Headquarters during weekends. Our authors will be signing their books at the signing tent on the war memorial plans after this session was you can purchase their books at the Parnassus Book area and a portion of the proceeds will benefit the festival. Our first speaker is daniel sharfstein, a professor of law and history at vanderbilt. He has twice won the loss collapse outstanding professor award. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and before law school he was a journalist. The director of the social justice problem, professor daniel sharfstein. You can hear me in the back . It is wonderful to be here again at the southern festival of books, my hometown book festival. A real honor to be introduced by andy bennett. In a decade plus i have lived in nashville i have presented as an author, been a host and most of all, a member of the audience, sharing this panel with roger hodge gives me the best of all worlds. Love the range of conversations we have at the festival. I look forward to hearing from all of you. I will talk about the nez perce war and how i came to write my book about chief joseph, what my conflict tells us about america after reconstruction and the current moment, a war the us fought in the summer of 1877, a small group of nez perce indians who refuse to move from their traditional lands to the reservation. The fighting began in the rolling prairies and deep canyons where oregon, washington and idaho meet but the nez perce families, men, women, children, alternately 900 in all fled east through the mountains into montana. They moved along the controversial divide, the ragged border between idaho and montana, they went into wyoming across the newly created Yellowstone National park where they took the first tourists there hostage and finally they turned sharp north, buffalo planes trying to reach sitting bull in canada where he had fled after custers last stand the year before. For 31 2 months, over the roughest mountain terrain, the Northern Rockies, the nez perce families out ran the army but in early october 18, 77, soldiers trapped them just 40 miles south of the border. The families were starving, they were freezing, they were devastated by months of vicious battles. It wasnt a big war but people have been writing about it almost constantly from the moment it happened. Why is that . Because in its aftermath, the nez perce leader who surrendered, chief joseph, became a national celebrity. He was hailed both as a military genius, wrongly it turned out because other men were the war chiefs but also a man of extraordinary kindness and feeling. Thousands of people visited him in exile, schoolchildren recited his words, people packed his speeches and adapted them as poetry. Josephs pleas to restore his people to their land inspired generations of activists for civil and human rights. I was interested in the nez perce war from the moment i could read words on a page. When i was 6 years old my mother gave me a childrens biography of chief joseph as part of the classic biography series where they gave you a bit of everything. Abe lincoln, George Washington carver, helen keller. I never forgot those books, but what compelled me to write about chief joseph in the first place wasnt joseph. It was the general who led the army forces against the nez perces. A man named Oliver Otis Howard. Howard was a main yankee west point graduate, someone with a truly terrific rippling beard. One of the challenges of writing this was very quickly run out of synonyms for bushy. Much to the displeasure of his men, he was a teetotaler evangelist. He was known as the christian general. During the civil war he had commanded a union army brigade and became an ardent abolitionist, who early on knew that he was fighting a war to destroy slavery. In june 18, 62, he lost his right arm above the elbow and the nez perces would later call him cut arm. But he quickly recovered and he wound up as one of William Tecumseh shermans commanders during the march to the sea and the final push through the carolinas. As the war was ending howard was cast to lead a bold experiment in governing. Congress had created a new agency, the bureau of refugees, friedman and abandoned land. The agencys job was to redistribute confiscated rebel property and help nearly 4 Million People navigate the path slavery to citizenship. The bureau build schools, they build hospitals, orphanages, asylum, set up entire court systems. This was the first big federal silverware social Welfare Agency in history, truly a radical test of what a government could or should do for its people. As head of the Freedmens Bureau howard was a crucial player in giving concrete meaning to the concept of liberty and equality. These are concepts the emancipation proclamation and the 13th and 14th amendments boldly proclaimed to be the twin pillars of our reborn American Republic. When congress, in 1867, chartered a new university for African Americans in washington dc it was a given that it would be named for howard, howard university. In southern history, Oliver Otis Howard is a hero. A flawed hero to be sure, someone who embodied the limitations of the federal governments efforts to remake the rebel south. But still a dedicated and true warrior for blackie quality. Then, as reconstruction was collapsing, howard was sent to oregon to command army forces in the pacific northwest. He is a hero in southern history and africanamerican history but in western history, in native american history, general howard is a villain. His decisions all but sparked the nez perce war. Men following his orders wound up massacreing women and children. The nez perce war is not just the story of one civil rights hero, chief joseph. Rather, it is the story of how howard, himself a civil rights champion, made vicious war on another civil rights champion. In a way it is a quintessential story of america after reconstruction. In the decades between the end of the civil war and 1900 are a story of an extraordinary pivot in american values. In 1865 a us was a beacon of liberty and equality to the world, but by 1900 all that political and policymaking energy was being redirected to a vast project, jim crow was the rule of the south and much of the rest of the country, every two or three days and africanamerican was lynched at the border. Chinese immigrants were and. 1900, the nation had become an imperial power with territories stretching from san juan to manila. A person with dark skin was is likely to be a colonial subject as a citizen. From 1865 to 1900, from emancipation to empire, this is a quick and stunning turn in our sense of america and the purpose of our government and the crucial moment for america. When the foundation was laid for battles we are still fighting over the contours of liberty and equality, the relationship between race and citizenship and over the proper size, scope and role of government, the story of this turn from emancipation to empire goes through the west. The last decades of the 19th century involves a massive exercise of government power to take land and wealth from one group and give it to another. The west was the staging ground for empire. It was where the logic and the politics, the vision of what our government existed to do were worked out. What is amazing is so many of the people who fought for emancipation wound up playing key roles in building the new regime. I wanted to explore how real people saw and experienced this epochal transformation. Howard went west in 1874, nearly a broken man. He had been a lightning rod for years of opposition, reconstruction, constantly investigated for corruption, turned into a national joke, as i traveled along with transcontinental railroads, he hoped his time in the west would be his great second chance. A big part of his job would involve forcing native americans on reservations. Were howard, reservation policies and acted a fantasy of reconstruction. During reconstruction, if you hadnt been able to give away 40 acres and a mule to africanamericans even though he tried, in the west, could give away small plots of land and this could be a pathway to citizenship. He convinced himself is was an extension and not a betrayal of reconstruction values, it was an enlightened way to protect indians from genocidal wars, and he encountered joseph. By the time he met howard in the spring of 1875, two years before the war, he was a seasoned advocate for his people, he was a young man in his early 30s, outranked by many leaders who long experienced hunting buffalo and fighting rival nations to the east but then ranchers started encroaching on his Ancestral Lands in oregons will all of valley. They told joseph rightly, 1863 treaty the valley was put into the Public Domain and had already been divided in the homestead. No one in the valley had been represented at the 1863 treaty council. The leaders of other totally separate nez perce 100 miles away seated the land for them. I presented joseph with a real challenge, it is a story for our time, when so many people today are wondering if there is anything to change our nations direction joseph had to figure out how to move the federal government, how to find and connect with american power, how to change official policy and convince people that the 1863 treaty didnt apply to his band and that is a tall order especially when we consider that he is native american, and native americans did not get much respect for claims they made to land. And whats more, he was an incredibly isolated Mountain Valley surrounded by towering peaks and canyons deeper than the grand canyon, hard to get in or out and he didnt speak english, he did his talking in nez perce, regional trade language. What did joseph do . How did he get his words to swim upstream . Joseph decided to plead his case to every federal official he could find, local indian agent, regional supervisor for indian affairs, congressman home from recess, he pressed his claim until those officials reported to washington that joseph was right. In the process, joseph was discovering how the American Republic worked after the civil war. It had many faces, many competing authorities how it was split and remained split in countless ways. Among federal, state and local governments, legislative executive judicial branches and among all kinds of overlapping agencies. What joseph found, was a fluid core of american power. Nothing is ever quite resolved once and for all. It is never over. There is always someone else to turn to and often persistence in this process could be leveraged into rights. You just have to keep fighting. He figured it out and had remarkable success getting his peoples land claims reopened again and again both before and after the war. In the course of his advocacy, joseph developed a set of arguments about liberty and equality that howard would have immediately recognized as ones that he had made about freed people during reconstruction. Howard refused to see joseph as one who was participating in a new american process but instead he saw joseph as someone showing disrespect for his authority, someone who could only be governed by brute force. And his drive for redemption, howard was singleminded as he pursued the nez perce families through the Northern Rockies but military victory did not mean redemption for howard. Almost immediately he recognized this was the moment of josephs surrender, it was almost as if howard realized he was no longer the hero of his own story. That is a tough thing to recognize. Ultimately, howard wound up playing a key role in making a place for joseph in american culture, in the days and weeks that followed the war, howard and his aid publicized josephs surrender statement. In the decades to come, howard couldnt stop writing about joseph. In the end it was joseph and not general howard who would be remembered as a great civil rights figure. Josephs rhetoric is so poignant, so moving that it is easy to overlook but he wasnt simply making a plea for a full package of rights as an american, what we might call citizenship. More specifically he was trying to define citizenship for and age of big government. He was claiming the right to participate in contentious struggles baked into our modern way of governing, the right to speak to the state and to be heard. He represents a set of ideas, just as important we, a set of methods we need more than ever. I will finish by reading a little bit from the book. In the book i try to foreground the words and experiences of joseph and many other native american nez perce survivors of the war. Josephs surrender speech has made him a celebrity. I thought i would read his surrender speech and then just read a little bit of a speech he gave in washington dc a year and a half after the war. Here is the surrender statement. The first thing that ever went viral. Tell general howard i know his heart. What he told me before i have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed, Looking Glass is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He believed the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. Little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run to the hills, no blankets, no food, maybe freezing to death. I want time to look for my children and see how many of them i can find. Maybe i shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my cheeks, i am tired, my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, i will fight no more forever. But the thing is we have to remember joseph never stopped fighting. Here he is a year and a half later in washington dc. To make his argument was to tell the history of his people among whites. Much of his talk he gave countless times for the war and his tribe long project United States, the injustice of the 1863 treaty, the pledge he made his father never to abandon the law. But it was the most recent chapter of the story that transformed him and his audience. According to one reporter as his account of the war unfolded his voice developed its flexibility and joseph began gesturing in miming which break grace and appropriateness would have done credit to a frenchman. Listeners gasped as he remembered the war, laughed when he described the raid on the army mule train in the meadows, wept as he told of the broken promises of the surrender. The audience then heard a message that had fallen out of favor with the end of reconstruction, an appeal for a new commitment to the basic values of liberty and equality. If the white man wants to live in peace with the indian he can live in peace, just said. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike, give them all the same law, give them all an even chance to live and grow. He called for an equal citizenship defined by broad fundamental liberties. Let me be a free man, he said. Free to travel, free to stop, for work, free to trade where i choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion among others, free to think, talk and ask myself and i will obey every loss or submit to the penalty. When he finished the simple declaration this is my story and here i am. The theater for the motion. Thank you very much. [applause] roger hodge is a Deputy Editor for the intercept which is internet news source. Former editor of the oxford american in harpers magazine and his writings are so numerous i dont think i will try to list any of them here. He has written a book that is, i think, part memoir, part reporting and part history. Here is mr. Hodge to talk about his book, texas blood. Thank you. Its really an honor to be up here with dan and he is a real historian. Im a journalist and that means im a [inaudible] historian. There is a lot of history in my book but there is a lot of personal history, Family History and a lot of traveling. The book begins and ends on the devils river in west texas where my family has branched for generations. When i was growing up i worked on that ranch every weekend, spent all my summers out there working and i had no idea how historic this place was. I took everything for granted. I would find the arrowheads but i would play cowboys and indians when i was small but i didnt really understand how long people had lived in that landscape. I didnt really understand my own culture and didnt understand the ranching culture. I took that for granted, as well. I assumed i would always be a rancher and that was my destiny and there was no choice and thats what i wanted to be and that was it. There would always be sheep and goats in those hills and there would always be cattle in the bottomland and that was the way it would be. But when my father figured out that was what was in my mind he had a talk with me. He explained that ranching was dying and that the way of life that i took for granted was going away and passing away and i had to have some other way to make a living. We would always hold onto the land the land was not going to be were not going to live off the land anymore. This was the trauma but eventually i made my way to new york city and became a journalist, became a writer and editor and if you know any writers it is if there is a something had happened to you to make you do this because it is not easy and sometimes i think it was the trauma of not being able to have that life that sent me into writing. As i was in exile in new york i thought continuously about my home landscape and wanted to figure out a way to write about it. But i was busy and editing a magazine and i was consumed with the new cycle and in 2006 a novel came out called no country for old men by Cormac Mccarthy and Cormac Mccarthy had been one of my he consoled me in my exile because he was writing about my home. All those border novels happened right there in my home and no country for old men came out in that opening scene that if you have seen the movie the shootout, the drug deal gone bad, that was on my familys ranch. The geographical markers were unmistakable. It was just west of note the canyon. That meant it was just west of my familys eastern fence. I had to write about this. I wrote about mccarthy and all of his novels and i wrote about his encounter with the borderlands and that took me deeper into the borderlands themselves and in the history and the landscape in the whole 14000 years of human habitation in that place. But it took a while and i realized and what i had to figure out and what i wanted to understand was the transformation that had overtaken this place that was so important to me. The transformation was not only the fact that the ranches were ending and no livestock in the pastors and people were moving away in the land was being brought up by tobacco lawyers and oil tycoons and environmental organizations and wanted to understand why that was happening but i didnt know enough about the history or what had brought my own family there. I certainly didnt know what had brought the hundreds of named indian groups that were there when the spanish arrived. At first i went to search for my own familys history was brought me to tennessee. I went to college in tennessee but i didnt even know my ancestors were from here. My greatgreatgrandfather brought the family to texas in 1854 was born in 1828 in newmarket, tennessee. That family, the wilson family, moved west as people were doing and ended up in missouri which is the staging ground for western migration. And not just western migration but western conquest and this is where the trappers and the scalpers and the speculators they were all panning out and going north to oregon or going into texas are going into the mountains and part of the book is trying to understand what is going on in missouri in 1840s. Hundred and 1850s. There were all these clues perrys father, william, was killed by a mob in 1841 and i could never figure out exactly what it was whether he just got caught up in something, whether the mormon war was heating up and there was so much violence going on and this was the border. You go southwest of what is now kansas city and you are in Indian Country and we forget about the western border and my ancestors, my great, great great grandfather, perry wilson came down the texas road in 1824. Perry had already been to california a couple times and he was a 40 niner and speculator himself but he went back, married his sweetheart and brought herself down to texas road. This was an ancient indian highway that was the osage and it was a military road and eventually became known as the texas road. So many settlers were heading down that way. I people didnt leave anything in writing except property records and so i have certain witnesses and fellow travelers and people who tried those same paths and wrote about it and fortunately there was some wonderful, wonderful writers went down that road and among them Washington Irving when he came back from europe iran into Henry Ellsworth was the administering the indian removal act and then went on a tour of the perry and Frederick Olmsted went down into texas and wrote a wonderful book called a journey through texas or settled trip on the western frontier. Part of the book was this layering of me following this path and describing what i see in shifting into temporal registers and describing what other people saw all in the service in one sense of trying to capture what was driving my ancestors forward and also to try to understand the larger questions about texas in general and the texas border and about the border and what is it about the border that makes it continually return to our National Debate and why are we so upset about the border and this is my questions. Terry and wilma went west after drifting cattle along the red river for a number of years and they packed up in 1856 and were headed to california. We are pretty sure thats what im very sure that they went along the southern road, the mail route from san antonio to the rio grande, up the devil server of the pecos, across the trans pecos and beyond and they couldve gone but the various property clues that lead us to believe they went up the devil server especially because in later years perry drifted to the cattle server living in camps and so i found as many witnesses as i could who made that same journey and the cattlemen and the journalist who rode on the butterfield stage and they were wonderful writers as well and they werent pros like olmsted or irving but they could capture the detail and hardship and it was a hard hard road. Days without water, and when they found water it was contaminated and livestock and death and disease but they still had to load their barrels. Along the way they had encounters with the native people that were still there and they mostly had been exterminated by that point. Those hundreds of groups with the wonderful malevolence names and if you ever listen to the audiobook you will hear me trying to count them. [laughter] i had a lot of practice before i recorded it. But they had mostly been exterminated or absorbed by another invader called the apaches. For example, those who arranged all across texas and had encounters with the french and the spanish and one in particular showed off again and again in different parts of the state and the different parts of northern mexico and they ranged widely and [inaudible] he made his epic barefoot journey across the continent from being shipwrecked on the texas coast. I delved into the history of his people through the spanish contact narratives into the records of expedition and into the afternoon history of the comanches which is incredibly rich. We know a lot about the comanches now as opposed to the mythology of the comanches which i have to say mccarthys depiction of the comanches is sorely lacking. He treats them as hell hounds as these infernal spirits but they were incredibly complex, sophisticated society. Id recommend the wonderful book the comanche in power if you have not read it. Part of this encounter with the native people gets you into the militarization of the border which is one of the things im trying to understand about the canterbury border is this enormous footprint of on parchment that has descended on my home. Now the largest payroll on my town or Law Enforcement and you cant throw a stick without hindering of federal law and the officer and what you figure out if he spent time studying the history is that militarization of the border is nothing new and thats how the border was settled and it was this line of force that was there to protect travelers and the mail and slowly, very slowly people started to try to live in these deserts and a lot of innovation happen a lot of military innovations happened along the border in the first appointment of the tank by the us military was along the border. The first appointment of an airplane by the us military was in a punitive expedition against wachovia and in the innovations continued. The first appointment of a drone surveilling the United States citizenry happened on the border and these innovations continue and its part of my in the book is organized in a series of journeys in one of the attorneys i undertook was not just following my ancestors but also following some of the other people who made these journeys. Loosely and metaphorically i followed his path but in my case in the company of the Border Patrol. I got myself an assignment with popular silence to write about Border Security technology and i covered most of the texas border with them and i showed up in brownsville and this very imposing guy wearing a tan jumper said are you roger hodge and i but we need for you. It turned out he was the very highranking guy and Marine Operations that he wanted to show me their surveillance platform which is called the big pike, a way that integrates all the surveillance assets, the drones and airplanes and cameras and border cameras and cameras in airports and any place you have a surveillance camera that the federal government has asked you to be brought together into this platform so if anyone needs to see it anywhere can login as long as they have credentials. It struck me and seen as being in action and see the machine in action on the border that we were watching and this is an experiment and its been in place for innovation for a long time in terms of civilian policing but this is a place now where we are seeing something very new and in the same way that the point aircraft was very new and powerful for military deploying surveillance on that scale talks about total domain awareness which is pervasive and persistent surveillance. This begins desperate for the questions i asked was what about the border that keeps coming back to National Consciousness and keeps me back to our National Discussion . What is it that we are afraid of on the border . That is the question. But i have come to realize i didnt fully get this until trump was elected that its the return of the repressed and return of our political repressed and the thing we havent really dealt with clinically or socially in our country is the genocide and conquest of north america and that is why im so excited to be on this panel with dan because those themes that he articulate are exactly what i am grappling with in this book. Were not really afraid and i dont think were afraid of what is on the other side of the border. We are what is afraid of insight already and thats why ultimately that trumps wall is not really about the border and its not really it doesnt really matter whether it gets built. Its already here and is not about keeping people out but dividing the people that are already here and i think the wall is already here. Wall rose through every Single Community in this country. That is the answer i end up with and that comes implied in the book. I dont even mention toms name in the book. Anyway, this is a very personal book and its a journey that i undertook to try to grapple with these themes and i hope you enjoyed reading it, if you do. Thank you. [applause] thank you very much. I hope you can see the quality of the two authors we have here. We have a few minutes if any of you wish to ask questions. There is a microphone over on the side and you are invited to go up and fire away with your questions. I will start while some of you may be lining up. Mr. Hodge has a lengthy journalism background, professor, you have a shorter journalism background and how did your journalism background help or hinder you in your writing of your books . Well, i would say my journalism jobs hindered me because i was having to do them while left back. Trying to write a book but it was a tremendous help for me because i learned how to write on the job. I had the opportunity to work with great writers and still do and at harpers district when i was editing harpers and coming up and i was there for 14 years and i began my journalism career there, i work with some of the best writers in the world and at the beginning is a fact checker or later as an editor and that i had the opportunity to write the magazine and the first words that i wrote in this book were published in harpers so it was tremendous advantage to have that experience. I dont think i couldve written a book otherwise. For me, i spent three years before law School Working as a reporter in west africa in southern california. I went from covering liberian peace talks to covering the City Council Meetings in monrovia, california. For me it was an amazing experience. Writing about real people who you will have to see again who can call you up and yell at you i think really makes you accountable and makes you committed to getting the story right and i also think being the journalist in a way turns me into historical equivalent of a method actor. I have to see the places that i read about. For this book i traveled the fulllength of the trail, about 1400 miles. In a four by four and then i so much of this took place on a horse. They were force hurting people and a huge amount of the war involved it wasnt just the 900 has women and children were fleeing the army but they took their herd with them and thousands of horses through the mountains and much of the army was the calvary action. You had one arm and he rode a horse for 1400 miles with one arm and i think it was the journalist in me that compelled me to take riding lessons south of nashville and it was humbling in all the told ive been allergic to horses so i went to the allergy clinic hoping they had a shot for me and it would turn me into the marlboro man but they told me that i didnt need shots and i wasnt really allergic and it was just the dust from the horses was irritating my eyes so as long as i took claritin and wore the worst pair of goggles youve ever seen over my glasses i could do that. I learned how to ride a horse and spent a week in the yellowstone backcountry tracing a part of the park where the nez perce families had crossed. I think if i hadnt been a reporter i would not have done that. Okay. We have a question here. Out of your question. [inaudible conversations] this is for roger. Can you explain a little more your point at the very end about the repressed coming back. Im interested in that and i think i know what youre saying but i want to make sure that i want a few more details. I think i was a little enigmatic there possibly but the thing that we havent reckoned with in this country is the extent to which we committed a genocide and we conquered this continent. Ive come to believe the reason we are so obsessed with the border it as a standin for other things in our history and in our politics and it also has a lot to do with slavery and these are the original sins of our founding. As dan was saying earlier between 1865 and 1900 we have changed the whole character of our approach to governance but before that as well will question of race and citizenship was of absolute central importance and when you think about the history of the border and history of immigration policy and i thank you mentioned the chinese exclusion act the Border Patrol was originally created to keep chinese out. It was not to keep mexicans out. They wanted mexicans to come in work. I think i could argue it at great length and theres a lot of discussion of this in the book but i do think that doesnt make sense and what we say about the border and what politicians say about the border who never really been there except once on a tour makes no sense. The problem they are trying to solve has nothing to do with what theyre talking about. It is what its not just about the border its about the historian wealthy called the boundaries of the longing. Its about who belongs and doesnt and who has rights in our society and who has a stake and who isnt allowed. Some sociologists talk about social silence and the things we refuse to talk about and this is like the side that we talk about all the time and what does that tell us . Were not really that worried about people coming in from mexico and if we are building a wall is certainly not the way to do it because its just a speed bump. Well, i believe our time is just about up. I wanted to say thank you for coming and i am sorry that thank you for coming and thanks to our great authors here. [applause] you did a wonderful presentati presentation. Please remember that they will be signing at the signing tent on the War Memorial Plaza immediately after this and you can buy their books up there to. Thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] i marty, your host for the session of the