Joe Rogan Experience #2058 — Elliott West Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. That is – that's a hell of a book. So this is a lifetime of work a hundred years before that, there had been Native Americans that had traveled to France. because the French wanted to expand their fur trade In fact, he had a son by one of the women in the Missouri tribe. down to New Orleans, and then over across the Atlantic to Le Havre.

2:59 Sorcerers. Wow. the French men. They said they were sort of effeminate and sissy, and they said they smelled That is so fascinating. They knew English, or some of them did. So I think the point to remember is that this – long before our image of Americans coming into this area, there was all sorts of contact between Native peoples and Europeans, all sorts of exchanges.

5:53 Peter Robinson That's right. Spanish coming up from the south, of course. Again, it's like us thinking that the 1800s, like 1823 was just yesterday. And that had been going on slowly. Not true. Right. A Land So Strange by Andres Resendiz. But it's probably the same exact thing that happened to 90-plus percent of the Native Americans that contacted smallpox. Maybe. The Mayas declined a good bit before that.

9:39 And then they gradually made their way across the Southwest up to, you know, what is today Arizona, like the Zunis, of a few hundred years, which is such a transformative time period. That's right. And it keeps accelerating. Yeah. They don't seem to be culturally related to others in South America. Where'd they come from? When did they get there? Until fairly recently.

12:53 She was? I mean thousands of years before the Europeans show up. that some are connecting at least some forms of syphilis to European settlers who had come to America and then It could also be kind of a skin infection. So that seems pretty clear. And it became, because the syphilis had just run rampant through this population. Peeps. Victims hid their baldness as well as their bloody sores that scored

16:43 So you're a big wig. I think you and I should look into this. I enjoy it. And I have a good shaped head, so I'm lucky. Some too. It's comfortable. It's so easy. You don't have to talk to barbers. Shave your head yourself. I enjoy it. That's right. You know, you want your kids to get those because then they're immune. So what probably was going on was that smallpox was so common in Europe that the Europeans who came over here had likely had it when they were kids.

19:03 people who have the least medical care, people who are – they're the ones who are most vulnerable. Yeah, there's some estimations that 90 percent of the Native Americans died from disease. It kills the hunters. to that. Keep in mind, these were all initially at least imperial enterprises. It wasn't And I think the most common answer is the one you suggested, better lives.

22:28 Yeah. I mean, what did they have? There was a very healthy place. They were corporations. chance. It's a big chance. But of course, it's always balanced between what appears to be a I'm retired now, but what I used to tell tell my classes, imagine that suddenly the news hits that there is another universe that we didn't know was there. And, you know, that was something that had already been really pretty well established.

26:01 You know, I don't think so. Well, it's not only by itself for human beings, but it's also by itself for native wildlife, Yeah. that were driven either to extinction completely or really close to it. Yeah. And that world, of course, was not one that native peoples knew how to work. It wasn't the military. What's buffalo robes? And suddenly there was this great market for these things for Indian hunters, native hunters.

31:57 Now, it was a commodity. That had an early effect on the decline of the bison population. And they began to feel the effects of it. Factories needed leather for gaskets for these machines, belts and these things. There's hundreds of new factories being built all the time, right? because of disease, that led to an unprecedented rise in the buffalo. Because of market hunting.

35:39 You know, the classic thing. Yeah. Well, you're right, of course. They evolved in the southern plains over 50 million years from a critter called a hyracotherium, which is about the size of a collie, into the modern horse. Yeah. Pushing far back enough. That's right. We're going through kind of a climate change, We had, of course, the saber-toothed tiger, the simuladon.

38:41 Wow. And, you know, the list just goes on and on. So what's the difference? Wow. Maybe they changed and evolved. replaced by or followed by our bison, bison bison, Americanus. And that that was the end of the ice age and that it happened not just I've heard that idea, but I don't, frankly, don't know enough about it. And it has to do, of course, with what we were talking about a little earlier.

42:39 the North American cheetah. Right. Right. Yeah. They starve, diseases, CWD. There's a lot of different diseases that they can get hit with because of this overpopulation. we have this incredible romantic attachment to Native Americans. peoples and fishers. They had figured out these ways to, these sort of incredibly complicated and complex practiced ways of moving through their year, month by month, week by week, in ways that they had practiced and learned about over many generations that allowed them really a remarkably high standard of living. Now there were not large tribes. One of the limitations of a hunter-gatherer society is you cannot expand in numbers beyond a

47:18 of the Indian, right? They're just like this one group of people. That's right. That's right. It's a fascinating idea. Well, it is interesting because it seems like there's a biological, maybe an evolutionary reason for gossip. could tell another person to do anything. They have Someone's hiding food. Right. Yeah. And like you say, it's hard work. They spoke the same or common or highly related languages and so forth.

51:51 a kind of a Sioux, Cheyenne nationalism. far-reaching it was everything changes quickly Yeah. One of the fascinating stories about Little Bighorn was that this band, this banding together of all these natives didn't last. But you're right. Like I say, they were under siege there for two or three days. July 4th, 1876, the 100th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence, our 100th birthday.

55:29 They were from Idaho, from eastern Oregon. than a month. And they formed, in the eyes of the Nez Perce, they formed this alliance with the Americans. Wow. somehow get their families, you know, women, children, kids, old folks, men took off and killed a bunch of white folks that they had grudges against. lands that the whites didn't want. Why then? Why force them in? What's the reason? And the only reason I can think of was the Little Bighorn. This

59:44 No. Really good shows? No. where Christianity is forced upon them, It's not just Christianity that's being forced on. I said a moment ago They identified with tribal groups. You know, I'm a whatever. purpose of a boarding school was to destroy Indian-ness. The famous phrase coming from Colonel Pratt, who was the one who founded Carlisle, was kill the Indian to save the man.

1:03:14 we may be Comanche, we may be Cheyenne, Indians from all over, native peoples from all over the nation, Certainly they were – especially when they're in particular places that are very rich in resources. Make them American. That's what – so it was both of those things together. No. It depended on really basically three things. meant to transform these people into Americans. So yeah. So you often hear the term genocide

1:07:53 Of course. It had to be so confusing to them what the resources were that the white man wanted, too. It's just cross-culturally across hundreds of years. now by a historian named Benjamin Badley who is studying in California. That's right. All parts of Asia. Yeah. to the East, a lot of people said, oh, come on. to the end of 1848, nobody in the East really either knew about this,

1:11:49 So it's what I call in the book the second conquest of California, the first, of course, in the War with Mexico. So these people are either driven out completely or they're confined One of the few times in American history when we could say absolutely, yes, this was attempted genocide. than had been mined across the world And they discovered, to their horror, that gold dust was being blown out of the smokestacks.

1:14:46 Wow. So it's a state government that's in charge there. Yeah, it was one of the... Those are the ones that we're most aware of publicly. Wow. Sure. Yeah. What year was this? They brought horses. It's like we have a car culture, right? It becomes, it's like you take these two animals and you fuse them into one thing. But at the same time, it becomes this – these horse cultures become extraordinary military machines.

1:22:34 The pistol. stretched from southern Canada all the way into Mexico, a native empire, right? years back. And it ends where the story began 50 million years ago with the beginning, with Yeah. He's a native Fin who has written the great book on this. This is where they were best adapted. They had their own foreign policy. Wow. And the amount of status and wealth that you had was dependent upon the amount of horses that you had.

1:28:18 And these arrowheads, this is one of them, they're everywhere here. who needed carbohydrates and who they couldn't go a day or two without But they carried multiple arrows in each finger. Now, by the time the real hammer came down, the whites had repeating rifles and they had Yeah, and very accurate. That was alien to them. that the military didn't really have a desire to acquire the revolver.

1:32:07 Revolvers are not terribly accurate, In Kwanzaa Parker, yeah. Yeah. But there's certainly something to that. Yes. But his partner, Oliver Loving, was killed by Comanches out in West Texas. stayed on that. that, but didn't last. The animosity, the unalloyed hatred, mutual hatred between Comanches So besides that, no. When you set out to write a book this vast, I mean, this is an enormous book,

1:36:55 It's just this bewildering series of things, of events. what went beyond hard And we're about finished with it now. It's done when it's done, right? The world changes. but sometimes things really change. We're technologically far more sophisticated. The most common answer to that by far up until now has been the Civil War. America. We become a Pacific-facing nation as well as an Atlantic-facing nation.

1:42:43 from the acquisition of 1,200,000 square miles over three years Yeah. Well, of course, I could not agree more. We can't know who we are as Americans unless you Sure. Eddie Westerns are actually made in Italy with Trin Eastwood and, you know, all these films that detail these heroic Americans who fight off the Indians. Yeah, right? It's a revisionist history question, right?

1:46:14 was west. the Civil War, this country is trying to remake itself into one nation. It's a heroic, very positive American view, story. trying to kill people to kill people. That doesn't matter. We need this to be a very virile story So it becomes a very male story. All of these stories of railroaders trying to protect themselves against the Indians, the idea of a violent West, these shootouts every day.

1:49:55 that that in fact is outsiders are projecting onto it what they want it to be. That's what Westerns are. You said a moment ago, everybody, if you stop folks on the street, everybody agrees Indians are poorly treated. I have no responsibility. pressure you to feel guilty about it. Literally whitewashing. Right. My early passion was what we call social history,

1:52:19 And I have yet to find one example, to read one example of somebody saying, well, tell you what, it's going to be tough out there, but we've got to go out there and get rid of the Indians. doing that, as I When you're writing something like this, like for them to be. It's not. That's part of the accuracy of it, right? You know, the stories, with as much nuance as I can, and to bring in new understandings.

1:55:52 Ranches out of the Great Plains. So they were able to send slaughtered beef back, but they wouldn't send the animals themselves. That was before. Like, if people came over here en masse from Europe, what were they eating? That is, individuals, you would raise your own cattle, cow. So you can take cattle in Texas, southern Texas. sort of these concentrations of capital, to create this new national, international business.

2:00:15 Yeah. And I'm listening to that right now. It's been an awesome, awesome conversation.