Transcripts For CSPAN2 Panel Discussion On Mississippi Heritage 20170910

Mississippi historical society. Two of the groups are responsible for the series she will moderate this penal. Thank you very much. I want to begin by recognizing our sponsors, bradley and cummings and Mississippi State university, thank you very much for making this panel possible. I want to thank you all for joining us here in the Mississippi State capital. We are very proud of this building and it was recently designated a National Historic landmark which is very appropriate. [applause] in our bicentennial year. Im really pleased to host this discussion about the heritage of mississippi series which was also a bicentennial initiative. The series will cover mississippihistory and 17 volumes , seven of them have already been published and there are seven scholars working their fingers to the bone right at this minute on the next volume and then a few to be signed. This series is as i said meant to cover the whole history of the state and its aimed at a wide audience. Dollars, teachers, students and the general public and the works are meant to stand for some years as the definitive studies of their subject. The series is published jointly by the department of archives and history, Mississippi Historical society and the University Press of mississippi with Financial Support on the phil harden foundation. This is a partnership that launched this series and more and more at the department of archives and history thats how we are working, through partnerships. Weve become increasingly focused in recent decades as we needed to become on telling the stories of all mississippians. We do thatby involving a wide range of people and organizations across the state. This broader approach has reached its height in the planning for the two mississippi museums. The museum for mississippi history and the Civil Rights Museum which are opening down the street december 9 at 11 am, i want to see everyone of you there celebrating with us. The project funded by the mississippi legislature. Weve had four governors in support of it including our Current Governor and we partnered with the choctaw, chickasaw, veterans of the mississippi civil rights movement, teachers, students and representatives of all the different cultural and ethnic groups whose stories are told in the museum. We are telling our stories through the voices of those that lived them and thats been our focus in recent years as we collected documents that tell the stories of all mississippians. The Heritage Series has been part of this change. The authors put all their stories together using the latest scholarship and as we talk about the volumes in this series id like us to think about how they represent this evolution in our approach to telling mississippis story and now im pleased to introduce our panelists. We are one panelist short, randy fark had a family emergency and was unable to be here today so we are thinking of him. We have James Barnett junior, the author of mississippis American Indians, jim was director of the division of Historic Properties at the Mississippi Department of archives and history based in natchez. He is also the honor of author of beyond control, mississippi rivers new channel to the gulf of mexico and the next indians a history to 1735. He is also an accomplished musician. We have timothy b smith, the author of mississippi and the civil war the home front. He teaches at the university of tennessee and is the author of several books including james b george mississippis great commoner and mississippis national convention, deliberations in war 1861 to 1865 and hes working on a book on griersons raid. Then we have lorie watkins, author of a Literary History of mississippi. Associate professor of english at William Carey university and author of william faulkner, Gavin Stevens and the cavalier tradition and editor of the publications of the mississippi theological association. Shes also collaborating editor for the Digital Product at the university of virginia. Im going to start by asking each of our authors a question or two and then eventually i will open it up to these audiences. Lets start with you. Your book is different from the others in that its an edited volume. And a literary work. T talk about the process of editing a work both from other peoples writing. Its like herding cats. And it was similar in between herding cats and nailing children to the wall. The hardest part was deciding who would be the best fit for each of these chapters and the way that i put the subtext, i wanted mississippi scholars to tell mississippis story and so i spent a lot of time planning, picking and i couldnt do it myself or i could have done it myself but i could do it better by acting into those resources. Thats great, you wrote the chapter about the slave narrative, talk about the narrative and how they fit in to our literary tradition. We built mostly with the wpa medicines and the Administration Records and there somewhere, they are somewhat problematic because these people were interviewed after the fact, several years out and all of the interviews were transcribed so you have to look at possible bias on the side of the interviewer and at the same time, we tried to get as close to the real story as we could. At the time. Thanks, jim. What do you think the readers have found most interesting about mississippis indians in reading your work . Let me start off first to thank the board of editors for the Heritage Series for the opportunity to write this book and john there was part of it, part of the decisionmaking process. I appreciate that and in talking to people, its been five years and the book came out. Ive given a number of talks to groups based on the book. A couple of aspects of the book that seem to catch peoples attention and their interest, one is the natural kinship system that the indians ofmississippi used. The system where the family name, familyproperty , all wood passed down through the female line from mother to daughter. When you are bored into a matrilineal family, if you are a choctaw, chickasaw, natchez, one of these mississippi tribes, you automatically receive membership in a number of travel organizations and you become a person who is known by your place in society. Now, i know that when most people hear about the matrilineal kinship system, its the novelty of it that strikes people first. Hey, women as the head of households, who would have thought . And a lot of people dont realize this kind of system existed but among the American Indians in mississippi, itreally touched every aspect of their lives. Aside from being a member of the tribe, tribal unit, the matrilineal kinship system gave a person membership in three very important groups. First was the moiety, and moiety is a french word meaning half and all these tribes were divided into two houses, two moieties. You belong to one or the other, that entitled you to certain privileges and other memberships. And then you belong to and ixa which is a clan within the moa t and your family group, thats the group you are born into. So the matrilineal kinship system touched every aspect of a persons life and in our society is difficult for people to understand that that complete submersion in kinship that the indians societies had going because kinship really is not as important today as it once was. I wont ask people to tell me how many in here have been to a Family Reunion in the last five years but i dont think kinship to us means anything quite like it did to the American Indians. The other aspect of the book that i think people were hearing about when they read it for the first time is the indian slave trade. And this has been a surprise to a lot of people that there was a very voracious and active slave trade going on in the 18th century. It was conducted by the english based in carolina and it was a system where they would pay Indian Tribes to go out and attack other indian groups, capture people and bring them back to charleston and ship them out to english possessions in the caribbean or to work in the minds in south america. The indian slave trade touched everybody living here and by the, it started around 1670, by 1700, it was here in mississippi and all the way to the mississippi river, natchez indians participated in it, they were slave catchers as were the chickasaw tribe, very active slave catching groups. Now indians had slavery or had slaves already when the europeans got here but these people were not taken permanently from their homes and shipped somewhere else, many of these people who were slaves lived within 50 miles or so of where they were born but under the indian slave trade, if you were captured by these slave catchers, you us appeared, not only from the area where you live but from the southeast there so it was a terrible situation that pitted tribes against each other all instigated by the european activities. Fascinating, what was the hardest aspect of writing this book. Or me the hardest aspect was to get at the American Indian story through the filter of the people who wrote the narratives. As lori said, you have to watch out for the bias and there were certainly the people writing these histories, they had their own agendas and you have to understand that and understand what they were writing was probably not what was in the minds of people they were writing about but there are ways i believe to get to that you are careful, Patricia Galloway used to be with the department of archives and history pioneered that aspect of it among the studies of the American Indians in mississippi. Thats great. We are proud of Patricia Galloways work and she and jim and the work they do have shaped the approach i talked about earlier along with patty car black and others. Tim, lets get you in the mix. You talk in your introduction about the difference between the topdown approach of earlier historians who wrote about the home front and about Everything Else and how you set out to fill the gas, focusing on women and africanamericans and letting people tell their own stories. Whats different about the experience of researching a book of this kind and how did that research meet you in Different Directions or towarddifferent conclusions. Every graduate student in history learns about the great man theories and so on and civil war historiography today, we call it the new military history that we are looking at soldiers, looking at the concept of combat and what it felt like to be in, and so on and only to use that approach in the home front book not a lot had been done on the homefront in mississippi, doctor john k better work and many of you recognize that name, did a book way back when in the decades ago, when the great man theory was invoked. And there was a little bit in there about women and africanamericans and so what i wanted to do a chapter on each one you really look at this and to tell all mississippians stories during the civil war on the homefront, not just the plantation owners or the elite. So the Interesting Research aspect of this was really getting into the letters and diaries of people on the homefront in mississippi. Every book, you know, there are different parts to writing the book. You do the research and you do the writing and you do the editing and then the publishing process and so on and ive often said there are parts of it that are more fun than others. Ive often said if you had to do the index first somehow that notebook would ever get written. Thats the most drudgery that youve ever imagined, doing an index for the book. Unfortunately thats comes at the end and you go through and do it. But the most fascinating part of this probably is the research because you get to go to your fine facility at the department of archives and history and university of mississippi and Mississippi State university and even outside the state, lots of ethereal outside the state and its like a treasure hunt. You get to find these letters and diaries that are absolutely fascinating. Its like reading facebook, i dont do facebook, my wife does not for both of us but its like reading their facebook posts april 18, 1962 and what theyre thinking and whats going on in their minds, whats going on when something happens and whats on their mind so thats really the most interesting aspect is doing the research and reading probably what none of them ever intended to be public, let alone published but its a very interesting way to do it and the manuscript research, this new way of looking at things from the bottom up rather than the top down one of the things i wanted to incorporate in this book. Did you find any surprises in the archives . You always find surprises and i would have to think find some of the better ones but things like, i believe i found this in Mississippi State, this lady in Carroll County is writing in black and white to her husband in the army, you come home because i cant pay the taxes on our land so youve got to come home and take care of the situation and that illustrates a lot of the mass chaos that was going on in confederate mississippi at the time. Lorie, in leading the slave narratives what surprised you about what you found . Just some of the statements that people were willing to make, some of the things they were willing to talk about afterthefact and in candor that was there. I also had a historian sitting here, i had a statue of literature of the civil war, can you hear me now . Ive got a soft voice, so sorry. I had throat cancer some years ago so youre in charge of doing this if you cant hear me but it struck me the intersections that there were, Brendan Brian at the university of North Carolina in greensboro , he has his chapter and ellen why no at the university of southern mississippi in the civil war said yeah, so im so excited and i was on this panel because i hear all these connections that i really didnt become apparent to me. Jim, youve been studying native americans for so long, you might not have run into any surprises in this book, did you in researching it . Im not sure, there were some surprises. One thing that surprised me was the European Reaction to the indians ways of doing things and in these matrilineal societies that we had here, a persons father would have a different name than you would, your father would have a different name and you would have the same name as your mother, thats how this thing worked. The father and the society would not be someone to discipline his son or daughter, would not be a stern figure, it was the maternal uncles, aunts, on the other side of the mother of course, they would be the ones to discipline the child and to teach them what what in these societies. The father got to be this kind of easygoing, friendly person in your life. He was always bringing you present and taking you fishing and things like that. So when the europeans got here, they demanded of the choctaws and chickasaws weird your father. You need to listen to what we say and do what we tell you to do. With the indians, that meant a whole other thing. We were we want presence, we want you to let us get away with stuff, things like that and it frustrated the french and english. This all, i will talk to all of you, this is really a boom time in mississippi for museums and cultural tourism. Across the state, the Bb King Museum is doing great, weve got wonderful museums in jackson at the museum of art, Smith Robertson and the sites of the department of archives and history, john marshall, im honored he took a break to be with us today, this panel was his inspiration so he wanted to be here but he is building with his own two hands a museum at the us grant collection, the library at Mississippi State university that opened november 30. And theres the new grammy museum, theres a new museum coming in meridian and that you mississippi museums again opening december 9, have you heard me say that yet . So i wanted to ask you in all the museums, the eudora wesley house but specifically in the two museums that cover all of mississippis history and focus on the civil rights movement, what is most important about the experience we give the public . Most important for them to walk away feeling or knowing. I think in my case, dealing with the civil war, i think its important that the public understand just what a , im trying to look for the best word here, what a complex issue the civil war was in mississippi, weekend to think of mississippi as the bastian of confederateism and 100 percent down the line for the confederacy and we supplied the president of the confederacy and so on but especially looking at the home front there were so many different nuances and levels of dedication if you will do the confederacy, levels of dedication even to the Union War Effort among the africanamerican slaves, just , its a very complex society at the time that really defies any attempt to put it all into one blackandwhite area that we can wrap our minds around. It was so complex and so chaotic at the time that its unreal for us really to get a glimpse of it and we havent seen anything like this in any of our lifetimes definitely. A war being fought right here among us which is just hard for us to imagine that some of that chaos of particularly living on the homefront during wartime mississippi is very important for the people to understand. Thats a great answer. I was fortunate enough to be involved in some of the planning for the new museums and one thing that kept coming up over and over again , were the stories of individuals that are going to be told in these two museums and i think its a fascinating idea, fascinating way to get at history through the stories of people in a way for i think almost anyone to go in there. I havent seen the museums yet, im looking forward to it but i think it will be wonderful for people to go in there and find their own connection with whatever story appeals to them there. Both jim and tim have helped us in the planning of these exhibits and its not too late for us to rope you in. We had help from people across the state, many different scholars. Ill throw one more at you and i will invite questions from the audience so you all be thinking about anything that you want to ask our panelists today. What are some topics in mississippi history that have not been touched or have not been covered adequately yet that youd like to see written on more . That was easy for me, the contemporary authors of course, i want to see more work on war for example and i think weve just begun to scratch the surface and natasha truck away and i have to with respect to the last question, i can tell you that mystudents , i think we read a lot of mississippi literature and revisit some of these museums and that personal connection jim that you were talking about,that is key for my students. When they walk into the welfare museum for example and ac the desk, if youve been to the wesley museum, you know the desk that im talking about and theyre like oh my gosh, its like the optimists daughter comes to life or them but they go to roanoke for example and they see where faulkner scribbled those phone numbers on the wall or in the delta blues museum, they see that little cabin that bb king was born in and it just, it makes the literature, alive and they make that connection to history and to themselves in that moment. Thats why these are so important because its just really cool for me to be able to do that for my students. Thank you, any other thoughts on topics that are out there, need to be covered . The whole question of course from Civil War History is what is their new to write about in the civil war. But in mississippis case, there are tons of topics to be written on and ive covered a lot of those in chapter form in this book but for instance, African Americans in mississippi. I believe thats one of the volumes that have not been assigned an author yet, the slavery in mississippi so im waiting on that one. Mississippi, the function of the Mississippi State government during the biography, theres no my biography of charlesclark. Women in civil war, there are tons of topics that are waiting for authors out there to help us understand more of civil war mississippi. So you got your work cut out for you. Im not going to do all of that but i will help anybody that does. How about you, jim . The first chapter of my book was devoted to archaeology in the state but really that deserves a whole book itself and we have 12,000 years of prehistory in mississippi with cultures, different cultures and Different Things going on and weve just finished developing a mississippi mountain trail you can drive down highway 61, were beginning to focus on this area and to bring it to the public more and i think that needs to be emphasized. Ray, would you all like to ask any questions and if you would, please go to the microphone. In the middle. [inaudible] he asks why is it necessary to have two separate museums and thats a great question. They started from different points. The state History Museum was always a part of the department of archives and history. It was in the old capital, we closed it after Hurricane Katrina tore the roof off the old capital and put the items in storage and ever since then and before then weve been seeking funding for the state History Museum. Meanwhile there was an effort in the private sector initiated by Governor Haley barbour to build a Civil Rights Museum. These museum efforts were installed and then in 2011 donner barber and some of the members of our board of trustees had the idea to put the museums together and build them in downtown jackson under the department of archives and history so that the background but the truth is it is a real, natural fit. Unnatural way to do it. If governor winter were here he would say in much more eloquent terms than i can the meeting of having these two museums, having everybody walk in one door sidebyside to learn all of our states tories. And then on a more practical level, the museum of mississippi history tells the entire sweep of our state stories from the earliest times, the earliest stories of native americans all the way up to the present. The civil rights era, the evidence of that era that happened in mississippi changed the nation and really changed the world, that. Needs and deserves a closer focus. Thats what will happen, the civil rights story is told along with many, many other stories that provide context. From slavery to slip civil war to reconstruction and jim crow all the way up to the movement, those stories are told in the museum of mississippi history, the museum puts a closer focus on the era 1945 to 1975, beginning with when the veterans came back from world war ii and carrying the story up through immigration and the initial election of africanamerican officials, its the story told in more depth than the Civil Rights Museum but also present in the other museums, the History Museum. That answer your question . Thank you. Doctor mark alike, this is your panel. I appreciate the commercial that you gave us for the grand president ial library at Mississippi State. We are opening november 30, a week before the big, big grand opening here in jackson of the archives and history but it struck me as something katie said it struck me and kind of fits in to i guess what ive learned, ive been a historian a long time and written some materials and history but was really struck me about my experience with the grand president ial library has been the fact that you cannot approach history in just one way. I always thought you write books and people read the books and then they will know all about what there is to know about history but it doesnt work that way because we find that in our operation, we will have people come in and they have no interest in books, absolutely none but they are interested in artifacts, material thats there. And then some others will come in and indicate to us that god, after seeing what youve got here, whats the best book i can read on grant or on some aspect. And then some others will come in and say i saw this thing on cspan or the History Channel and ive learned something. Now i want to read. Whats the book i can read . One of the things that i like the panelists to talk about is this question of what historians call public history. How do we reach the public to present the best history we can, not just in books, not just in all these other things we mentioned but how do we get at this . How do we Work Together to get this done. Great question, you want to jump in . I try to do a lot of that with social media and some of my students have told me that my Facebook Page is like an extension of the classroom because im always posting cool stuff that i want them to know about. So thats one way that i do it. You have to hit the audience where they are, and i am looking forward to seeing the museums and im guessing you have a lot of interactive, all the museums , the Natural Park Service and so on, they are moving toward interactive, especially targeting the kids because as we know most kids just walk around doing this all the time. They dont read the books, they dont even read text in a museum so you have to make it interactive and lively and something they would be, a modem they would be interested in receiving information from. Ill just say theres lots of noise out there that distracts children and adults from history and from getting at what may be close to the truth, i dont know as historians if we can ever get at the truth or not but we can try to get as close as possible. And try to counteract the noise coming from everywhere else about everybody elses ideas about, favorite ideas about what happened . Thank you. Doctor barnett, you mentioned the Indian Tribes and i guess tribalism was a way of organizing society. Which we dont understand very well. When we hear about tribes in the middle east and africa, it seems like these days from our perspective they are tearing their societies apart. Conflicts between tribes. I wondered if you ran across any of that or other interesting things about tribal structure of the indians in mississippi . One thing we have to realize with the word tried means something to each of us , maybe we got from television or from somewhere else but these groups in mississippi, the chalk toys, chickasaw and natchez, they were all confederations, by the time europeans got here, these groups have banded together. To protect themselves against the european invasion of north america. Mainly the indian slave trade. If you are a small tribal group, living in mississippi, in the late 1600s, early 1700s, you are going to be hit by the slave raiders again and again unless you ally yourself with other groups. The natchez for example were made up of at least four different language groups in what we call the natchez indian tribe. No tribe is not a good word if its the word we have and the word we use but these were confederations of groups pumping together to protect themselves against what was going on with the european invasion of this country. Yes maam. My question is to tim and jim, this is your expertise. How were the native american tribes affected by the civil war . Did they have any type of participation, were they attacked by federal troops, anything like that . By the time of the civil war,everybody understand the question . By the time of the civil war, there were no recognized tribes living in mississippi. There were choctaws living here under one of the articles of the treaty of dancing grief that allowed choctaws to remain, some chocolate to remain in the area but by the time of the civil war, of the choctaws and chickasaws, the two last tribal units of the state were located in what is now oklahoma, indian lands in the west. They were both on the side of the south. They owned slaves and in fact, when the civil war was over with, the people they had owned asked for and finally received a share in federal payments to tribes because they were in slave People Living with the choctaws and chickasaws in oklahoma. In service of the military and homefront, i did a little bit of investigation into that and there was actually a choctaw battalion that fought in the federal army from mississippi, didnt look into a lot of the history but there were others around, most notably probably greenwood, our chief is the correct term or what but he in Carroll County, he was a unionist by all accounts. He owned slaves but a unionist and he welcomed the union troops when they showed up in that area and got his United States flag out theres some evidence and some discussion of the state of americans in mississippi. Yes. I want to thank you for being here and my question is to james. I would be interested in any aspect of religion among mississippi indians. What role did religion play, perhaps it was the religion between tribes. Did it overlap . What were really the central themes of religion and a couple more things. Were they receptive to the europeans christianity and were they pressured to give up their religions . That could be a whole days discussion. The Belief Systems of the American Indians of mississippi were so different from the way we approach religion, they were not proselytizers, they didnt care whether you understood as a frenchman or an englishman what they believed in. They didnt want you to join their church, was a whole different aspect of the lease but it was very rich and extremely complicated. There are probably some brilliant books out about it now that you can delve into deeper then i can discuss it right here but as far as the missionary work, the french missionaries, the catholic missionaries that came in in the early 1700s were by and large not accessible at trying to mission eyes the indians and pretty quickly, by 1720, these missionaries living in the Lower Mississippi valley were serving the french volunteer and ignoring the indians because they had not had any luck with converting. Interestingly enough, in the 19th century before indian removal, the protestant missionaries, methodists, presbyterians,baptists , these missionaries came in and were quite successful at getting the indians to come to Church Meetings and really, it was in the socalled indian churches that the native people of mississippi in the 19th century were able to preserve their language, their dancing, a lot of their culture that they couldnt show in public in those days. They could carry those things on in what are called indian churches. And if you go into the philadelphia area, every once in a while you will come across a sign, indian church, Indian Baptist church or whatever so religion played a strong role in that way with the state indians. Yes. Brad hollingsworth. Thank you for being here today. The question is for you miss blunt but looking at mississippi history, we had a controversial path and tucking it things going on in the news today, statues, things being torn down. How do we tell history and present history in a way that peddles the truth. I look around and everybody wants to judge three through their own lands. Theyre judging it through their own wednesday and not paying attention to maybe real history. There are characters out there that had some bad traits but they had some good ones also and indians owning slaves, that will fit some narratives so how do we tell that story and at the same time still have people come in and are interested in the topics . Thats a great question, maybe the most important questions to talk about. We are telling the stories of mississippi history in all of their complexity in these museums. We are shying away from nothing. One of the most difficult dories in mississippi history is the many lynchings that took place here. That storywill be told in both museums. In the Civil Rights Museum, we have monoliths memorializing the lynching victims. Our direction from the elected officials who funded these museums, from the donors who funded these museums, from the people who came to our Community Meetings across the state was , tell the truth. And you know, thats not so simple either, whose truth . But it is our mission at the department of archives and history to help people understand their past, to help us understand where we are today, which has sheet in every way by where we have come from, the events that make up our history. Thats what we do. And to get back to the point about whose truth and how do you tell those stories, we involve manyvoices. In shaping these museums, representatives of all the different cultural and groups who made up mississippis history,weve worked closely with the tribes, with dollars , special scholars in almost every area of ourhistory. The museums are full of the voices of mississippians tellingtheir own stories. So that is how we shaped what we will present when the museums open but when the museums open, thats just the beginning of the conversation. Im sure there are, i know there are things weve left out because we didnt have room or we may not have thought of the one aspect of the story. Thats what, and we will need your help with this, the ongoing work once the doors open is to continue to tell these stories, to think about these issues and talk about these issues, particularly the ones that we think are hard. We will do that through programming, we will continue to have the wonderful histories Lunch Program that Chris Goodwin runs. And we will have lots of other public programs, temporary exhibits and special exhibits, we will all collectively continue to tell our stories. Yes sir. [applause] its all very interesting, im from natchez and i had to learn about the state of the confederation but among the indians, id like to know what other tragedies in the second question, i was surprised at the history lunch, there are more about the chickasaw inoklahoma and there is in mississippi, and im wondering why . About your, okay. One more thing. I was not too surprised but i knew that the iroquois and the mohicans, i was just surprised about that. The natchez, when you look closely at them, were a confederacy of people who were, their name was probably natchez, that may be how they said it. Natchez is a French Version of that but they were the natchez speaking People Living there from prehistoric times andthey were already there in the natchez area. Attached to them were the groups, the tioux. These groups spoke to languages there and there was a fourth group, the corowa indians that lived there that also spoke their own language. Now, the greegra and transcend tioux tribes, the french could tell the difference between them because the natchez indian language did not have the r sound in it. Whereas the greegra and tioux languages did have the r sound sound in there so that allowed the french to distinguish between the groups but the greegra, tioux, these were small groups that would have been prime targets for the slave traders unless they were attacked through a larger group though they attach themselves to the natchez and receive protection. The protection in those days was that if you didnt want to be hit by slave traders, slave catchers, you became slave catchers your self and the natchez became by 1702 very active slave catchers. Yes. Im from south mississippi and my family is, as ive been researching is a testament to the complexity and their stories of in the 1700s of intermarriage with choctaw who were there and then during the civil war there were five brothers, 34 for the confederacy, one hand for desertion and to cross the river and fall for the union but im most interested in the choctaw connection and with this movement of the tribes out of mississippiat one point. Can i find particular information about my family members by going tothe current tribe . Have they passed any of that . Thank goodness for the internet. You can check whats called the dawes role. That was compiled in the 18 90s when the federal government was wanting to move to indians land in the west. The federal government had to take away the land theyd given them under treaties and they had to figure out whos an indian and whos not. Theres this brief window of time, it was done capriciously, no system to it where you would come in and sign up and decide the dawes role and if your name is on that role, that allows you to be a member of the choctaw tried so you can check out on the internet and see what you find there. Good morning. You mentioned something about bias and how to deal with it in works that preceded and the moment you see it, my mind went off on a tangent and. Can you speak a little closer . The moment you open up the comments about bias and how to deal with it, i kind of went off on a tangent in thinking of applying it to the bible. So i didnt really hear your answer about how you would deal with bias and the parallel to that is that i would like the fellow with comments on textbook selection and how as parents, how would we deal with what we encounter in some of the textbooks that our kids use, history textbooks, when we know that there are things there that should be there for there is a controversial, that sort of thing but how do you, what are your comments about textbook selection and dealing with bias in textbooks . From my own experience in writing mississippis American Indians, i mentioned that one of the hardest things to do was to get through the french narratives to really get at the indian People Living here. And you have to really get good at separating out what is somebodys opinion versus what they saw. If a frenchman says they saw People Living in a certain place and describe a structure of certain way, thats probably all right. If they begin to talk about what the people were thinking about, what was in their minds, what their intentions were, thats where you have to have all the red flags that come up and be careful with that. The french narratives are full of that. Where they are putting words in the indians mouth,so to speak. With textbooks , i think textbooks have gotten a whole lot better than they used to be, thank goodness and ive done some writing for some modern School Textbooks and i really think theyre being welldone right now in coming at these things from lots of diverse positions. The older textbooks, the ones i use for example, we took a lot of the stuff for granted, we memorized it but it probably wasnt all that good information. Im not sure how you should approach that unless you maybe meet with the School Teachers and say you know, this is being taught but i think theres another aspect to what went on. Can we bring that into the discussion . The role of the teacher is invaluable. If you are very familiar with your subject, you are going to see those holes and try to fill those in for your students. Because i think all of us who teach really are invested in not indoctrinating our students into thinking one thing or another, we just want them to think, to give them all the tools that they need to decide what they believe for themselves. My initial cynical response is students dont readtextbooks anyway so what difference does it make . Thats not the case, i make mine read them and you can give them, things and so on to make sure that they do. My thing in terms of textbooks is to watch publishers, if you trust a certain publisher, i use a lot in terms of Higher Education the history of the United States that oxford University Press has done, the battle cry of freedom which won a Pulitzer Prize and so on. A very good series. There are 1000 pages each but if you make students read them, then they get a lot out of it. I would watch publishers and so on in termsof choosing textbooks as well. Weve got about two minutes and we are going to use them. I hate it when i go to a panel and the moderator makes it all about herself but back to the two museums, one of the things we are going to do is wring people into mississippi and send them out to all the wonderful places around the state where history happened and cultural attractions. Whats your favorite place and maybe kind of a hidden one, to send people in mississippi to learn something more about our history and culture . I wouldnt say is my favorite but i will say my students are always very affected when i take them out to barnes grocery. And until, may or may not have listened but mrs. Bryant, its haunting. And its terrible and its also beautiful to see the reaction that brings about in some of us. In terms of the civil war, there are numerous sites that they can visit but the crown jewel of civil war sites would have to be the Expert National Military Park and i have a personal connection. In the seventh generation this is the and most of my folks fought for the confederacy and there were i think four or five inside vicksburg surrender, one of them was killed right before it surrendered so theres a connection for me there as well but you cant go wrong visiting vicksburg. My Favorite Places in adams county where i live and that would be emeraldmound. Second largest indian work in north america, got here in mississippi, theres no museum out there, no one out there to interpret the site. So you can read about it, but when you go out there and stand on top of that mountain, i think each of you would have a different sensation about these societies that lived here and passed away before we ever came along. We will leave it there, thank you very much. Youve been a great audience, great questions. A few panelistsand thank you chris. [applause] heres a look at upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. On sunday, september 17 tv will be live at the oakland book festival featuring law professor tim wu and new yorkers on a car and chris hayes. The following week we are at the baltimore book festival taking place at the citys inner harbor like authors like michael eric dyson, journalist polly malik, photographer devon allen and more and in october we are headed to nashville or the southern festival of books and later that month there are two festivals happening the same weekend. In the north its the boston book festival and in the south, the louisiana book festival will take place in baton rouge. For information about upcoming festivals and to watch previous festival coverage, click the book fairs tab onour website, booktv. Org. [applause] can you hear me . Can you hear me . Yes