Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1442 - Shannon O'Loughlin
Uploaded: 2020-03-17T19:00:05.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1442 - Shannon O'Loughlin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-03-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1442 - Shannon O'Loughlin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-03-17. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1442 - Shannon O'Loughlin

All right, here we go. Hello, Shannon. What's happening?
I'm doing well. How are you?
Thanks for being here. Appreciate it.
This is an incredible opportunity. I'm glad you're interested in the subject of
American Indian history,
and I'm glad to be here to talk about it.
Yeah, I'm glad you were willing to come here.
Yeah, I became fascinated when I, well, I've always been sort of peripherally
interested,
but never really delved into it until I read Empire of the Summer Moon.
And then, you know, have you read that?
S.G. Gwen's book about the Comanches and about the Texas Rangers.
And it's such a crazy story that I just became obsessed.
And then I read Son of the Morning Star, and then I read Black Elk.
The Black Elk one was particularly fascinating to me because it details life
before they killed Custer
to living on reservations to the desperation.
Why don't you, before we get started, tell people what you are, who you are,
and what you do.
So my name is Shannon O'Loughlin.
I'm a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
I've been a practicing attorney since about 2001.
And I'm currently the executive director and attorney for the Association on
American Indian Affairs.
We're the oldest nonprofit serving Indian country.
We've been around since 1922.
All right.
And we should tell people, if you ever listen to this in the future, this is
all going on right now when the United States is going through one of the
craziest times ever in terms of dealing with a virus.
We're, we're, we're on sort of on lockdown, all gyms are closed, all comedy
shows are closed, all concerts are closed, clubs, bars, everything's closed.
Um, and some places are restricting travel, and, uh, it, it, it's, it's
interesting to me that, um, this is all going on and we've never had to
experience this before.
But it makes me think of what happens when, what happened when the Europeans
first came to North America and encountered the Native Americans and they didn't
have any immunity to all these diseases that the Europeans are bringing over.
And in some cases wiped out as much as 90% of the people that were living here,
but we're still here.
Yeah.
We would have only set the borders about 550 years ago.
We would have, yeah, if you had a Trump, a Trump Indian back then, wanting to
build walls around everywhere.
Oh God.
Let's not get there.
Yeah, let's not.
It's, it is, um, I mean, really it's the, I mean, it's one of the biggest times
in human history where if you talk about the Europeans coming to North America
and what, what happened to the Native Americans just from diseases.
I mean, it's, it's one of the biggest genocides in history.
Now, now when you talk about 90% of a population wiped out by disease, I mean,
that's almost, almost impossible to understand.
But the genocide didn't happen because of the disease.
The disease did what the diseases did, but the genocide happened through colonization.
The genocide happened through U.S. Indian policy that continues today.
The genocide is ongoing.
So this is not something from the past.
This is something that continues today that we still are working to fight
against.
That's why the, my organization is here.
Right.
Um, that's, that's absolutely true.
Um, I just was getting into the disease part of it, how crazy it is, is no, it's
fine.
It's a, I want you to talk about everything you want to talk about.
But, um, so let's, let's go to that then, since this is what the United States
has a very strange situation with Native Americans, where Native Americans have
reservations and on those reservations, they have sovereignty.
They can, they have different rules, they can do what they want.
It's very strange.
It's like there's nations inside of our nation.
Mm-hmm.
Like, how do you feel about that?
Uh, so it's a system that's been imposed by, maybe the best way to start is
kind of start with the beginning.
Okay.
Like, how did, how did, how did we get to where we are today?
There, uh, and there's a lot of information.
Yeah.
And so you got to stop me if I start getting too carried away, all right?
No worries.
We have plenty of time and a lot of interest.
Okay.
So don't worry about that.
So there are three Supreme Court cases that happened in the 1800s.
And there was a justice named John Marshall, who was actually buying Indian
land from, from U.S., the U.S. government through U.S. grants.
And so he was interest, he was an interested party.
Uh, but he was making decisions that, um, that set forward the kind of
watershed principles that continue to affect who, uh, Native Americans and
Indian nation governments are today.
And so those three cases, the first one was called Johnson v. McIntosh.
And it was in 1823.
And it didn't involve any Indians.
It was, uh, non-Indians coming to court to try to determine who owned a piece
of land in Indiana.
And, um, there was one guy, Johnson, who was a plaintiff, uh, who had purchased
the land directly from the Piancashaw Indians who are related to the Miami
tribe today.
And, uh, then the defendant was McIntosh and he purchased land from the U.S.
government.
And so the case, of course, was who had the proper rights.
And so the case, uh, through, uh, the narrative that John, that Justice
Marshall created, uh, he, uh, brought forward, uh, a piece of international law
that affects us today.
And that's the Doctrine of Discovery.
Have you ever heard of the Doctrine of Discovery?
No.
So that's – any Christian civilized European nation has the right to conquer
indigenous heathen peoples.
So this was the principle that this case was based on and it set forward this
weird relationship that tribes in the US government have today.
So if the US – if the Christian European peoples had the rights to take land
away from tribes because they were an inferior race, which is – this is
language from the case.
They're inferior race.
They're savages.
They're unable to govern themselves and they only have a right of occupancy.
So that was the first of three cases that Justice Marshall decided.
And of course, he was an interested party in the whole thing because he had
purchased land from the United States and he wanted to make sure his land was
secure.
The second case was Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.
And this was the time during the Indian Removal Act that Andrew Jackson had
gotten through Congress to remove the eastern Indians west of the Mississippi
River into Indian territory,
which is, of course, now Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas area.
And again, this is a case that actually the Cherokee Nation tried to bring
before the Supreme Court.
And before the Supreme Court could even make a decision on the – and I just
realized I didn't even tell you the facts of the case.
So there was – I'm getting ahead of myself.
I apologize.
No worries.
This is an incredible experience to be here.
So I'm a little bit nervous.
So in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Georgia was trying to assert its laws over
the Cherokee Nation.
And so the Cherokee Nation brought this case before the Supreme Court to say,
you know, the state does not have any right to assert any of its laws against
us.
And what Justice Marshall did is said, well, you're not a foreign nation, so
you can't bring a case before the Supreme Court and determine that tribes were
a pseudo-sovereign nation,
that they were still under tutelage and they needed to be civilized.
Again, the same kind of inferior savage language in this case and held that the
federal government had plenary power over tribal affairs
and that the Cherokee Nation couldn't bring this case to court.
So what ended up happening is some missionaries who were serving the Cherokee
Nation actually developed a case and violated Georgia laws
so they could bring a case before the Supreme Court.
And that case was called Worcester v. Georgia.
And I think that was about 1832, 1831.
And in that case, it was ruled that the United States had a guardian and ward-type
relationship with tribes.
And so we were the wards.
They were our guardian.
And that set up this weird dynamic that still exists today.
The Supreme Court's and other courts cite indecisions today to basically take
away more and more rights.
So that's the watershed basis for this weird relationship that we have.
And it's based on racism.
It's based on tribes being an inferior people as they not be civilized.
And so here we are.
So help direct me into another question here.
Well, that's a fascinating thing.
The idea that the United States government is – they're like the big daddy to
look over the tribes.
And the only way the tribes can exist is if they exist the European way.
Right.
The great white father.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
And so all this was happening while they were trying to conquer the West.
So all this was happening around the gold rush time.
And this was happening before then.
So this was happening in the 1830s.
So this was – when was the gold rush?
The gold rush was 1850s?
Okay.
1849, 1850s?
So it was a little bit before that.
And then they were trying to – they were basically trying to take over land,
right?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
So Georgia wanted that land for themselves.
They wanted to remove the Cherokee and, of course, the other, quote-unquote,
civilized tribes that were in the southeast at that time.
And that's what's so interesting is because you see throughout time – this is
a little bit why I have a problem with some of the books that you've read –
is because they've taken small pictures of what was going on and kind of
removed the context of what was really happening.
There were so many tribes across the United States that tried everything to
resist or comply or assimilate so that they could maintain their way of life,
maintain their lands, and continue to prosper as they had been.
But the United States was obviously for a formidable opponent and regardless of,
for example, the five civilized tribes and their tactic was to assimilate, was
to go to school and educate themselves and learn English.
And even though they did that and they did everything that the United States
wanted them to do, they were forced off their land to the west into Indian
territory.
The Comanche, who you've learned about through the book, those events happened
during a point in time and that was their effort at resistance.
And they saw how disease wiped out their brethren from other nations.
They knew that folks were coming to get them.
And so that was their way of resisting being assimilated and having everything
taken away from them.
In the defense of the authors of those books, they did cover a lot of that.
These books are in no way taking the side of the United States government.
You know, most of it, I mean, the most amazing thing about Empire of the Summer
Moon was just how special the relationship that the Comanches had to the land.
And about how when Jessica Ann Parker, no, Cynthia Ann Parker, who is, she's
the photo out there of the woman that's breastfeeding her child.
She was kidnapped when she was nine and assimilated with the Comanches and then
was re-kidnapped by the United States government when she was in her 30s and
didn't want to go back.
She missed the Comanche life and through her and through her depictions and her
descriptions of the way they lived and the understanding of it, they got a
better sense of like what she missed about that life.
And that they had an incredible relationship with the land.
They lived basically just in teepees.
They were very nomadic.
They just followed around the buffalo and they had, you know, in her way of
looking at it, a magical existence in comparison to this really boring life
that these settlers had.
And when, you know, she looked at it, it was interesting because she was a girl
who was born, you know, how would you describe it?
A white settler and then from the age of nine on lived as a Comanche.
So she had like sort of a view of both worlds and, you know, she very much took
the side of the Comanches and she wanted to go back.
Like she had spoken Comanche in the book