And I'm So if you want to start by introducing yourself Roxanne? I'm Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, a historian, activist, writer, and author of an indigenous people's history of the United States.

And quite an influence on organizations such as ours, the Red Nation, honorary member of the Red Nation, but also intellectual

inspiration to a lot of the work that we do, not just you know in our activism but also in the work that we do thinking through the

problems of settler colonialism especially as it pertains to history and

that's really what we're gonna talk about today in this podcast. I had reached out to you, Roxanne, about talking about the US Constitution and talking about democracy in the United States as it pertains to indigenous people.

We're in an election year and there have been you know slogans in Indian country

ranging from indigenous

a sacred in an effort to get indigenous people signed up for voting,

but also ostensibly to get the vote for Democratic candidates because as we know there are a lot of

kind of states with large indigenous populations in kind of the Western part of the United States that may have you know more

influence over kind of local elections than elsewhere primarily because of things

such as like the Electoral College or the Senate seats that

exist.

And you know, while I think, you know, nobody's saying that nobody should, that people, nobody's saying that people shouldn't have the right to vote. I think it's worth delving deeper into the Constitution itself as a document that is fundamental to the governing of this particular nation, but also for the dispossession and the justification of the dispossession of indigenous lands.

And so you and I read an article that was in the Duke Law Journal by Gregory Oblofsky, who I believe was a grad student at the time he wrote this.

And it's called The Savage Constitution and we'll provide a link in our show notes and it's in the Duke Law Journal and it talks about kind of this

omitted history of indigenous people and the United States Constitution and its drafting.

And I was wondering, Roxanne,

if you could just give us a brief overview

of this particular time period.

It's right after the Revolutionary War. The United States is very weak. It's broke. It's in lots of debt.

And it can't defend itself against these more powerful Western indigenous nations.

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