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Our Fake History

Episode #121- What is Ghost River?

Our Fake History

PodcastOne

History, Education, Society & Culture

4.73.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2020

⏱️ 82 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1763 twenty indigenous people in the colony of Pennsylvania were murdered by an armed gang. The victims had been a peaceful group of Conestogas, who had been wrongfully accused of aiding in violent raids against the settlers. The infamous attack would go down in history as the Conestoga massacre. However, almost immediately after the murders the meaning of the event became the source of a fierce war in the press. The so-called "pamphlet war" saw two competing groups trying to sell contrasting interpretations of the attack. The perspective that was inevitably left out of these pamphlets, and the "official" historical record, was the indigenous perspective. The new graphic novel Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of Conestoga seeks to remedy that by telling the story with the focus squarely on the Conestoga people. In this episode Sebastian is joined by the creative team behind Ghost River, Weshoyot Alvitre, Lee Francis IV, and Will Fenton, to discuss the graphic novel and how fake news can become fake history. Tune in and find out how hand ground paints, blood memory, and Ben Franklin's biggest political defeat all play a role in the story.Read Ghost River for FREE here: https://read.ghostriver.org/Thank you to our guests!Lee Francis 4 (Author): https://redplanetbooksncomics.com/Weshoyot Alvitre (Illustrator): https://www.weshoyot.com/Will Fenton (Editor): https://www.willfenton.com/Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga is part of Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America, a project of the Library Company of Philadelphia supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
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Transcript

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0:00.0

In December of 1763, the American colony of Pennsylvania became the site of a bloody

0:14.2

mass murder.

0:16.2

The victims were 20 indigenous people, men, women, and children from the Conestoga or Susquehonic

0:23.4

tribe.

0:25.3

The killings came in the wake of a conflict that Americans called the French and Indian

0:30.3

War, but the rest of the world calls the Seven Years War.

0:35.8

This was a complex conflict that spanned across European and North American theaters.

0:42.7

But one of the most substantial outcomes was that by wars and France had surrendered many

0:48.8

of its new world possessions to the British.

0:52.4

In 1763, there was an entirely new colonial dynamic in North America.

1:00.6

But just because the war was officially over didn't mean that the violence had ended

1:05.9

along the frontiers of Britain's American colonies.

1:10.6

In Pennsylvania, the war hadn't really been about the ambitions of far away European

1:17.1

powers.

1:18.6

The conflict was instead characterized by violence between British colonialists and

1:24.0

various indigenous groups allied with the French.

1:28.4

Indigenous raids into Pennsylvania had been common, as had been violent attacks organized

1:33.9

by the colonists.

1:36.4

Tensions between native people and colonial eager to expand westward had never been

1:42.4

higher.

1:44.4

But in 1763, the treaty that ended the Seven Years War was supposed to settle this question

1:50.9

permanently.

...

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