The Past, the Promise, the Presidency
Welcome to "The Past, the Promise, the Presidency," a podcast about the exciting, unexpected, and critically-important history of the office of the President of the United States. You'll find four seasons of this podcast: Season 1 - Race and the American Legacy; Season 2 - Presidential Crises; Season 3 - The Bully Pulpit; and the current Season 4 - Conversations. Between Seasons 3 & 4, you will also find here a new pilot series called "Firsthand History." In each season of this series, we'll tell a different story from the complex and controversial era of the George W. Bush presidency. We'll tell these stories by featuring oral histories from our Collective Memory Project - firsthand stories told by the people who were there, including U.S. government officials, leaders from foreign countries, journalists, scholars, and more. Season 1--"Cross Currents: Navigating U.S.-Norway Relations After 9/11"--explores the tangled webs of transatlantic alliance in a time of war and uncertainty. "Firsthand History" is a production of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
The Past, the Promise, the Presidency
S3 E7: Native Sovereignty and Native Removal
In March of 2021, Deb Haaland, a member of New Mexico's Laguna Pueblo, became the first Native American Cabinet Secretary in US history. It was was a truly historic first, as Deb Haaland is part of a long history of Indigenous peoples that predates the United States as a nation. And today, we are going to explore the relationship between Indigenous peoples of America and the United States Government.
When the United States became an independent nation in 1776, a new era began, one of constant conflict. Native peoples claimed sovereignty over land and resources across the continent, while the US Government often called for the removal of Native peoples from those lands.
To help us understand this history, we turned to two expert guests. First, we spoke to Dr. Christina Snyder, a professor of history at Penn State University. Dr. Snyder sets the scenes for us by exploring Native sovereignty in the earliest years of the United States. Dr. Snyder also takes us through the most infamous period of Native removal in US History, the era of Andrew Jackson.
To understand how the relationship between Native peoples and the US Government changed in the 20th century, we turned to Dr. William Bauer. Dr. Bauer is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in Northern California.
Dr. Bauer explains the major changes that took place in US and Indigenous relations at the turn of the 20th Century, and he shares some remarkable stories and insight on struggles for Native sovereignty during the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon, and Barack Obama.