The canonical history of the West is that California joined the Union as a quote-unquote free-soil state.

But a coalition of Americans living in California, along with old Mexican ranchers who came to dominate the early politics of California,

drafted the so-called Act for the Protection of Indians of 1850.

I call it in my book a piñata of laws

that enable people to exploit natives in different ways.

That's Dr. Andres Resendez, who will continue to hear from in today's episode.

Dr. Resendez comments about California remind me that the stories we were told as students,

even stories that are viewed as canonical history, may not always tell the full story.

The telling of history is not static,

and how we remember history changes as we listen to different voices and perspectives.

We live in a time when we as a nation are grappling with our memories of the past

and their role in our future,

particularly with regard to slavery and the Civil War.

I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and I attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For decades, even before I went to Carolina, students had been fighting to remove Silent Sam,

a Confederate statue strategically placed at the entrance to campus in 1913.

After years of indecision from administrators, protesters removed the statue last year.

And agree with their tactics or not, the statue was gone.

The issue felt more or less resolved.

And then this week, the UNC Board of Governors reached a private and questionably legal

multi-million dollar settlement for the care of the statue

with the sons of Confederate veterans, a neo-Confederate organization

...