#80 Navajo Code Talkers, Pocahontas, & Native American History w/ Ashley Riley Sousa

The Road to Now

Benjamin Sawyer

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2017

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A few days ago, President Donald Trump welcomed the Navajo Code Talkers to the White House. Instead of focusing solely on the veterans' contributions during World War II, he used the event to take shots at Senator Elizabeth Warren, who he mocked as "Pocahontas" for her alleged unsubstantiated claims of Native American ancestry. He also held the ceremony in front of a portrait of President Andrew Jackson, who is a controversial figure for his policies toward Native Americans. In this episode of The Road to Now we speak with Dr. Ashley Riley Sousa, a specialist on Native American history at Middle Tennessee State University, to talk about the Navajo Code Talkers, Pocahontas, and the often overlooked and unappreciated place that Native Americans have held in American history.

For more on this episode, visit www.theroadtonow.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Road to Now, where we look to the past and everywhere in between to understand the present.
0:05.0	I'm Ben Sawyer, and in today's episode of The Road to Now, we're actually going to try to fill the gaps in something that happened recently.
0:13.0	I don't know if you saw it, but a few days ago, the President of the United States invited the Navajo Code Talkers into the White House.
0:20.0	And he said a lot of things,
0:23.2	but one of the things he didn't say was why the code talkers were important and what they did for
0:28.7	our country. And he didn't seem to represent a very thorough knowledge of the contributions
0:35.0	of Native Americans. In fact, he used some names of Native Americans in negative ways.
0:40.3	So in today's episode of The Road to Now, we're speaking with Dr. Ashley Riley-Susa,
0:44.3	a colleague of mine at Middle Tennessee State University, a specialist in Native American history,
0:49.3	to dig deeper, understand what the president said, what the co-talkers did, and why maybe the problems that you've
0:57.5	heard about in the media, why they matter.
1:25.3	Thank you. Dolf Ramzer began his record label in his hometown of Concord, North Carolina, where he continues the tradition of delivering new and inspiring music to audiences worldwide.
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1:39.3	Visit Ramsar Records.cunfooStore.com and use the promo code, history, at checkout.
1:53.7	Ashley Riley-Susa, welcome to the road to now.
1:56.4	Thank you. It's great to be here.
1:57.6	We're happy that you can join us today because recently in the news,
2:02.3	we saw a moment in which President Donald Trump invited some of the co-talkers, the Navajo
2:08.2	co-talkers, to the White House. And in the process, made a big moment in the media by using
2:15.4	that opportunity to mock Elizabeth Warren and then to basically say very little about the code talkers.
2:22.3	You're very, very special people. You were here long before any of us were here.
2:28.3	Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her a Pocahontas. But you know what?
	...

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