• 2:15:38
  Speaker 1: not be exposed to these new materials. In fact, they're
• 2:15:44
  Speaker 1: down there like, hey, you know, it turns out I
• 2:15:46
  Speaker 1: got these polarized sunglasses in They're great because I can
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 1: see fish and shoot them better the innocent It's it's
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 1: what it is I think is I would just say
• 2:15:57
  Speaker 1: two things. I think what you're just driving is a
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 1: perfect description of probably what happened in the eighteenth and
• 2:16:06
  Speaker 1: nineteenth centuries when Europeans went around the world and contacted
• 2:16:10
  Speaker 1: indigenous peoples in the way we were talking about with
• 2:16:14
  Speaker 1: how the market transformed the buffalo hunt, uh in the
• 2:16:17
  Speaker 1: eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I think this is just a
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 1: kind of a microcosm description of it. And the other
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 1: thing I think I would say is that you know,
• 2:16:29
  Speaker 1: we're all in the same boat because technology is proceeding
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 1: so rapidly all around us that we're all getting introduced,
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 1: not on a daily basis, necessarily, but maybe on a
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 1: monthly basis to new technologies that we can either accept
• 2:16:48
  Speaker 1: or reject. But if we reject them, a lot of
• 2:16:52
  Speaker 1: times we end up kind of disadvantaging ourselves because compared
• 2:16:56
  Speaker 1: to everybody, Yeah, it shifts without you and it leaves
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 1: you behind. And so I think the truth is we're
• 2:17:03
  Speaker 1: all in this same boat. The world is going at
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 1: hyper speed. Technology can easily leave somebody behind in their
• 2:17:16
  Speaker 1: lifetime or either maybe in a decade or in a
• 2:17:19
  Speaker 1: couple of years. And so we're finding ourselves sort of
• 2:17:24
  Speaker 1: living that same experience that you've just been describing then
• 2:17:27
  Speaker 1: and that I was describing earlier from centuries ago. Um,
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: and it's happening all around us. Yeah, I think I
• 2:17:37
  Speaker 1: hijacked your concluding thought. No, you never do that, what
• 2:17:42
  Speaker 1: are you talking about? No? Uh, yeah, it is like
• 2:17:48
  Speaker 1: it's a perfect paralleox. And now, instead of like other
• 2:17:52
  Speaker 1: the other tribes saying no, I don't want the tools
• 2:17:56
  Speaker 1: or the metal, you know the machetes. They're sort of
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 1: like Romans groups like very much adopted the eco tourism
• 2:18:03
  Speaker 1: and that's giving them wealth and like helping his village prosper.
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 1: It's like the school there, I mean it took us
• 2:18:11
  Speaker 1: actually didn't take that long to get there. We got
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 1: there from New York in twenty four hours to the
• 2:18:16
  Speaker 1: village itself, um, and that included a couple of hour
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 1: boat ride, you know. But inside the village, when you
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 1: go by the school, the school, it's like you look
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 1: in the window and you're like, oh, well, it looks
• 2:18:28
  Speaker 1: like every other school I've seen recently, you know, kids
• 2:18:31
  Speaker 1: just well and they were in uniform and uh, you know,
• 2:18:35
  Speaker 1: half high high teacher to pupil ratio. But he was
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 1: telling us that the other you know, camps along the
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 1: river hadn't really got gotten into that yet. And it's
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 1: created some jealousy, you know, their village is actually growing. Yeah,
• 2:18:50
  Speaker 1: well not just jealousy, but even inspired a a curse
• 2:18:57
  Speaker 1: from a nearby shaman. Yeah. Well, I think, uh, you know,
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 1: it's it's happening at differential rates for everybody, but I
• 2:19:10
  Speaker 1: think we're all kind of caught in it. And maybe
• 2:19:12
  Speaker 1: it's useful to see indigenous people's confronting it because that
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 1: kind of is a mirror back on how all the
• 2:19:21
  Speaker 1: rest office are having to grapple with the speed of
• 2:19:25
  Speaker 1: technological change. My handful of experiences down there has um
• 2:19:32
  Speaker 1: change in a remarkable way. How I view parts of
• 2:19:39
  Speaker 1: our portions of our own nation's history that I'm interested in.
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 1: All the parallels. Someone could very easily come in and
• 2:19:49
  Speaker 1: point out that there that they're false comparisons, false analogies.
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 1: But um uh, because it's not perfect, the timelines aren't perfect.
• 2:20:01
  Speaker 1: But it's just fascinating, particularly the evolving relationships of people
• 2:20:09
  Speaker 1: and animals and the market influence and to see people
• 2:20:17
  Speaker 1: um going through a very speedy version of what we
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 1: went through of within a single generation being engaged and
• 2:20:27
  Speaker 1: being introduced to market hunting, engaging in market hunting, realizing
• 2:20:32
  Speaker 1: where market hunting is going, and looking for a sustainable
• 2:20:35
  Speaker 1: model to have that play out in a person's lifetime.
• 2:20:40
  Speaker 1: You're seeing like like in some way, you're seeing a
• 2:20:45
  Speaker 1: hundred years of American history can pressed down really tightly
• 2:20:49
  Speaker 1: in part because of the technology you're talking about, where
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 1: ideas can cycle in so quickly. Yeah, it's both ideas
• 2:20:57
  Speaker 1: and uh, you know, the goods, the technical, logical, uh
• 2:21:01
  Speaker 1: possibilities all at the same time. And I think you're
• 2:21:04
  Speaker 1: exactly right. We're seeing it in a sort of a
• 2:21:07
  Speaker 1: hyper drive microcosm, replicating the last five years of world
• 2:21:14
  Speaker 1: history but happening in the space of a few years. Yeah.
• 2:21:21
  Speaker 1: I don't know if that's good or bad. Any other
• 2:21:23
  Speaker 1: final things. Yeah, that's intense. That's my final thought. Dan,
• 2:21:30
  Speaker 1: anything you'd like to add, Thanks for having me on
• 2:21:33
  Speaker 1: and say thanks for coming. Thanks to both you guys
• 2:21:37
  Speaker 1: for being here. This makes it easy to do a
• 2:21:40
  Speaker 1: podcast when we're sitting here on my couch. Yeah. Again,
• 2:21:44
  Speaker 1: I want to thank you, and I really want to
• 2:21:46
  Speaker 1: implore I really hope people do go check out your books,
• 2:21:49
  Speaker 1: especially if if you've always you know, if you tend
• 2:21:53
  Speaker 1: to only and I'm guilting this too, if you tend
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 1: to only view a wild life from the perspective of
• 2:22:00
  Speaker 1: hunting right and through that kind of media, I think
• 2:22:03
  Speaker 1: it's helpful to to to step into um a historian
• 2:22:08
  Speaker 1: like a trained historian shoes and look at wildlife a
• 2:22:12
  Speaker 1: little bit because it, uh, it adds a layer to
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 1: it that you don't get in the kind of normal
• 2:22:18
  Speaker 1: conversations about wildlife and wildlife management that we engage in UM,
• 2:22:23
  Speaker 1: where we're talking about like what we're doing now, what's
• 2:22:26
  Speaker 1: going on now, threats at wildlife habitat now to step
• 2:22:30
  Speaker 1: back and go like, oh, so that's the that's how
• 2:22:35
  Speaker 1: we arrived at where we're at. Those are the things
• 2:22:38
  Speaker 1: that shaped our understandings, the mistakes we've made, the successes
• 2:22:42
  Speaker 1: we've had. UM. I think it's really enlightening. So yeah,
• 2:22:45
  Speaker 1: hopefully you go check out Dan's uh not just his
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 1: not just his books, but if you want to dig
• 2:22:52
  Speaker 1: into the deep web, you'll find some of your academic
• 2:22:54
  Speaker 1: pieces from your your past life as a peer reviewed journal,
• 2:22:59
  Speaker 1: peer reviewed historian. So again that Dan, thank you very
• 2:23:03
  Speaker 1: much for joining him. Thank you man and also Man,
• 2:23:06
  Speaker 1: I just want to remind everyone please UM go and
• 2:23:10
  Speaker 1: give go and give a big gas five star review.
• 2:23:14
  Speaker 1: Me need your podcast. Thank you very much,