Was the Colonization of North America a Genocidal Project? David Silverman on the Tragic Fate of Native Americans

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: [Editorial note: the first ~40 seconds contain on-air false starts and restarts; the full intro restarts at 00:01:13 in adjusted time. Likely trimmed in the published audio.] Hello, everybody. It's 07/02/2025. Oops. Somebody started again. Hello, everybody. It is 07/02/2026. I'll probably run this after July 4, America's birthday, 200 birthday [as spoken: 250th]. Although recently on the show, America hasn't necessarily been getting a very good press. A few days ago, we had, Christopher Hooks on the show. Whoops. David, I'm gonna start this again. I apologize.

00:01:04 David Silverman: Not at all.

00:01:05 Andrew Keen: Here we go. One more time. Let's see if we can get this right. Embarrassing. Okay. Here we go. Hello, everybody. It is 07/02/2026, couple of days to July 4, America's 200 birthday [as spoken: 250th]. Although recently on the show, America hasn't been getting a great press. Couple of days ago, we had Christopher Hooks on the show. His article in Harper's this month, Happy Fucking Birthday, America, was on the cover of the magazine, suggesting that America is now exhausted. We also did a show with the Paris based, journalist, Madeleine Schwartz. She has an edited new book out, How We See It. The world looks at America in the age of Trump, and, America doesn't seem, at least according to Schwartz and her fellow writers, get a very good look. And I'm wondering whether, America's bad luck, if that's the right word to use to describe all this, we'll continue with today's guest, David Silverman. He's a professor of early American and Native American history at George Washington University. He's the author of one book [as spoken: Silverman is the author of several previous books], This Land Is Their Land, and his new book is called The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in The United States. David is joining us from a very steamy Washington, DC. David, congratulations on the new book. Are we gonna have another thirty or forty minutes of bashing America in this conversation?

00:02:49 David Silverman: I don't think America comes off looking all that great, in the book that I that I just wrote. Though, I will say, there's some redemption towards the end of the story.

00:03:01 Andrew Keen: No. That's good. I look forward to the redemption. I have to admit I'm getting a little tired of the America bashing. So let's begin with the bad news, David. It's a pretty miserable story of American treatment of Native Americans, isn't it?

00:03:16 David Silverman: It is that. I'm contending in this book that, a structural genocide took place over the course of centuries, which is to say that, white Americans and their colonial forebears so diminished their valuation of native people, that they treated indigenous people's lives as expendable, and thus wasted away those lives over the course of centuries constituting again, what I consider to be a structural genocide. I'm also contending that structural genocide, both fed and was fed by a racial ideology of white supremice, white supremacism, and Native American degradation.

00:04:15 Andrew Keen: David, we did a show recently. I was actually in Warsaw, with an expert on the Holocaust, who defines genocide. You talk about something called structural genocide. What do you mean by that?

00:04:32 David Silverman: Right. So, you know, the genocide I'm talking about is not a top down government directed campaign to exterminate native people. Though let's be perfectly clear, there are moments across the centuries in which the government did decide, that certain groups of native people, should be exterminated for their resistance to American rule. What I'm describing is actually a society wide, a culture wide indifference to Native American life, that was based on an ideology of race in which white Americans considered themselves to be chosen by God to possess the continent and lord it over others, and in which they saw native people as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction in the name of white American progress. And that ideology coupled with the imperative, the white American imperative to seize Native American land, led white Americans from the seventeenth century well into the twentieth century to just destroy Native American life through dozens of different forms. That's what I mean when I'm talking about structural genocide.

00:05:58 Andrew Keen: How does it compare in terms of these relative genocides with the behavior of the Spanish in Latin America and Mexico

00:06:07 David Silverman: Right. So there's a difference there. You know, the violence of Spanish colonialism in Central and South America and in The Caribbean, was quick and horrific to be sure. Just incredible spasms of violence in the interest of subjugating native people. But the purpose of Spanish colonialism was not to wipe out native people, and it wasn't to seize Native American land, at least not in totality. The purpose was to subjugate the Native American population and to have them subservient to Spanish rule. So once the Spanish had defeated, native people, they took their foot off the gas, so to speak, and kept the surviving native American population around as tributaries. That was not the purpose of Anglo Americans during the colonial period or The United States that succeeded English America. The purpose of those societies was to seize Native American land and remove the native people on it. And when, you know, when they met Native American resistance to that agenda, their first order of business was to exterminate those native people in resistance.

00:07:34 Andrew Keen: Was there something unique, about, shall we say, the ideology of these Anglo settlers, maybe with their fetish of the land, maybe derived from John Locke or notions of Puritanism. What was it about the settlers in North America ideologically distinguish them from the Spanish in Latin America, and perhaps explains what you call this structural genocide to the native peoples?

00:08:06 David Silverman: Well, it's not it's not, particular to The United States, but it is rather particular to English settlement. And you see very similar patterns in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. What those places have in common is that the colonial enterprise involved displacing native people from the land and replacing them with settlers, men, women, and children. Right? They were there to set up new societies, and they weren't there to subjugate native people. They were there to replace native people. And so, you know, that involved a policy of extermination. That is not what the Spanish intended to do, and that's not what most European colonies say in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or in Southeast Asia intended to do. In those cases, the colonial powers left the indigenous people in place and then exploited them in place rather than attempting to replace them. English colonies, you know, in North America, in the case of The United States, in, in Canada, you know, in Australia, New Zealand, and eventually South Africa, they intended to replace the indigenous people. And thus, you end up with these kinds of structural genocides that I'm talking about grounded in racial ideologies.

00:09:40 Andrew Keen: So how was this justified? And two things come to mind for me. Maybe they're both oversimplified. One might be associated with the land, the idea that these people had this bounty and never took advantage of it, so Europeans had every right to exploit the land. And the other was purely racial, the idea that these people had darker skins than these white Europeans and were somehow inferior?

00:10:06 David Silverman: Well, I you very rarely, have racial ideologies that galvanize people to large scale projects, to large scale violence unless there's a material interest in at stake. It you know, you can have latent racial ideologies that don't mobilize people on a on a large scale. But when they get attached to material interests or for another example, when they get it, attached to people's desire for defense in wartime, they can mobilize people on a on a very grand scale. And what I think is instructive here is the way the, the way English colonists, later white Americans, views about native people emerged out of a previous context that was not racial. So, you know, when the colonial era begins in North America in the early sixteen hundreds, the main spokesman for the colonies, governors, religious leaders, and the like, insisted that their moral purpose in colonization was to Christianize and civilize indigenous people who they saw as savage and pagan. And, you know, these are the binaries through which Europeans view the world. Some people are Christian and civilized, others are savage and pagan. The spokesman of these ventures insisted that indigenous people could and should become Christian and civilized. The problem that they encountered was twofold. One was most native people weren't interested in that offer because they knew it came with political subjugation, to these colonial governments. But the other the other area of pushback that these Christian visionaries met were their own colonists, their own colonists whose main interest was seizing indigenous land and wiping out native resistance to that project. And those people from the bottom up were insistent that native people were indelible savages, that they could not, should not become Christian and civilized. And that's an ideology that galvanized white expansion across America for the better part of three centuries.

00:12:43 Andrew Keen: Let me sort of vulgarize this question. Are you suggesting then that interest in the land created, the convenience of racism to take the land away from these people so people could make money from the land, or is it more complicated than that?

00:12:59 David Silverman: That's the main driver, but it's not the only input in all of this. You know, another critical context as I alluded to before is war. So, you know, when native people resist white expansion, all of a sudden, these ideas about native inferiority and white people's superiority take on even greater valence. You have, you know, white Americans saying that, native people are vermin. You know, that's a term that only emerges in the context of war. And, you know, then as now

00:13:40 Andrew Keen: We, could we think of Andrew Jackson in those in that kind of language?

00:13:46 David Silverman: At various points in his career, to be sure. You know, Andrew Jackson, rose to political prominence as an Indian killer, as a general you know, first as a, as a military commander in the Tennessee militia and later as a general in The United States.

00:14:03 Andrew Keen: And the seventh president, of course, of The United States. David, there are two again, I'm maybe slightly vulgarizing this, but my understanding is there's two kind of settlers in The US, the Northern settler, perhaps more capitalist, and then the, the slave owning settlers or at least those who settled in the slave owning South. In terms of Native Americans and the making of race in The US, how did these two types of settlers differ in the way in which they conceptualized and treated Native Americans?

00:14:44 David Silverman: It depends on when you're talking about. So, you know, during the early colonial period in the North so let's say in New England, in New York, in Pennsylvania, and the like. The colonists of those areas, adopted a virulent form of Indian hating and an elevated opinion of themselves relative to, to native people when they were fighting native people for the land, as did colonists in the South, as did later white Americans in the West. However, when that conquest was over, you know, let's say if we're getting into the eighteen hundreds, the era of Andrew Jackson, all of a sudden, white Americans in cities like Boston and New York and Philadelphia gradually began to style themselves as friends of the Indians. And, you know, they became critics of the crude exterminationist behavior of, Western frontiersmen and southern colonists for that matter. And, you know, their these, these northeasterners critique of the violence of white American expansion against Indians and their critique of southern, enslavement of black Americans overlapped, quite significantly. So by the nineteenth century, especially the mid to late nineteenth century, white Americans in the Northeast, especially those of the middle and up and upper classes, consider themselves more enlightened and humanitarian than their crude countrymen of the South and the West.

00:16:30 Andrew Keen: David, year or two ago, we did a show with another historian of Native Americans, Kathleen DuVal. I'm sure you're familiar with her book, Native Nations, a millennium in North America. She, of course, focuses on the history of these native nations. You're not your book is very different from DuVal's. But in terms of your understanding of, Native Americans, in this new book, The Chosen and the Damned, Should we be making massive distinctions between different kinds of Native Americans, or in your mind, did the Europeans just treat them all the same, whichever kinds of civilizations or cultures they were part of.

00:17:18 David Silverman: Right. So, you know, ideology, doesn't much care for reality. Right? Ideology makes it makes its own reality. And, you know, what DuVal's book does, you know, very effectively is demonstrates the sheer variety of native civilizations across The Americas, as they've developed over the course of a thousand years. I take no issue with that whatsoever. But when it came to white Americans' racial conceptions of indigenous people, those distinctions between native people hardly mattered at all. Sorry. I have a light that just went just went out here.

00:18:00 Andrew Keen: I blame Andrew Jackson, David. Sure.

00:18:06 David Silverman: And, you know, likewise, you know, another parallel phenomenon here is that indigenous people, you know, who certainly are aware of their, their differences, increasingly over the course of centuries come to see themselves as a collective, as a race of people, as Indians defined against white people. So there are parallel phenomena going on here.

00:18:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. That's actually pretty interesting. So it's rather like if, if the Earth was invaded by another species from another planet, maybe the Russians and the Americans and the Chinese would all join hands. Another historian that we've had on the show recently is historian of American Christianity, Matthew Avery Sutton. His new book, Chosen Land, How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. Is the remade Christianity, David, of America, is it bound up essentially in the making of race? Are those two things inseparable, particularly not obviously, not just in terms of slavery, but particularly from your point of view in terms of Native Americans?

00:19:18 David Silverman: They're utterly inseparable. And there's a couple of different ways of putting this. One way of putting it is that the delimiting of Christian universalism is constituent of race making in America. So let me explain what that means. You know? It's a what few comments ago, I mentioned, you know, when the colonial period starts, colonial spokesman say that their moral purpose, right, is to Christianize and civilize native people. Over time, the majority of white opinion rejects that position. Now let me be clear. You know, there are always some elites who are contending that native people can and should become Christian and civilized. But those elites are a small minority of the overall white population. On the frontier, in those areas of white Indian contact, the overwhelming majority of whites are in favor of exterminating native people, and they take efforts to achieve just that end. And the rest of white America is largely indifferent to those efforts because, again, racial ideology had devalued native life in their own opinion and also convinced them that white Americans were destined by God to possess the continent and dominate its darker peoples. Christianity is utterly wrapped up in those discussions. An another important point to note here, and this is a pattern I trace through the book, is that frontier whites over and over again across time and space target Christian Indian communities for extermination. You know, these are the communities that are defying white racial ideology, and that very often are on the front lines of white expansion trying to find a peaceful alternative for native people, even as they become enveloped by whites. Over and over again, from the sixteen hundreds well into the eighteen hundreds, white frontiersmen wipe out their fellow indigenous Christians in part because they see those native people's transformations as a threat to their worldview.

00:21:40 Andrew Keen: Pretty miserable so far, David. We did

00:21:43 David Silverman: a show

00:21:43 Andrew Keen: a date [as spoken]. A couple of days ago on the Louisiana Purchase. Is this one of the critical chapters in terms of the acquisition of Spanish and particularly French land. Of course, the Spanish and the French had a quite different, understanding and treatment of Native Americans. Do you see the Louisiana Purchase as the beginning of the end, so to speak, of Native American peoples?

00:22:09 David Silverman: I don't. You know, I think white Americans were going to spread into the area of the Louisiana Purchase whether that purchase was made or wasn't made. And that, you know, that's one of the patterns that you see in the in the book that I'm writing. White Americans have such a super majority in the continent, not only vis a vis, native people, but vis a vis the Spanish, vis a vis the, vis a vis the French. None of those groups are capable of stopping the westward expansion of white Americans. And for that matter, neither is the white American government, which doesn't make much of an effort to begin with. Governments from the colonial period onward all the way into the nineteenth century prove themselves not only unwilling, but incapable even when they do try of restraining the anarchic and violent expansion of white American settlers at the expense of indigenous people and, for that matter, other colonists.

00:23:17 Andrew Keen: I don't like bringing up the n word, David, Nazism because it often trivializes the subject. But the more you talk about it, I'm not sure if there's a great deal of difference between what you call the structural genocide of white American settlers of the native peoples and the German attempt to wipe out the Jews in Europe.

00:23:37 David Silverman: Well, I will note. Nazi leaders studied The United States treatment of indigenous people and the reservation system, for that matter as they were trying to put together their program for exterminating Jews. So, you know, you're not the first person, to

00:23:57 Andrew Keen: No. I'm not claiming any originality here.

00:23:59 David Silverman: But, you know, there is a fundamental difference in insofar as, you know, the Shoah or the Holocaust was a top down program, and it was industrial in scale and short in duration. That is not what's happening here. What we're what we're seeing in this what I'm calling a structural genocide against Native Americans in the context of The United States and its colonial predecessors is fundamentally a bottom up movement. And it's much slower in duration, and it takes many different forms, and doesn't take the form of concentration camps. Although, you know, one could make a make the, the argument that there are, some parallels between concentration camps and reservations. You know, by and large, governments tried to restrain this vile this violence over time. Though sometimes they sign onto it. The you know, I think the cautionary tale here is that when you have a democracy that permits the tyranny of the majority, it can turn into a structural genocide of the sort that I'm that I'm describing.

00:25:14 Andrew Keen: So this is, in a way, an implicit critique of Jacksonian democracy, maybe even the current MAGA Trumpian style of democracy. You said you

00:25:25 David Silverman: Oh, indeed. And, you know, I listen. I'm no I'm no fan of Andrew Jackson. But I do have a certain measure of sympathy with his, the predicament he faced as president. No question about it. Andrew Jackson had no love of native people. But, you know, Indian removal, you know, the forced migration of tens of thousands of native people from their ancient homelands in the East to federal Indian Territory west of the of the Mississippi, was not simply an invention of Andrew Jackson. He had a very broad constituency in favor of it. And it might very well have been the best of the options on the table. Because the fact of the matter was this, the white people of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi were going to wipe out groups like the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks or Muscogee if the federal government didn't move them off the land, which faced Andrew Jackson with a, critical predicament. Was he going to dare to use the United States army to defend native Americans against white Americans, his voters, by the way. It would have been political suicide to be sure, and it might very well, have caused a rebellion. He chose the path of least resistance there. If he had done nothing, an extermination almost certainly would have taken place.

00:27:02 Andrew Keen: You're presenting all this then as a kind of not as a kind of as the original sin, of, of the American, so to speak, project. You've written about it in This Land Is Their Land and now in this new book, The Chosen and the Damned. Subtitle of the new book is Native Americans and the Making of Race in The United States. I think most nonprofessional historians, certainly those outside the field, David, would assume that race and the making of race began with slaves and the Africans who were brought to The United States. What's the relationship between Native Americans and slaves, and the conception of Native Americans and slaves in The United States?

00:27:50 David Silverman: So there are some points of comparison here. There's some points of contrast. Let you know, let's start with the contrast. The racial system that permitted, that justified the enslavement of Africans was fundamentally a top down system. You have a, there's never in any colony or state of majority of white people who own slaves. It's a very slim minority of the population. But that slim minority was enormously wealthy and enormously politically powerful. And so it had the ability, to shape the law and to shape public ideology to its interests. Again, you know, the vast majority of white Americans had no direct stake in the slave system or in the denigration of black people. The racial white racial attitudes toward Native Americans, by contrast, is a bottom up phenomenon. White elites, again, were largely in favor of Christianizing and civilizing native people and absorbing them into white society. But it is the vast majority of whites, the settlers, who wanna wipe them out. So, again, your top down phenomenon when it comes to race making and slavery, bottom up phenomenon when it comes to race making and native people. Structurally, though, there is a an important overlap between these two populations. When white Americans eliminate native people from the land, in many areas, they replace native people with enslaved Africans. You certainly see that, you know, we were talking about Jacksonian Indian removal. The main impetus to that removal is that those native people live on the prime cotton growing areas of the South. And so, you know, the vast majority of people who supplant native people on that land from which they removed were blacks in chains. So, you know, there's important points of comparison and contrast here.

00:30:08 Andrew Keen: Race is an odd thing. I mean, it's more than an odd thing. As you note in your book, it's a construction of power in many ways, cultural, economic, political, military. You're certainly not the first or the last person to observe that. I think one of the things that strikes me, David, we've done a number of shows on this subject, is the more intermixing of race, and I know there was a great deal certainly between Indians and slaves and then between whites and blacks and Native Americans, the more it seems to rigidify or formalize the theory of race. Is that true? Certainly, in the American context, as you have more and more of a society of mixed race, mixed racial identity, the idea of race becomes more and more powerful.

00:31:01 David Silverman: It does indeed. And your society adjusts its rules, to try to contain the inevitable mixing of peoples. And, you know, you raised the question of the relationship between, Native Americans and African Americans when, when it comes to race making. And here, I think, the way that white Americans respond to race mixing, if you will, is deeply instructive. When a white American produced a child with an African American, you know, effectively from the late seventeenth onward, and this is an ideology that continues to operate in The United States, to this very day, the child of that relationship was considered by white people to be simply black. Not half white, but simply black. So in other words, you know, the child of white black intermixing assumes the status of the lower class parent. However, you know, what so you might say, why would that be? If whites assume that they're superior to blacks, why does their identity not define the child? Well, there's a twofold reason for that. You know, one is in slave societies, the slaveholders want more slaves. And so what you're doing is you're taking a population that is in between statuses and making more slaves out of them. But the other function of that rule is it serves as a warning to white people. Don't intermix with these people. We wanna maintain a society where we can tell on sight whether a person is free or enslaved. You're not gonna muddy those waters. So now we call that kind of thinking the one drop rule or hypodescent. Contrast that way of thinking with the way that white Americans across time and space have thought about Native Americans. The child of a white parent and a native parent is called a half blood, and then the next generation becomes a quarter blood. And then after that, poof, there's no native ancestry left. In other words, what the white Americans have done is not created more native Americans. They've created fewer native

00:33:18 Andrew Keen: And what's worse, they're both terrible, Sonar [unclear]. They're both

00:33:21 David Silverman: But they're driven by economic interests. The first way of thinking is designed to create more slaves. The second way of thinking is to create fewer native people on the land so that whites can then claim it. In other words, if you think in terms of economic interest, you can understand the inconsistencies in racial ideology when it comes to mixing.

00:33:45 Andrew Keen: Well, very depressing, David. I wanna come to some good news in a minute. But how does this work in terms of caste society? I mean, the, Isabel Wilkerson, of course, made that term very popular. Are you arguing that America became or was born as a kind of caste society, particularly in terms of its treatment of Native Americans. And in that sense, I don't wanna bring up the Nazi equivalent again, but perhaps rather like India. Wilkerson uses the Indian example in her very influential book.

00:34:21 David Silverman: Oh, without question. I mean, you know, caste and race are almost interchangeable, terms in this respect. And I think, you know, it's we've been talking at great length, right, about, the kinds of crimes to which native people are susceptible because of the way that whites, degrade them ideologically. But another way of flipping it and thinking about in terms of caste are the various privileges that came with white identity relative to native people. Whites enjoyed some fair treatment under the law. Native people, to this very day, struggle to have fair treatment under the law. To be white in America for centuries, meant that you could kill native people with almost impunity and would never be held accountable under the law. If native people dared to kill white people, their entire community was at risk of being exterminated. And we can go on and on and on down the line. Native people from the late nineteenth century all the way up until my early childhood routinely have their children taken from them by the government for abusive culture reocculturation [as spoken] in boarding schools. They had their children taking away from them at social services by social services at a rate that utterly eclipsed other people. White Americans never had to face those kinds of challenges. Caste? Sure. You can call it caste. You can call it racial hierarchy. They're the same thing.

00:36:00 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, in that sense, I guess, it's quite similar to what happened in Australia and Canada, although the Australians and Canadians seem to be more, more willing to address this. You promised me some good news, David. This is Sure. Utterly miserable, especially, we just, as I said, I'm gonna put this out just after July 4 just as America celebrated its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary and lots of talk of freedom and democracy and all the rest of it. Where's the good news here? Where are you gonna cheer me up?

00:36:31 David Silverman: Sure. The good news is what has happened in The United States since the late nineteen sixties. And I think it is an utterly remarkable transformation, that is very rarely talked about, and yet should be, something that we're celebrating at this present moment. The genocide came to an end. The genocide came to an end in the late nineteen sixties. And the reason it came to an end is that native American activists and their non native allies convinced a majority of Americans that native people as tribes, not just as individuals, but as tribes, should be a permanent part of The United States. That treaties signed between The United States and native tribes, which under The United States Constitution, constitution or [as spoken] the supreme law of the land, should be honored. And as such, that tribes should have their own territories and exercise a measure of their own sovereignty. This is an argument that has convinced a broad spectrum of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans. This might be the only lasting bipartisan consensus in this country that native people should exist? And, you know, many people will say, well, yes, of course. No. Not of course. For most of American history, the program of the government and certainly of white American society in general was to exterminate native people either physically or as cultural, social, and political units. That is no longer the case. Indeed, the government takes extra steps to protect native people today. It's a stunning transformation.

00:38:21 Andrew Keen: Two thoughts on that. Firstly, I take your point, although I've been to some Indian so called Indian reservations in The US and Montana and elsewhere, and they're strikingly impoverished. In fact, in a previous show, I once got into trouble from one of my guests for saying that. So it's all very well recognizing the crimes and all the rest of it, but that hasn't really changed anything on the ground in economic terms, has it?

00:38:46 David Silverman: Oh, no. It's changed them dramatically. Now, changing them dramatically still has resulted in native people experiencing, the lowest life expectancy, the worst health outcomes, having the lowest incomes of

00:39:02 Andrew Keen: Alcoholism. Sure.

00:39:04 David Silverman: Sure. Yeah, yeah, in almost every measure of well-being, native people rank near the bottom of American society. However, every in every one of those categories, there's been remarkable improvements since the nineteen sixties, which tells you how dire things were. Native people are rising in this country. They're rising in terms of their well-being. They're rising in terms of their numbers. They're rising in terms of their political power. There's light years to go, but we have come an enormous way as a society since the nineteen sixties.

00:39:40 Andrew Keen: We've done some shows, David, also on the giving back of the land or certain historic claims on the land to Native American communities. Where do you stand on that in terms of the good news? Is that a good or a bad thing?

00:39:53 David Silverman: Well, you know, let me be clear about what's going on here. When we talk about native people getting land, reattached to their reservations or, having the right to open, say, casinos, We are not talking about special privileges, given to a group because of, you know, white guilt over, the treatment of that group over time. That's not what's happening here. What you're seeing is The United States honoring the treaties that it had signed with those groups in the nineteenth century. And, again, you know, the these treaties under The United States Constitution are the supreme law of the land. The United States hasn't honored those treaties as the supreme law of the land for most of its history, but it has begun to do so since the nineteen sixties. What you're seeing here is not reparations. You're seeing The United States living up to its word, living up to its constitutional duties.

00:40:59 Andrew Keen: Finally, David, in our age of hostility to immigration in Donald Trump's America, What is this whole tragic narrative, the chosen and the damned, about Native Americans and as you've noted throughout this conversation? It was the land that the white settlers wanted, and they justified this, what you call this, structural genocide, to do it. What should it teach us in the long term about American obsession, this continued obsession with land and hostility to immigrants?

00:41:36 David Silverman: Well, that there is that white supremacy and white nationalism, have been a feature of American history since the beginning of American history. So anyone who thinks that this phenomenon under Donald Trump is something new, just is not paying attention to how the last four centuries have unfolded in The United States. You know, but as I mentioned, just a moment ago, in the progress that's been made in the nineteen sixties, there has been a countervailing trend in American society, that prides itself in pluralism. And what you're seeing in The United States today is a clash between an ideology of pluralism, that pluralism is good for humanity, that it's good for American society, that it's, consistent with our values, and others who say, you know, hell with that. You know? Your white Americans, should be dominant throughout this society. That is the clash that we're having. It's a fight worth having.

00:42:43 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. Fascinating new book, The Chosen and the Damned, Native Americans and the Making of Race in The United States that presents American treatment or colonial American treatment of the native peoples as the original sin. David, I appreciate it. A lot of bad news, but maybe a little bit of good news at the end. So continue to tell the truth about perhaps this most misunderstood and morally important question in American history. Thank you so much.

00:43:13 David Silverman: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.