VoE - Margarett Newell - podcast
===

[00:00:00] 

Margaret Ellen Newell: So it's never, a straight line, the gaining of rights, the losing of rights, this is never a straight line either. It's almost like a cycle of achievement and then backlash and then more efforts on the parts of these communities to secure their rights and their livelihoods. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Emergent Materials and Mathematics and Languages, among many others, the College always has something exciting happening.

Join us to find out what's new, now.



David Staley: I am pleased to welcome to the ASC Marketing and Communication Studio my colleague, Margaret Ellen Newell, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at The Ohio State [00:01:00] University. Her research and teaching interests include colonial and revolutionary America, Native American history, the history of slavery, economic history, material culture, and comparative colonial American and Latin American history. Dr. Newell, welcome to Voices. 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Thank you, David. It's my pleasure to be here. 

David Staley: And I'm very eager to talk about your research, but before we get there, I want to say that you are Director of the History Praxis Lab, and I'm very interested to learn more about the Praxis Lab. 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Sure.

So, the Praxis Lab is a centerpiece of a half a million dollar grant that I and three other scholars received from the Mellon Foundation for a three year program. So, what we were interested in doing was engaging undergraduates in research, we thought undergraduates could do good research and make a contribution to new and original work.

We, liked the idea of a team based system. People in the sciences and social sciences use a lab format for their research. It's collaborative, whereas historians tend to be all alone out in the archives, all alone writing. So [00:02:00] I've been thinking about this for a long time, wanting to use the lab model for historical research, so this sort of was a way to bring together involving undergraduates with that lab based collaborative team based, approach to research. So, my three co principal investigators in this grant are actually former OSU students, they are OSU PhDs, some who I worked with directly.

One is a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, his name is John Bickers. He's a professor at Case Western Reserve. Another is a African American history, Noel Volz, also at Case Western. And third is DeAndre Smiles, who actually has a PhD in geography, so he's coming out of a social science background, and he teaches at the University of Victoria.

So all of us collaborate in leading the lab and sort of setting the students on different sorts of research expeditions and sort of planning publications and how to share this research that we and the students are creating. 

David Staley: What sorts of research are you conducting in the lab? 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Well, the last two years, first year we focused a lot on we created teams.

One was a [00:03:00] legal team, so we were looking at what is the framework for citizenship. So the grant was for investigating citizenship and civic engagement. of, of Native Americans and African Americans and the ways in which they were, they had similar experiences and the ways in which they had different experiences.

So we had the students investigate the legal framework for citizenship. We focused on what historians call the old Northwest, which is, states like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, because I feel the Midwest is a little bit less studied than the East Coast in these citizenship questions.

It's nearby and we could take students to archives more easily, access materials. So we looked at what was the framework for citizenship, who decided who could become a citizen? What were the criteria for citizenship? Same with voting. But we also ended up. Finding out quite a bit about the kind of demography of these places and how it changed over time.

So I think when people think of the, of the great [00:04:00] migration of African Americans to the North, they often think of the 20th century, but in fact, there's a great migration that follows the American revolution. Out of the South, but also out of the East as both freedom seekers, you know, enslaved people escaping slavery, but free people of color.

Many of the Southern states passed laws actually saying that once people had gained their freedom, they had to leave the state. so this was a push effect that pushed a lot of people into the Midwest and the West and that created a reaction on the part of state officials. so the states were in charge of immigration.

The states were in charge of citizenship. So this is,

David Staley: Not the national government. 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Not the national government. And in fact I think we've seen a little bit of this in, I think some recent history has made it clear the degree to which the states still do have a lot of influence on voting processes, on the length of time in which people have the ability to vote, on registration processes, that local boards and state boards have a lot of influence in determining how people vote and who can vote to a certain extent. So this was a big [00:05:00] finding or big realization on our part is the degree to which the states were really in charge of determining citizenship and really kind of running immigration policy to a certain extent.

We also looked at what we called settlements and removals. That was another team, a research team. So looking at both Native Americans and African Americans. So you have to think of these African Americans in this giant migration, they're settlers, they are pioneers, they are, I know, buying land establishing farms, homesteads, and towns creating institutions, schools, other sorts of aspects of civil life.

And some of them experienced removals, just as Native Americans did. So you, you might have heard of the Tulsa Massacre, or, 

David Staley: 1921 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Mhm, and The Wilmington Massacre is a similar, I believe around the same time in Wilmington, North Carolina were attacks on local governments, you know, multiracial Republican governments who were allied with the progressive reformers.

So, there are events like this in the Midwest in the Antebellum period in which, basically, through forced [00:06:00] intimidation, people were removed from their homesteads African Americans, and we also know that Native Americans are experiencing removal in this period, too.

We had a team looking at individual stories trying to look at the individuals who were engaged in civic activism and a guy in Dayton who he Basically organized a tax revolt and saying the African American community was not going to pay taxes since people weren't allowed to use public parks, weren't allowed to send their children to schools.

This is in the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s. So yeah, women were often the ones who created schools. As, African Americans and sometimes Native Americans were excluded from public schools in Ohio the communities took action to create their own educational institutions. And it was often women who were creating these schools.

But schools themselves sometimes became targets of violence. So there are violent attacks on African American schools across the Midwest in the Antebellum period and the postbellum period. So this summer, we focused more on those settlements and we actually had [00:07:00] the opportunity to do some field work and visit descendants of some of these settlement communities in Ohio and on the Indiana border.

So both in Southeast Ohio and Northwest Ohio, we met with descendants of these black pioneers. Talked about what their archive, their knowledge, the materials that they have kind of carefully saved. One of these individuals in Southeast Ohio, people are still living in this settlement that was founded in 1830.

He has a museum and maintains materials. Yeah. It was very interesting. Northwest Ohio people traveled from as far as Georgia to meet the Praxis Lab students and show them 1820s homesteads, show them records, tell stories, mayors were coming out to meet the Praxis Lab.

These were like giant community events in some ways where people were really wanting this history told and recognized and so on. That was an ,important part of, this summer. And, I think the Native American side of this has also been very interesting.

I think, if people think about this question at all, they think, there's a law in 1924 that gives Native American citizenship and until then they [00:08:00] weren't citizens, and after that they were citizens. But it turns out it's much more complicated than that. 

David Staley: As it usually is.

Margaret Ellen Newell: As it usually is, that's right. Some Native Americans actually, because the states were the givers of citizenship or the granters of citizenship that we find Native Americans who did become citizens before the Civil War and after the Civil War. And sometimes it was a conscious strategy on the part of tribal nations who are all sort of thinking about how can they preserve their land, how can they preserve their sovereignty and preserve themselves as an entity.

What was the best strategy? To remain separate or to experiment with citizenship and see if citizenship gave them more power to protect their lands and livelihoods. So we see, sometimes states forcing Native American groups to detribalize. It's just saying you no longer exist as a tribal entity.

You have to sell your land. We're going to sell your land. We'll give you some of the profits where, you know, we're just extinguishing you as a distinctive entity that grants citizenship. And now you must, become citizens of our state. But sometimes the indigenous groups themselves chose to try to experiment with this and see how it worked.[00:09:00] 

We see some Native American groups that try citizenship and decide that it did not provide enough benefits and the negative consequences outweigh the positive. And then they retribalized, gave up US citizenship, state citizenship, and, reformed as a distinct sovereign nation under the Constitution.

So it's never, a straight line, the gaining of rights, the losing of rights, this is never a straight line either. It's almost like a cycle of achievement and then backlash and then more efforts on the parts of these communities to secure their rights and their livelihoods.

David Staley: How many students are part of your lab? And who are these students? I mean, it's not, it's not their name, but how, how were they selected? 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Well, through advertisements, so I circulate an ad, we post ads to Workday, which is the OSU kind of administrative platform in which all people are hired at every level of the University.

We sort of try to get the word out to a lot of departments across the University not just history because our feeling is we can train people to do historical research, and we do. We always start off [00:10:00] by helping people do this, and giving them some training on how to do research. So you don't have to be a history major. We like when people bring other sorts of experiences. We have had people bringing lots of other talents. Sometimes people bring great quantitative skills, and that's really wonderful and helps us sort of look at numbers and statistics.

We've been very open to people from lots of different backgrounds. So we take a look at the applications and see who seems to be the most enthusiastic, interested in what we're doing, might have some related work experience or just seems to bring good qualities for collaboration as well.

The lab has been, 14 people the first year. This year we had 18 people people, big lab. In all in all, we survey the students before the lab about what kind of research they've done, what's their experience, what do they know about the subjects we're looking at, and then we survey them on the way out.

They've learned a lot. They've gained confidence in their ability to do this research. They feel like they're actually contributing to a big original project. They've learned about the topic in important ways, people love the [00:11:00] lab and always have great things to say about it.

David Staley: You had mentioned that this is a collaborative project. 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Mhm. 

David Staley: It's a lab. Have you ever, personally, ever engaged in kind of collaborative research like that? 

Margaret Ellen Newell: No, I haven't. 

David Staley: So what's that been like for you? 

Margaret Ellen Newell: It sometimes is hard because you can't be in charge alone.

You have to work with other people on their schedules and take their ideas and plans into consideration. But on the other hand, it's been really fun because both the students and the other investigators bring great ideas to the table. So, they think of things I wouldn't have thought of and frame things in ways that I haven't.

I think it's good because, the other folks, some of them have access to archives on Native American politics and political culture and citizenship that I haven't worked with. They have knowledge that I don't have, so they can bring that knowledge to bear in ways that help shape the program, plus it's just fun.

It's communicative, we have fun together and that's kind of part of the point. 

David Staley: Do you see this style of scholarship becoming more influential in history? You had mentioned that, [00:12:00] historians tend to work alone in a dusty archive. Could you see this as maybe the principal way that historical work gets accomplished?

Margaret Ellen Newell: Oh, that's interesting, and there's some famous collaborations in history that produce very successful scholarship. Part of the problem may be that the reward structures within the profession really reward individual work, which is again, not how it works in the rest of the social sciences.

We're a bit of a book discipline and books take a long time and maybe that's part of the issue too, that it may be a little bit harder to write a collaborative book, but not impossible. I'd like to think that we're providing an example of this kind of successful work and that collaboration can produce good scholarship and gratifying scholarship. I feel like this project is helping my younger colleagues professionally. Their programs are proud of them and very much on board and it's very much a positive.

I'll create some individual scholarship out of it too, so we'll both have collaborative scholarship and individual scholarship. 

David Staley: I said, I wanted to talk about your research, as well, so you've recently published an article in the William and Mary Quarterly, [00:13:00] _"The Rising of the Indians" _- that's in quotes - _;or, The Native American Revolution of (16) '76_, meaning 1676. 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Yes. 

David Staley: Tell us about this research, please. 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Well, the quote "the rising of the indians" was a quote that came out of a letter that the governor of Barbados had written in 1676. He connected the dots amongst a lot of events that early American historians tend to study singly including King Philip's War, which was a major Native American uprising war in New England, Baker's Rebellion, which was both an internal conflict within Virginia among Virginia colonists and a war with Native Americans, and activities of the Carib or Kalinago Indians in the Caribbean.

So, I threw the Pueblo revolts in the mix as well, and also added a few other contemporaneous events. You know, so I thought if Europeans are seeing these as linked at the time, European imperial agents, then maybe there's a connection worth exploring.

So, I ended up arguing that there were connections amongst all [00:14:00] of these events and that, you know, when what was really a sort of uprising across the Western Hemisphere, a hundred years before the American Revolution, and that we needed to view it as an uprising and as people who were trying to, you know, change the course of history, and a giant pushback against colonization. They all shared some causes, they shared some effects, and they interacted with one another, that Native Americans, in fact, did know what was going on with these other uprisings and that these other uprisings influenced the process of an uprising in one area did influence the process of uprising in another area.

David Staley: How would they know? How was that information spread? 

Margaret Ellen Newell: You know, Native American communication networks turn out to be fantastic. Native Americans traveled over incredible distances you know, on land. Like, we know the European empires were traveling incredible distances, but generally over water.

You know, they had global reach, and many of the colonists were themselves just incredibly cosmopolitan. But Native Americans also traveled just tremendous distances, so news traveled from New Mexico to the southeast,

you know, there were [00:15:00] already networks of communication in place: networks of trade, you know, networks of alliance, and these carried that news. And they also heard news and got news from Europeans, so Europeans shared news with Native Americans who then shared news with other Native Americans. So these communications networks have become a target of study and people have looked at them and have found just how profound, how quickly news, you know, made it across North America.

David Staley: One of the things that you write in this article is, "Historians in the general public are often guilty of assuming that displacement and removal of Native Americans was inevitable and that it happened in the distant past. It wasn't inevitable, simple, or complete at any time in American history."

Would you say a little more about that, and especially about inevitability in history? 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Right. Well, I think, you know, historians are just as guilty as anyone else of committing this historical fallacy, what we call teleology, which is, okay, you know the outcome in the present, so you go back in the past and just cherry pick bits of evidence that lead to that outcome.

But people at the [00:16:00] time of these events did not know what the outcome was going to be. The outcome was far from certain. They have limited information, so you know, at any given time in colonial and then U. S. history, you know, the people who are involved in relations with Native Americans, whether it be alliance or warfare, are not always sure how things are going to turn out.

They don't view first European and then American dominance of North America as a given. I didn't include this, up until you know, the late 19th, early 20th century in the West, individual commanders of forts are really not sure how this is all going to work out, and they may foresee a future in which, they're at a kind of stasis with Native Americans and the Native Americans still continue to control large swaths of land. So, I think what I was trying to say is we also need to take seriously these events in which people are, trying to change, you know, change history, which I think Native Americans were trying to do, and not just assume, oh my gosh, you're going to fail, or they did fail. Well, therefore we shouldn't, it's hardly worth studying because it failed. But I think we need to, they didn't know they were going [00:17:00] to fail, and Europeans didn't know they were going to fail.

The Europeans are pretty worried about them, they're worried they're going to get pushed in the ocean, they're taking this seriously. So to take seriously how people are experiencing these events at the time, and that then also tells us that things could have turned out more than one way, but there were multiple ways this all could have gone, and in fact, you know, there are often different sorts of experiments in relations with Native Americans that did not involve, you know, removal and displacement. The Ohio delegation to Congress voted against Indian removal. So, that's interesting. They saw a future in which there were still Wyandotte living in Ohio. 

David Staley: Do you do counterfactuals as part of this, or do you at least gesture to counterfactuals? 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Uh, not so much counterfactual, but I did do a dive into complex adaptive systems, which is, you know, some might call it chaos theory, or it is a social science model. The historians hated it, actually. It was, I really had to struggle, I had to hide it a little bit in this article or it just wasn't going to get through.

But, so [00:18:00] one of the things I found happening in these events, these wars and uprisings is that there were sort of live and volatile events so that, you know, there's, there's kind of a cascade effects of, you know, migration of one group into the area could just set off a lot of unexpected conflict or scare people and that leads to them to attack other Native American groups and that leads to a wider war.

The slavery and the slave trade, I found that some groups who had been taken captive by the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois, or by you know, Catholic Iroquoian towns that also took captives and were made to come were Susquehannock people, were sort of forced to go live in these towns.

But they ended up kind of coming back to their homelands, fighting the English as part of this larger Iroquoian Confederacy, so that in fact that these practices of slavery and captivity sometimes allowed these communities to go back and settle old scores, and that some groups that, you know, started out as having their homelands obliterated, ended up returning to them [00:19:00] and restarting again there at the end of all these conflicts in very unexpected ways.

So, that cause becomes an effect becomes a cause becomes an effect is sort of... the ripple starts and ripples in ways that many of the participants don't expect. So, that's what I found in these uprisings, that they were, you know, unpredictable processes that took on their own life.

I can see, I can see you like, you are very interested in these framings and systems. 

David Staley: Very much so. I'm interested in your book_ Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery_. This is an award winning book, I should point out. What was the argument in this book?

Margaret Ellen Newell: Well, my argument was that there was extensive enslavement of Native Americans in New England. So, this was a story about slavery in the North, not the South, and Native Americans were the principals, not African Americans. So I kind of stumbled across this in doing research on my first book on economic history, on the economic causes of the American Revolution.

And I found treasurer's accounts [00:20:00] for Massachusetts during King Philip's War, it's one of those revolutions of 1676, and the colony of Massachusetts was auctioning off Native American captives, and I was like, I didn't know about this. I wasn't teaching this in my classes. I talked to Mary Beth Norton, a great historian who had written one of the core textbooks that I was using to teach early American history, and she was really interested and she's like, you know, there were two lines about this in her book, like that basically Native Americans didn't make good slaves, so, that the English didn't engage in Indian slavery, those were the lines. So now we know, I'm not the only scholar working on this, so now we have a much more complete picture. Now we know the enslavement of Native Americans was quite extensive, that they were the majority of all people enslaved in the Americas before 1700, and that even in a place like New England, they remain the majority enslaved population until about 1720. But I also looked at the ways that the system created around the enslavement of Native Americans then affected the system in which Africans entered.

So, in New England, [00:21:00] I think because Native Americans were the first core population, and because the colonists had such complex ideas about Native Americans and some Native Americans remained free and independent and had their own nations, some were allies, some fought in colonial armies against the French and other enemies, that they even while enslaved, even though New England adopted some of the same slave codes as other colonies, enslaved people kept some rights, if we can call it that, in New England, it's the right to testify and the right to marry, things like that, that were just not part of the right to gain an education that were not, you know, that were explicitly banned in the South, say, for example, or in the Caribbean. So, a different sort of slave regime came out of the fact that Native Americans were the first group targeted. And I also looked at the ways in which Native Americans and African Americans intermarried and, you know, the kind of, the creation of a more complicated [00:22:00] racial demography in New England, and that affected the efforts of tribal nations in the present to gain federal recognition.

So, many initially had their applications rejected in the seventies and eighties because they looked too African American; there are now several federally recognized groups that are in fact the descendants of these same folks that experienced enslavement in the 17th century that have remained in New England and have managed to regain their sovereign position.

So, you know, I think it told me that slavery is just, you know, it's just a kind of endemic thing. Part of the Praxis Lab findings were also the ways in which the Northwest Ordinance of 1783 banned slavery in the North, well, theoretically, above the Ohio, Ohio River, but what we're coming to find is there's, there's still extensive slavery and enslavement going on and enslaved people being brought into this region.

This is the foundation of the Dred Scott case, and explicitly kind of permitted in law or certainly permitted in practice, the U. S. Army [00:23:00] officers, you know, engaging in having, enslaved workers and so on at a lot of the forts in the West that are dealing with Native American relations.

So, you know, I think what we see is that no matter what, you know, systems or backgrounds people come to these colonial situations, they adopt slavery as a labor system. So that's, you know, that's interesting and important, and the first laws of slavery in the English colonies was actually created in Massachusetts, which might surprise people.

David Staley: When did you realize you were going to be an historian? A little girl, college? 

Margaret Ellen Newell: You know, I think in college I realized that one could be an academic, which I don't think it had occurred to me. I mean, I certainly loved history. We always visited a lot of historic sites. I read a lot of historical fiction and really liked it, so I thought I would like to be a writer.

But in college I sort of looked around and saw that there were these people that got to live here all the time and work in this wonderful place, and I loved the idea of doing that. And then in college I [00:24:00] encountered history, which I hadn't really planned to major in, but I took one course and just realized that this was for me.

So I think it was college where I, I really began to understand what it was that history professors did and the combination of research and writing and teaching was very appealing. So, I love that OSU gives me the support to be an author and to take on these projects that take a long time to research, you know, it is investment of many years to find the evidence, to make a case for things like indigenous enslavement.

But, you know, that's the kind of support you get at a place like Ohio State, to do this while still teaching and interacting with students and, you know, which is a really wonderful part of the job. 

David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research. 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Well we're planning to, various ways of communicating the research from the Mellon Project, from the History Praxis Lab.

So, this includes at least two graphic novels, which we're, we're sort of learning about. 

David Staley: Really?

Margaret Ellen Newell: We're right now studying what we need to do to...

David Staley: Are you gonna be the illustrator? 

Margaret Ellen Newell: No, I think we're, we're gonna, we're gonna have [00:25:00] to hire a professional illustrator, but, you know, it means storyboarding rather than, you know, conceptualizing it almost like a film.

You know, explaining why things change from one panel to the next and so on; it's a very different kind of writing and storytelling. So, that's kind of exciting. We are guest editing a special issue of the journal _Ethnohistory _on connecting African American and Native American citizenship.

And we are, I personally would like to write a kind of a you know, a big book about citizenship and just sort of try to pull together all these things that we found and write a book that's accessible to a popular audience that may tell people some, some stories they don't know about citizenship in 19th century America.

David Staley: Margaret Ellen Newell, thank you. 

Margaret Ellen Newell: Thank you, David. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at [00:26:00] go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.