River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part two.

This novel, which I introduced previously, introduces some very serious issues, even though the author treats them with humor.

First, racism. Rea and her mother are full-blood Cherokee, while Earl is a white racist. (He obviously wasn’t when he first married the mother. Rice leaves this unexplained.) The way Rea describes it, white people see Native Americans as “dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the rez in flyover country.” Can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Yes, it can.

Not only is the racism contemporaneous but extends also into the past. Most white people (as Rea explains, echoing the words of Rice’s nonfiction book Forgotten Landscapes) see Natives as, at least in the past, savage hunter-gatherers. But many tribes, including Rea’s Cherokee tribe, fed large populations from big farms, and lived in big cities—some of them the biggest in the world a few centuries ago. Whites see themselves as not only being but having always been the forefront of civilization.

And there’s more. The adoption of Native children by white parents sounds like a good idea, only it resulted in the erosion of Native cultures, even when the white parents had the best of intentions. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act directly addressed this problem. You can read about it in at least two novels by Barbara Kingsolver.

The second issue is the oppression of women. Earl is not only violent toward Rea but also intends to rape her—and would have, were it not for the intervention of poison ivy. One of the reasons Rea loves Marten is, as she says, “You know how to grab a woman by the part of her body that matters most—her brain.” Rea becomes something of a heroine among women and among Cherokees, although she was just trying to live her life.

President Trump's Columbus Day Proclamation

President Trump has proclaimed that on Columbus Day, 2025, Americans should honor Christopher Columbus as “the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth.”

What followed Columbus’s encounter with America in 1492 was a legacy, not of “faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue” but of conquest, disease, and slavery. While I will admit that Columbus probably did not intend the entire Native population of two continents to be slaughtered and enslaved, and all their resources grabbed by force, he certainly began the process. While we may not necessarily condemn Columbus, neither should we revere him. He was NOT the original American hero, as if the indigenous people who were already in America did not even exist—there is no mention of them in Trump’s proclamation.

To listen to Trump, you would get the impression that the white domination over Native America was a completely good thing. This is false, as I explained in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.. My book is not a vicious liberal attack on Columbus, but a scientific evaluation of what America was like before Columbus and what happened after him.

Native American history has, in the popular mind, largely been erased. Most Americans know nothing about Native Americans, other than as dark inconvenient people who stood in the way of white progress, and continue to do so today, as explained in detail in Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.

We had been making progress so that even in many red states the Monday nearest to October 12 was recognized either as Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day. Under Trump, we have gone back to exclusively the white version. In this as in many other ways, Trump is leading us fearlessly into the twentieth century.

If you agree with Trump that Columbus was inspired completely by the desire to “spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands”; that evangelism consists of killing some of the people who had not yet heard about Jesus, enslaving others, and taking their land, then you are welcome to join President Trump in celebrating Columbus. And you should get out your guns and go on an evangelistic expedition into whatever hotspots of anti-Christianity you might choose.

Breathtaking Racism in Modern America against Native Americans

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book. You can find more information about this book and these videos in my science blog.

 

When you hear about racism in America, you usually think of white racism against black people. More recently, racism against Hispanics have been in the news, since being Hispanic makes you a possible illegal alien, until proven otherwise. Once in a while you hear about racism against Asian Americans. And, of course, immigrants from every country in the world, except the very white ones, face discrimination.

But there is one group about which you hear less often, the largely-silent victims of racism: the Native Americans. Natives are underrepresented in reportage and in fiction. Many if not most Americans think of Native Americans as dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the Rez in flyover country. Most Americans who have this image of Natives say this with pity, rather than with scorn, the way true racists would say it.

I can write these things because I am a member of the Cherokee tribe, with my lineage completely documented. And I build my book, Forgotten Landscapes, around ten generations of my family’s history.

Perhaps the major part of the racism against Native Americans is that most Americans (assuming themselves to not be racist) believe Natives were hunter-gatherers prior to the coming of European “civilization.” The racists would say “savages” instead of “hunter-gatherers.” Those who consider themselves non-racist would say that there was (or is) nothing wrong with being a hunter-gatherer.

Many people even think that the European-white American conquest of Natives was a blessing, because it replaced a miserable savage condition with a happy, white civilized condition.

But this perception of Natives is about as wrong as it can possibly be. The factual basis upon which anti-Native racism is based is just simply wrong. Not just offensive, but factually incorrect. Some tribes, it is true, were hunters and gatherers. But many tribes—such as the Cherokee tribe from which my family comes—were not hunter-gatherers.

Native Americans had large cities before European contact, and by the time Columbus came these cities had shrunk into large villages, but they were still connected by strong continent-wide trade networks. There were millions of healthy well-fed people who were able to resist Viking invasions (which nobody else did) and would have resisted later European invasions had it not been for European diseases such as smallpox, and European guns.

Native Americans transformed the North American landscape by the controlled use of fire, by skillful group hunting, by agriculture, by irrigation, and even by planting orchards. The whole face of “wilderness America” was an artificial product of Native activities.

I’m not talking about Aztecs and Incas and Mayas here—regarding whom everyone has heard—but the civilizations of North America, which reached their peak around 1200 AD. It has been erased from history, and from the landscape, by racist assumptions. You can hardly find any remnant of it anymore; we don’t even know what they called themselves, or which tribes still in existence are their descendants.

We are here; we have been here longer than any other group; and we had an important impact on the American landscape, until we were decimated by Europeans starting in 1492. You need to know this about us. Too often, people look right at us and do not see us.

These are big claims, I realize, but I explain and document each of them in my book, which I encourage you to read.

Forgotten Landscapes: Truth and Sanity

 have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How NativeAmericans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It.

 I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book. My first video is Darwin Restores Truth and Sanity.

In March 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. I’m sure Donald Trump thinks he can rewrite American history by simply speaking His version of it into existence, but even He cannot do this. All he can do, by executive order, is to remove all National Park and Monument signage that does not have his version of American history on it. He cannot rewrite the textbooks and change all school and college courses, however much He would like to do so.

What version of American history does He want to impose? The white supremacist version. He wants to proclaim that white settlers moved into an empty North America and brought the bright white light of civilization to the few savages who already lived there. Trump is offended by signage that makes reference to slave owners and to white who killed Native Americans.

My book, Forgotten Landscapes, is in fact the way to restore truth and sanity to American history. I do not, like Trump, do so by calling my critics liars and insane. Instead my book presents the evidence:

• That Native population densities were large before European diseases decimated them
• That Natives managed the North American landscape through fire management, hunting, and agriculture

This is not the first time the Trump Administration has tried to erase Native Americans from history. In January 2025 the Justice Department proclaimed that Native Americans did not quality for birthright citizenship. The very day I made this video, the Supreme Court was deliberating a birthright citizenship case. (Update: On June 27 the Supreme Court decided that Trump had the right to limit birthright citizenship. This means that Cherokees like me might very well not be citizens of the United States or of any other country.)

The only way to restore truth and sanity to American history is for all of you, individually, to make sane and truthful use of the evidence. My book provides that evidence.

How History Can Liberate Us

I read a most unusual book, Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian who is on the Cambridge faculty. It has been a widely-read book in the English speaking world. Many of the author’s assertions are not completely credible, but there was one insight that drew my attention right away. As an historian, the author naturally asked himself and his readers, of what value is history? Why study it, why write about it? Many of you have personal interests in history, perhaps because of where you live or your family history. This is why I write about Cherokee history. But why should anyone be interested in history in general, or other peoples’ histories?

Harari’s answer is simple and powerful. There are many problems of oppression and injustice in the world today. The only way to solve these problems is for us to re-imagine the future, a future in which we will have put these problems behind us. I live in France, and I can see Germany from my window. But not once have I had the slightest fear that a new crop of Nazis will coming marching or sailing over the Rhine. That was what happened eighty years ago, but Europe re-imagined its future, a future without aggression and war. It worked.

And the first step to re-imagining the future is to retell our history. Harari said on page 69, “Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.”

And this is what I am doing in my book, now in press and due out in July 2025, Forgotten Landscapes. I will tell you a lot more about it as its publication draws closer.

One major problem in America, often overlooked, is the continued oppression of Native Americans. And one major reason for it is that American culture, in general, dismisses Native American tribes as dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the Rez in flyover country. This image makes Native American progress sound totally hopeless.

And this image emerges from an historical mythology. One of the dominant, foundational myths of American culture is that Europeans came across the Atlantic and found a continent that was sparsely inhabited by savage hunter-gatherers who hunted deer and gathered nuts and berries, running through the forest and leaving scarcely a footprint behind them. Europeans then took the land, pushing Natives out of the way, but in the end the land was better off for it, even for the Natives. God blessed the Europeans, and the Natives too, by the Manifest Destiny of the United States.

This version of American history is totally and verifiably wrong. Some books (for example, by Dee Brown and Angie Debo) have tried to correct this false image, mostly from the historical viewpoint. My book will also retell the story of Native American history, and tell it accurately, this time including scientific as well as historical information.

North America was not sparsely populated by Natives. It was densely populated. A civilization that was as highly developed as any in Europe or Asia had just collapsed when Columbus came, but the economy of that civilization lived on, in a network of large, healthy villages connected by strong trade networks. These large villages were healthier than the cities of Europe. European soldiers would not have been able to conquer America had it not been for their diseases, which wiped out ninety percent of the Native population. Europeans also conquered Africa and Asia. But today Asia is mostly Asian, and Africa mostly black, while America is mostly white. And the reason for this is epidemic diseases.

Nor were Natives hunter-gatherers who lived on in unaltered wilderness. Natives transformed the entire landscape by the controlled use of fire, burning whole forests and prairies. They controlled animal populations by hunting. They relied upon agriculture, including by means of irrigation and orchards.

I am not the first to write about this, but other books have been lost in the scholarly literature. They include Forgotten Fires by Omer C. Stewart and America’s Ancient Forests by Thomas M. Bonnicksen. My book will be, as far as I am aware, the first time this story about Native transformation of the American landscape has been told for a popular audience.

I provide documentation for all of these things. In this book, I have retold Native American history and got it correct this time. This will be my contribution to a popular rethinking of Native Americans and their ongoing oppression today.

It is equally incorrect to depict Native Americans as having lived in perfect harmony with their environments, something about which numerous books have been published. Natives changed their environments and sometimes degraded them. But the myth of the eco-friendly tribesmen is not a dangerous myth, unlike the primitive-savage myth that dominates American thinking and keeps Native tribes in ongoing repression, poverty, and obscurity.

I hope that my book will have an impact similar to that of Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, which revealed how, even in the twentieth century when most white Americans assumed the Indian Wars were over, members of the Osage tribe were murdered so that whites could get their oil rights. Although I cannot hope that Martin Scorsese will make a movie from my book.

I posted this essay on my science blog. For this religion blog, I can add that our perverted American form of conservative Christianity is largely to blame for contorting our view of the past and our chances of making life better in the future.

Gulf of America: Why Stop There?

It is usually scientists who have the right and responsibility to decide the scientific names of organisms, and in some cases the common names as well. For example, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (Now International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants) gets to decide the rules for plant names and the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature for animal names. However, this is scientific convention, not law.

The new Trump Administration singlehandedly decided to rename the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America.” Trump has no legal authority to require this, although he can personally call it anything he wants. However, he has already excluded the Associated Press from press meetings because they continued to use “Gulf of Mexico”. He can, and presumably will, cancel funding for any recipient of federal funds or any government agency that uses the name Gulf of Mexico.

My upcoming book, Forgotten Landscapes, makes one unnecessary reference to the Gulf of Mexico. I am proofreading the final pages, and I will change this to simply “the gulf” since the meaning is clear: it is where the Mississippi pours its water. I will stand and fight some other time when it is more important.

But such a time might come sooner than later.

Consider the example of the giant sequoia tree. It is the species with the largest trees in the world, and they are trees of incomparable beauty. I have written, and continue to write, a lot about them, including in Forgotten Landscapes. After these trees were discovered in the nineteenth century, the British originally insisted the scientific name be Wellingtonia; Americans countered with Washingtonia. Finally the name that was used was Sequoiadendron giganteum, named after the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah who single-handedly invented the indigenous Cherokee writing system, which allowed the Cherokee tribe to, within decades, achieve the highest literacy rate in the world, in their own language. The common name is giant sequoia, and thus it has been known for over a century.

The Trump Administration, I do not doubt, considers Native Americans to be savages. Or, at least, to have been so in previous centuries. Would Donald Trump and Elon Musk tolerate a savage name for the biggest trees in the world? I can foresee that Trump might want the name changed to Trumpia muskii, or maybe Megalotrumpia muskii. Or maybe Musk, unabashed admirer of the old South African apartheid system, might want Apartheidia muskii. They might just let the common name be “giant redwoods” and let it go at that, because “Trump trees” sounds too silly even for them. I think.

Trump would have no authority to enforce a name change for the giant sequoia tree. But he might have at least provisional authority to require all government agencies to change the name to Megalotrumpia, and to cancel funding for any government project that refuses the name change. Any legal challenges to this would take years, and even then Trump could just ignore the court ruling.

Such a decision would profoundly affect my book, Forgotten Landscapes, not only because of its frequent references to giant sequoia trees but also because of its front-and-center defense of the non-savagery of Native Americans, who transformed the North American landscape by fire, hunting, agriculture, irrigation, and orchards. But by then the book will already be rolling off of the presses. Such a decision might even throw a spotlight on my book, which would be positive. The only people who would agree with Trump on this matter are those who do not buy or read books. But, all the same, I would prefer my book to stand on its own merits.

At the present time, this essay is written in a spirit of humor rather than alarm. But if the Oval Office proclaims that the plague bacterium, now known as Yersinia pestis, be renamed Obamabacterium bidenii, don’t be totally blind-sided.

The above essay appeared on my science blog. But this is a religion blog, and I have a few words to add to it for people who are interested in religion.

In Genesis, God told Adam to name the animals (presumably plants, also). Apparently Trump and Musk think God has given them a similar authority. To name something is to take the first step in conquering it. Gaza as an American territory? Canada as an American state? The New American Empire might be taking form as an open reality, not just as a de-facto situation.