Beyond Cowboys and Indians: Seeking Common Ground in the American Frontier with Stephen Aron

00:00:00
Welcome to what’s your why. I am your host, Emy Digrappa. What’s your why? Is brought to you by Wyoming humanities. This podcast focuses on the why.

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It is a storytelling podcast where we discover people’s journeys, their inspiration, and their why. And today, my special guest is Stephen Aron. Stephen is president and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American west in Los Angeles, California. He is an author and a speaker on the American west. His latest book, Peace and Friendship ; an Alternative History of the American west, came out in 2022.

00:00:41
Welcome, Stephen. It’s a pleasure to be here. Well, I’m so excited to have you because I love that you studied the history of the American west and brought it into our contemporary lives, where we live right now. And that is so important because history is now right. And a lot of people think, oh, history is really boring.

00:01:03
But I love that you make it very relevant. So the first question I have for you is, what has been your journey and what brought you to be in love with history, and especially history of the american west? Oh, okay. So you want to go back further? I thought we were going to start with how I came to write peace and friendship.

00:01:24
No, I want to tell you, which I guess is part of that journey. Yeah.

00:01:31
I can’t say I had any kind of epiphany that led me to history. Some moment where it was like, this is what I’m destined to do with my life. Nor, for that matter, how I ended up drifting into western American history as my primary field. But both of which, I guess, like many people, I certainly found that I had a passion for history. I don’t think I figured that one could turn that passion into a career, primarily spending most of my career as a professor of history before I moved into the museum world, I should say I didn’t necessarily start that journey thinking of myself as wanting to become a western historian or a historian of the American west.

00:02:24
Indeed, I think when my career launched, I thought of myself primarily as a colonial american historian. And I guess colonial America led me into a history of colonialism, and that led me into a history of studying the expansion of the United States and its colonial projects westward, and that ultimately made me a western historian. That’s the shorthand journey version of it. What I think, though, as I say, is more novel than just that. Why?

00:02:56
Trajectory is how I ended up writing this book, peace and friendship, which is subtitled an alternative history of the American west. An alternative, I mean, and I want to be careful here to clarify, not as I think when you google the term alternative history, you are automatically taken to its synonym, alternate history. Alternate history is a genre of what if studies. What if the Nazis had won the second world War, being probably the most popular in this genre? Or what if the south had won the Civil War?

00:03:33
There are a lot about western topics, too, but it’s not really. I mean, it’s the stuff that I think fiction writers and sometimes science fiction writers do wonderful things with. But it’s not really the province of historians to work there because it’s untethered from the history of what really happened, which is where historians tend to like to work. But by alternative history, I wanted to write about a kind of a lesser known current that runs against the mainstream of west american history, a mainstream that is really focuses on the violence that accompanied the making of the American west. In an older version of that history, that violence was seen as what ennobled american greatness.

00:04:29
It’s what made America great again and again as the frontier expanded westward in the newer version of western american history. More often that violence is shown to be what really created catastrophes for native peoples and often led to environmental issues such as wildfires and the like, burning across the west as a byproduct of it. In any case, you know, either way, violence retained its centrality. By contrast, I wanted to look at an alternative, or what I would see as an adjacent face of the frontier expansion of the United States. And that’s where people overcame their differences as opposed to always being overcome by them.

00:05:20
Now, I should say that that really is not the mainstream of western american history. And that was made clear to me again when I was recently giving a couple of lectures and talks in at the Jackson Hole History Museum. And I was paired there with Eliot west, who is a really one wonderful, eminent historian in the American west. And he was talking about violence in the American west, whereas I was talking about peace and friendship, this alternative history. And I will say, and maybe it was because he’s a much better historian than I am or a more famous historian than I am, or has written a very, very important recent book.

00:05:59
But his audiences in Jackson Hole, in Jackson, were considerably larger than mine, which I think reflects where the mainstream is versus this adjacent face. But I still think the adjacent face is very much worthy of our attention for reasons that I’m happy to go into. Well, yeah, I think that that is what really captivated me on the title of your book and just in reading a little bit about it, just learning what is the history that’s taught in schools, the violent history and you’re taking that and saying, well, this is another way of how people worked together and dealt with each other that isn’t violent. How did they develop friendships? How did the west expand?

00:06:52
And what was, you know, what was your take on it that you studied, that you wanted to create this alternative narrative? I think it was. Look, the book I had written previously to the piece in french book was for an Oxford history series. The very short introductions, I don’t know if you’ve seen these volumes. They’re really tight.

00:07:14
They’re 35,000 words. They have them on all different subjects, hundreds of different subjects. And they asked me to write the American west volume. And so, I mean, it was a great challenge, I have to say, writing all of american western history into 35,000 words. And I have to confess, first draft came in at about 70,000 words.

00:07:34
And I came back to them and I said, well, surely a subject as big and broad as the American west deserves more words than just 35,000. But they were not sympathetic to me at Oxford University Press. And so 35,000 words it was. But that was, in a sense, a work that was filled with the stories of violence and conquest that sort of enabled the westward expansion of the United States and the making of the American west. Today, by contrast, though, I do think, and I think it’s become particularly important today, as we think back on looking for usable pasts, to also look beyond that stream and look to the counter currents and look to these moments and places where erstwhile enemies manage to figure out how to get along with one another, at least for time.

00:08:29
And what the book does is it looks at a series of moments and places where, unexpectedly, peace developed and sometimes even friendships between former foes and former combatants, mostly between native peoples and Wyoming Humanities in different settings, moving across the west. And the question I really wanted to pursue was, why did these moments occur where they did?

00:09:01
Why didn’t they endure? Why did they fall apart? How do we remember and misremember these episodes? How, in some cases, do we turn them into what I call wishtories, which are histories we wish for, as opposed to histories, that that kind of what really happened? How do we turn them sometimes into happily ever after fairy tales instead of really following what happened?

00:09:28
But even accounting for the fact that these moments don’t last to think about what lessons we can take away from these episodes, because it seems to me that’s particularly important to all of us today in a world where we seem to believe that our differences are so profound that they are irreconcilable. Well, what did you find? What were the key stories that led you to write about the friendships? So the one I start with, which really coincides with the American Revolution, and not in the west as we know it today, but in the west as it was at the time of the founding of the United States in the 1770s and 70 days. And that’s the west of the Ohio Valley.

00:10:20
What? The first American west, the first west of the United States. And the figure I focus on is Daniel Boone, who, of course, is obviously among the most famous, most legendary of american pioneers. And Boone himself sort of is engaged in combat with Indians for a significant part of his life. He sees these moments where there are parts of his life where two of his sons are slain by Indians.

00:10:50
So if anyone could carry sort of hatred, animosity, grudge, it might be Boone. And yet Boone gets taken captive by Shawnee Indians in 1778 and spends several months with them. And actually, during those months, actually develops, I think, familial relationships. He’s the adopted son of a headman among the Shawnees. He ultimately does escape and return back to the american side of the frontier.

00:11:18
But it’s not without some regret, especially later in life, that he sort of recognizes the missed opportunity. And indeed, after both he and the Shawnees are essentially exiled from the United States and seek new homes in what is then spanish Louisiana, Spain controls the Terry west of the Mississippi river in what is now Missouri. Boone basically reunites with some of those with his former Shawnee captors slash adopters slash enemies, and again, lives in kind of a warm friendship with them. And it seemed to me that story is worth unpacking and seeing the larger meanings there, because really, right at the origins of american expansion sort of opens up a very different side. And then one that sort of travels through both in terms of individuals and larger groups.

00:12:17
I want to emphasize, though, that mine is not what I would call a Kumbaya story, where everybody who had formerly been killing one another suddenly is now singing around the campfire together. Oftentimes, as one looks deeper at various episodes, one finds that, yes, sometimes there are individual factors. Something like Daniel Boone. Someone like Daniel Boone is a remarkable individual and able to, in some sense, transcend his upbringing, overcome some of the cultural baggage that he carries, able to see beyond the biases and prejudices that infect so many of his compatriots, especially regarding indian peoples, able to really appreciate and grow enamored with some of the attractions that he sees in indian cultures in the eastern woodlands of the United of what is now the United States. But so maybe it’s a remarkable individual.

00:13:16
And he also had a remarkable, as he puts it at one point, he says, in explaining how he overcomes, he says, sometimes what happens, sometimes, basically what happens. We’re best to forget what happens in war, that rather than holding grudges, one has to learn to sort of forget them in order to sort of be able to move beyond them. I think there’s an interesting episode from that because so much of our own apparatus today about truth and reconciliation around the world is premised on recognizing and kind of building conciliation from sort of first recognizing and then reckoning with historical wrongs. And I don’t mean to devalue that work, but in Boone’s case, I think in pointing us to the importance of being able to forget, it also points us in useful directions about how do you get beyond lifelong animosities and grudges, but beyond just individual factors, I think there are also geopolitical ones that help to explain why and where these moments occurred to. Oftentimes it’s balances of power or powerlessness.

00:14:32
That is, when groups are relatively equal in number and they realize that they can’t militarily dominate one another. They have to look for ways to get along, or contrary also to conventional wisdom that often says it’s the entrance of the state, the nation or empires that bring law and order to frontiers. What I found is sometimes it was those larger entities that disrupted and disturbed the peace that had once existed because they bring in weaponry and the ability to fight on a much larger scale. They destabilize local arrangements that allowed people to again work out ways of accommodating one another as opposed to always fighting and killing one another. Most of the situations that I point to are tenuous, are tentative, but they still point us, I think, to useful lessons.

00:15:32
Well, I think just in hearing you talk about that, it makes me think about where we are today with the American Indian and where we’re trying to reconcile and have a deeper understanding of where I they were. And I would say it was the us government that created genocide against the Native Americans. And how do you reconcile that? So historians spent a lot of time, the old buzzwords of western history were about the triumph of civilization and the progress, american progress. And in fact, at the autry, probably our most famous paid to get the autry museum is John Gast, american progress.

00:16:14
You’ve seen it in a million sort of textbook illustrations where it’s the figure, the angelic female figure, in the white robe floating above, carrying a school book in one hand and stringing a telegraph wire in the other, while a parade of pioneer types moves across the plains and Indians and bison are pushed into the shadows and off the canvas. That’s the sort of classic progress version distilled, really, a picture being worth several thousand words, in this case a painting. The newer versions of western history, as I say, tend to invert that story and tend to look at it as giving primacy to that original sin of american history being the dispossession, the expropriation of american indian lands, and worse still, the ethnic cleansing or even genocide. And it’s certainly true that, you know, when you look at one of my other books is I co authored a world history textbook, worlds together, worlds apart, which. So I have thought about this in global historical context, but there is no catastrophe in human history in terms of demographic collapse equal to what befalls indian peoples in the centuries after 1492.

00:17:31
That most estimates now suggest that the population, the native populations of the Americas, declined by 95% in the centuries after 1492. So you, you know, when you talk about other horrific plagues in world history and horrific demographic collapses, there is no equivalent to that. So one does not want to minimize. Now, historians get into lots of debate about whether the, whether the term genocide applies. I would argue that probably the best case of where it most applies, the term as the United nations definition of genocide, which is not a word that’s not coined until 1948 by the United nations.

00:18:15
But you can then go back and use the definitions, the standards that they use, is probably what happens in California after the gold rush, where you get state sanctioned violence against Indians. That leads to the eradication of scores of indian groups in California and the widespread destruction of indian peoples and cultures other places. Sometimes historians argue that insofar as various epidemic diseases where the prime cause or primary cause or significant cause of indian depopulation, does that really fit under genocide? We can quibble or not about that. They’re still getting back to the question you raised, no question that there is this catastrophe on which Americans and the land we occupied.

00:19:08
And I actually listened to the podcast you did about homesteading recently, and it sort of ties to that very nicely to what that interview was bringing forward. That one brought it forward, just in particular about homesteading policy and the ways in which that family or any of the people who acquired homesteads were beneficiaries of the dispossession of Indians and the largesse of the federal government about giving them wealth upon which generations of wealth could be built as opposed to in people of color, largely excluded from that. But I think if we go back to this larger point, in some senses, we in modern american society are all of the beneficiaries of catastrophe, the beneficiaries of the catastrophe that befell indian people. And we have to grapple with that as part of our legacy and reckoning, you know, in terms of reckoning with our past and reckoning with our present and thinking about the future and where that leads us, I think takes us in many different, complicated directions. My book being one effort to grapple by showing that there were at least alternative possibilities that were in play in the past, that at least showed us some path that didn’t lead to ethnic cleansing and dispossession in quite the same way.

00:20:32
Well, I think you made a point earlier that when people were, you know, when it was the west and people were trying to get along with each other and trying to figure out how to live, and they were in a real roots on the ground kind of way, struggling with each other, but in that way that they were struggling, they had to find a peaceful place to come together. But when you involve governments, then, like you said, that changes because the government has the military and they have a different weapon that they can use, and it’s bigger and stronger. So if people were left, this is just my little if they were left to their own, they would find that way to live together rather than have this authoritarian entity come along and say, you’re bad, you’re good, you’re non white, you’re white, whatever. And then they divide people just in doing that. Look, and again, the problem, the problem here is that, and I readily admit that about the case studies I do.

00:21:51
First of all, the case studies I look at sort of don’t last. So already there’s an issue, and so we have to explain why they don’t last. If people found ways to accommodate one another, if people found ways to sort of overcome their differences, well, why did that fall apart? And one of the explanations is other forces enter the equation that destabilize those local arrangements. That’s part of it.

00:22:15
Part of it, though, to be fair, there are other moments where some of the people who are calling the government in are basically saying, solve our indian problem for us by getting rid of these Indians for us. And in a sense, they stir up the trouble and then get the government to intervene sometimes, too. Um, I guess there’s actually a larger point here about historians, I like to say, are much better at predicting the past than we are at forecasting the future. And if we were as good at forecasting the future as we would like to be, well, historians would be a lot. Well, we’d probably be a lot wealthier, and we’d be a lot more important in some way if they’re past, you know, look, one of the classic formulations that people sort of often bring forward when they say about why it’s important to study history is version of Santayana’s.

00:23:05
Those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it, meaning if we don’t learn from the past, we just repeat the errors of the past. But I think history and western american history doesn’t work in such straight lines. I mean, I much prefer Mark Twain’s formulation that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I think at best, as historians, we can look for the rhymes, not necessarily expect the repetitions. And so it’s really sometimes not that easy to simply say, oh, you know, this is what happened here, and so this is what will happen in the future.

00:23:46
I think there are very important lessons we draw from the past, but it rarely sort of translates so perfectly. I think, you know, at best, there are patterns that we can think about and certainly think about both, not simply looking at the follies of the past, but sometimes looking at the successes of the past. And even my dead ended moments of peace and friendship at least offer us something of an alternative from which to build. I would argue, even if they don’t readily translate into here’s my five part plan of how we can learn from history and build a better future. I don’t know that it ever will ever be that predictive or prescriptive, but I do think that we can still again, and it maybe opens us up to some unconventional angles of vision that make us, if only to tilt our vision in ways that begin to make us rethink how we are, where we are today and maybe begin to also ponder how we might get to a better place.

00:24:59
And again, I think there’s no question the book was written at a moment and with in my mind how profound our divisions seem to be and how we’re told how irreconcilable our divisions are. And yet, you know, in some ways, if someone like Daniel Boone, as I suggest, could overcome, so might we. One of my, and I’ve always been, and I come from a big hispanic family, and I’ve always studied history, but from the spanish side of things and studied the spanish history and the spanish empire and how they went into Mexico and the birth of the mexican culture and then into the American southwest. So it was always very interesting to me to try and unravel that history because as you know, as a historian, the history books are written from the perspective of the pilgrims landing, right? They’re not.

00:26:15
They don’t tell that story about the spanish conquest and what happened with the spaniard. That’s not even, you know, you. You go to Thanksgiving and you’re. In fact, I used to, when I was teaching the colonial american course, and I used to. This will explain the difference, I used to say, to say in one or even the early, early lectures in my westward, my history of the American west course, I would sort of say to the students, just first things that pop into your head when I ask you to think about symbols or names or figures, whatever it would be.

00:26:50
And almost always I get some version back of pilgrims, pocahontas, and patriots, you know, in their tricornered hat. So it would be sort of, you know, nicely alliterative there, but, you know, pilgrims, because everybody goes back to Plymouth Rock and sees that as the foundational story, Pocahontas, because now, especially in the, you know, post Disney movie era, she’s emerged in a particularly central way. And then the patriots, the american revolution being the culmination to that colonial story. And here I was doing this course in California, or these courses in California. I said, wait a second.

00:27:28
Why don’t any of you ever bring forward the mission as the emblem of colonial society? Oh, but in some ways, well, no, that’s not part of the colonial story. That’s part of this, I don’t know, sideshow story, that somehow the Spanish north is a sideshow. And it is, of course, not a sideshow. In fact, you know, in terms of territorial expansion, in terms of all sorts of measures that we might use, it’s anything but a sideshow.

00:27:59
And indeed, it seems to be one of the things that has changed about the teaching of early american history.

00:28:06
And westward history is no longer thinking about, a, the english colonies as being the only colonies, and b, thinking about expansion westward as being the only current in which these expansionist processes work that I think we now recognize a much more.

00:28:32
The west is a north for many people as much as it is west. And of course, it’s a homeland for many other people, but it’s also a homeland in which those boundaries are shifting as indian peoples are moving around and oftentimes displacing other people. Indeed, some of the most provocative new work on the record, west looks at, in particular the Lakota and the Comanches, as being the most successful expansionist powers in the 18th century, displacing other Indians from the plains. So I think we have a much more complicated dynamic, but one that certainly now understands and more fully grapples with the significance of the spanish presence in North America, north of Mexico. And then likewise, if we’re talking about the dispossession of native peoples, also thinking about what happens to the people of mexican origin who, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, are guaranteed their land rights and us citizenship, but how that doesn’t really work out as it was supposed to.

00:29:43
Well, that’s what I find. So maybe this is too much to see happen, but I’d like to see all the grade school books rewritten, elementary to high school. I will say this, and if you’ll allow me, a shameless plug for my museum here. The autry has an exhibit right now up called Reclaiming El Camino, native resistance in the missions and beyond. And it actually focuses almost entirely in California.

00:30:15
We basically did it, native curators and native consultants saying, you can tell, this is a gallery in which you can tell your story as you want it to be told. And they really did emphasize both the genocidal destruction that begins with the missions, intensifies with the american conquest, but also, and the resistance to that, but also the remarkable story of resilience and survivance that has allowed indian peoples, even under the most challenging conditions, to survive. That’s a story we tell about California, but I think we could spread it across much of what is the United States to tell that story. But one of the things I was going to say is, in my, one of the signature projects that California students do in fourth grade was they’re asked to build a mission diorama, you know, and in the old days, that was basically meant to be an homage to these whitewashed missions that become, you know, they’re sort of famous in California because they become early tourist attractions in the early 20th century. They get rebuilt, and they get turned into this fantasy past that people like to proclaim about the early spanish days in California, usually erasing the mexican era entirely, but sort of venerating the spanish colonial while whitewashing out the mexican period.

00:31:42
In any case, one of the things I used to say in my class was, in light of what you’ve learned in this course, how would you redo your fourth grade diorama? And I got some fascinating answers, including people, some students, who actually redid their diorama to sort of emphasize all sorts of things that they now knew. But the broader lesson that I always really wanted them to come away with also was to not treat what happens in the spanish north as somehow a world apart from what’s happening in the rest of. In the other parts of colonial America, but to see the ways in which these stories have to be understood as entangled with one another and entangled with the histories of indian peoples across the continent. And that more holistic vision is one that I hope we’re moving to, and not just at the college level or at the history museums doing it this way, but I hope in 3rd, fourth, and fifth grade, even though one of the projects that one of the students did, which was a redo doing of the diorama, basically redid the stained glass over the altar in the genetic code of syphilis to connote the ways in which Indians were not so much civilized as syphilized by the coming of the Spanish.

00:33:08
And I said, I’m not sure that’s going to fit into fourth grade curriculum very easily, but I take your point. And it’s a really important one, super interesting to me. And of course, like I said, coming from a big hispanic family growing up in Colorado, my father was born in New Mexico. It’s always been the history of the mexican people. And I used to always wonder, the Indian of Mexico is so interwoven into its entire culture, and it wasn’t a separation that happened like it did in the American west where the Indian was put on a reservation, where if you look at the Indian in Mexico, it is part of the entire, you know, there is no reservation.

00:34:02
Its entirety is part of the people. Yeah. One of the things that certainly, you know, in a grander way distinguishes the english expansion from the French or the Spanish. There. Look, there are economic reasons for this.

00:34:18
There are demographic reasons, too, that the English migrate. The english colonies tend to be settled by a much more balanced demographically men and women, whereas the spanish frontier to the north and into Mexico, for that matter, and the French, primarily fur trading frontiers, are almost disproportionately men. And so the intermingling and intermixing with indian peoples is obviously creating metis or mestizo offspring that become the dominant. The mixed complexion is dominant and therefore makes it harder to create those clean separations that the Wyoming Humanities tried to impose. That said, when you.

00:35:05
And again, this is part of that larger story, and there’s been really some wonderful books written on this. The Mountain men, for example, famous to Wyoming history. The mountain men. You know, often this is an example of fur trading group, that fur trapping trading group that does mix and mingle with indian peoples whose livelihoods depend on gaining, you know, collaborating with indian peoples and oftentimes whose well being also rested on marrying indian women. And so you have significant mixed offspring population in the mid 19th century american west.

00:35:40
That does create this counter sort of story where now how those people oftentimes either have to make hard choices and figure out which side of the frontier line they’re going to be on. Are they going to try to pass themselves off as white and move into that way? Or are they going to stay with their indian kin, these mixed race, mixed ethnic offspring? That’s often a painful family stories that situate across the american west. And one of the fundamental changes is, whereas being of mixed ancestry was an enormous advantage economically and culturally for a time, how that becomes ground that no one, that people can’t stand on anymore, that the american government imposes.

00:36:29
If you’re indian, you’re on a reservation. If you’re not. And then that also follows with all sorts of blood quantum determining who is indian and who is not. In a way that had never been the case among many of the indian societies. It was more a matter of culture than blood.

00:36:49
The american government, in a sense, is what imposes a standard of blood in this on Indians that re changes that formulation and continues to this present day in terms of, especially with casino gaming tribes, where being part of the group can often be particularly economically enriching. Well, you make so many good points. We could talk forever because I love this. I love this part of history. Some of the things that you grew up hearing go back where you came from, and it’s like, well, I am where I came from.

00:37:31
And you probably hear that a lot in California. That was all part of spanish territory, and people were. That was their home. Well, I think the best line is we didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.

00:37:48
We’re already here. Yeah, I know. I mean, and by the way, that is true. Not, you know, people, many indian peoples make the same point about, wait a second, this border, you know, we had territory that and trade relations that crossed freely across this and moved peoples freely across this. Just because you drew a line in the sand doesn’t mean I.

00:38:11
Yeah, so I think. Yes, well, and another part of the western story, though, there’s so much, it’s so deep, and. And that’s why it was so challenging to get it down into 35,000 words. I might point out in the very short introduction, the peace and friendship book, I can tell you, is a little bit longer than that. I think it’s more like 100,000 words total, including footnotes and so forth.

00:38:34
But even there, I don’t in any way pretend to be telling the whole story. So there’s, in fact, I should say, about the peace and friendship book it originally was going to be. It really now has chapters that look at episodes from the American Revolution, basically through the 1870s, 1880s, through the first century of the american nation, basically. Originally, I had planned to write a book that would take it to the present and look at various of these same kinds of stories as they play out in different communities in the 20th century and even into the 21st. But when I took the job at the Autry museum, when I left being a professor to be a museum president, I realized that I no longer would have any time to finish writing the book.

00:39:19
So I said, I better publish. Let’s get it out in this form and at least get the conversation started about this history. And then maybe somebody else will take up the baton. We’ll pick up the baton and sort of think about other episodes and chapters that are worthy of our attention as places and times, which at least make us rethink some of what we think we know about the american west and the relations between peoples there. Oh, my gosh.

00:39:49
Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. It’s been so great talking to you. So thank you so much for your time. I’m going to put all the links in the description for all the books you’ve written.

00:40:01
And do you have an independent website, or do people just find you at the autry museum at this point? I have one at UCLA still, but the autry has a little page on me, which is just as good as either that or the UCLA one, I think are probably the. Okay, I’ll point people in that direction, learn about all your writings and the research and the work that you’ve done. But, Stephen, thank you so much. I could talk to you.

00:40:27
Well, it’s been a real pleasure. I’d be happy to go on. In fact, I have lots of feedback. As I said earlier, I listened to the episode on the homesteading, and it just really provoked me to really think about in a different context how much we are the inheritors of a very problematic history. In that way.

00:40:49
Yes, I like the way you said that. We are the inheritors of a very problematic history. That’s a good way to put it. I have to remember that when I think about, I have a ton of books on borders and border crossings and just, you know, the, the marriage of the, the Spaniard to the Indian to the mexican culture, which I love so much because that’s my history. So it’s great to talk to you, and I’m going to really look forward to reading your book.

00:41:23
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure. I realized we ranged a little bit more widely than the book. All sorts of terrain that I can’t claim is in the book, but that’s what, look, in the end, I said it’s a problematic history, but it’s also an endlessly fascinating history. Absolutely.

00:41:42
And even for all its problems, I also think, and this is really important to get on the record, even for all the problems that it brings forward, it also brings forward possibilities and promise. And even if sometimes, even if sometimes it leads us into a broken promised land or a land of broken promises, I still think there’s so much, the possibilities should bring us back again to studying this western american past. Absolutely. I agree with you. Thank you so much for having me.

00:42:15
Okay. Thank you, Stephen. Take care. You’re very welcome. Bye.

00:42:24
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