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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Before the break, we were speaking with Sterlin Harjo, a filmmaker of the Muscogee and Seminole nations, and the showrunner of Reservation Dogs, a modern coming-of-age series set on a reservation in Oklahoma. Now, we'll take a turn away from today's Indigenous folks and turn toward a new way of looking at the past.

A recently released history book flips the narrative of the 15th and 16th-century European experience of finding the new world, and instead, details the history of Indigenous people who traveled to Europe during that period. Early in the book, the author, British historian, Caroline Dodds Pennock, notes that during her research, she encountered the slur savage quite a bit as she writes, "For the Indigenous travelers in my work, Europe was a savage shore, a land of incomprehensible inequality and poverty that divide pre-invasion values and logics where resources were hoarded, children ruled great kingdoms, and common people were meant to meekly accept injustices without dissent."

Her book is titled On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe. These people sometimes went by choice but most often by force. There are stories of Inuit Harpooning ducks on the Avon and a Brazilian king who met Henry VIII. We discussed all of it and more with Caroline Dodds Pennock. I began by asking how she settled on the timeframe she chose for the explorations in this book, which ended with the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.

Caroline Dodds Pennock: I know it's a Eurocentric timeframe, which seems a bit ironic given that I'm trying to flip the script on the Eurocentric story, but what I really wanted to do in this book is address the fact that Indigenous peoples haven't formed part of our understanding of that early period of Atlantic encounter. This is a period of history that people in Europe at least think they know really well. It's the period of the golden age of Spain, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, the Renaissance, the Reformation. Although there's been some good work in bringing Black histories back into that period of history by people like David Olusoga here and Olivette Otele, Indigenous people still really haven't made it into our picture of that period of history at all.

You have to stop somewhere, but for me, that period of history is particularly fascinating because it's before the really firm establishment of colonial structures in the North. At least it's a period where Indigenous people have quite a lot of influence and leverage. It's that moment of ferment and encounter and beginnings, really. A period that's often associated with white men discovering the world, but so often, we don't think about the Indigenous people who are also traveling, coming the other way in that period.

Alison Stewart: I mentioned it in the intro, and I wanted to be clear, that you are very serious about, and you spend some time in the beginning of the book discussing the word savage and that it is a slur. Yet it's used in your title. Tell us a little bit about that decision.

Caroline Dodds Pennock: It is used in the title. It's something that I talk to Indigenous friends and colleagues about before using it because I should be really clear, it does not apply to Indigenous peoples in this title. The Savage Shore in this instance is Europe. The intention is really explicitly to flip the perspective and say, "Well, how strange must this have seemed to Indigenous peoples at that time when they arrived in this place where, according to their own accounts, people are behaving in ways that they frequently see as really unusual and peculiar?" We don't have that many sources from their own perspective, telling us their own words, but those that we do suggest, they found it a very strange and savage place indeed.

Alison Stewart: What was your research process like? Let's just talk about the very beginning of your research process. Where did you start?

Caroline Dodds Pennock: I started as a historian of the Aztec Mexica people. You probably know them as the Aztecs. They would have called themselves the Mexican. I was working on what was happening in Mexico in the 1520s and just before. The more I was working on this as a person in Europe working on Mexico, the more I started to wonder why we heard so much about white people going West and so little about Indigenous people coming East. The more I started to look out for these people in my research, the more it turned out that there were really thousands and thousands of them. They just pop up everywhere. It started as a scholarly project, as an academic project about Indigenous Mexicans and Caribbean Island peoples coming to Europe, to Spain.

There are some fascinating stories, for example, about the people who came with Cortés and with his ambassadors, and mocked up human sacrifice at the court of Charles V, for example. It's an amazing set of stories just in and of their own right. I had a baby, as you do, and I took a long time doing the writing. The more time I had to think about it, the more I realized that there's a bigger story here about why even though some academics have worked on Indigenous peoples traveling to Europe, those people haven't really made an impact on our wider understanding of that period of history.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized it spoke to this bigger story about Indigenous people as part of that global Atlantic encounter and as mobile peoples during this period, not just people who are encountered and involved in the Atlantic in a local sense, but who themselves travel as translators, as diplomats, sadly, most often as enslaved people, but in many, many roles.

Alison Stewart: When you do come across written encounters, it's often from the POV of a European person. When you, as a historian with this thesis, how do you interact with these sources? How do you find clarity from the point of view of an Indigenous person? Could you give us an example of one instance?

Caroline Dodds Pennock: It's really not straightforward because I as a white person working on these sources want to be really careful not to ventriloquize for Indigenous people, to speak for them. The reality is that the majority of the sources we have are written either by Europeans who observed or accompanied, or in many cases, kidnapped or enslaved the Indigenous peoples in question. Now, that's not to say we have no sources by Indigenous peoples. Of course, we have many, or that we have no sources at all from their point of view, but the majority of these sources are exterior.

For example, we have these amazing accounts by Peter Martyr, who is a historian who is at the Spanish court, and he writes about the Indigenous Mexicans that he sees there, about the people who mock up human sacrifice, as I say. Who are displaying their-- what's the word I'm looking for? Their regalia. They appear in traditional regalia. He describes all of these processes they go through or are forced to go through in revealing themselves. Now, we would often simply as historians or most historians have taken these sources and simply talked about them as symbols, curiosities, exceptions.

There are, for example, the six Totonac travelers who are the first Mexicans that we know of to come to Europe. They appear in the accounts of Peter Martyr and in a letter by the papal ambassador to court. He says, "The women are small and have ugly expression," and we don't get to know what they thought of him, which I'm being flippant about, but it is a real problem. What I do with those sources is partly to use them as a way of thinking about why this is problematic and what we might know but also to put them all alongside each other.

When you take those sources and you look at how the people are fashioning themselves, it appears they are presenting themselves as diplomats at court. They are dressing in official regalia. The women are seen by the Europeans as wives or hangers-on or parts of an entourage, but actually, women from this community could easily have been diplomats. We have the fact that they say when asked that they're very happy to be Christians, which is probably untrue but is another example of them fashioning themselves for this period.

If you set those things alongside accounts where we do have Indigenous peoples' own points of view, which I can talk about if you'd like me to, then we have this amazing opportunity to at least open possibilities for how people saw themselves, their surroundings, their experiences. I'm really careful not to say this was what they thought or felt, because we can't know that. If we foreclose the possibility that we might speculate, then we are never going to be able to open up those things. We do have some accounts. Again, often they're filtered through European perspective so the essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote a famous account that he called, On the Cannibals, which he is using to critique European hypocrisies.

He says that the Tupi people, these are Brazilian people that he met in Spain, in Rouen, in the 1550s, that they're really surprised, in particular, that brave warriors will serve a boy king. Why on earth aren't they putting one of them in charge? Also that they're horrified by the inequities of European civilization. He says, "Why on earth are these poor people outside the palaces not burning down their houses? Why aren't they seizing them by the throat and burning down their houses?" Now, that's not to say that European Indigenous civilization was ideal and equal in every way, or that they're the same.

There are hundreds of different, at least, Indigenous cultures. One thing that the majority of Native American civilization share is a sense that there should be a form of redistribution to prevent absolute poverty at the bottom end. You do have repeated mentions of the fact that this extreme poverty in Europe is seen as problematic. One thing I try and do in the book is to go forward a little bit to where we do have accounts by Indigenous peoples who are witnessing these things for themselves. For example, we have a mid-19th century account from the Mississauga/Ojibwa Chief Maungwudaus, who is also known as George Henry.

He talks an awful lot about inequalities, about luxury, about the fact that Queen Victoria has such a big house, he gets tired walking through it. He's talking about the palace, but that she is having more houses built because this one isn't big enough for her. That the people in London are like nuts, biting at each other to get enough. By putting these sources alongside each other, you often can get a sense of Indigenous people's perspectives. Then there are some areas where we do you have quite a lot of sources, in particular, fascinating me, for the very top of society, so for diplomats and royals who write their own letters and diplomatic records at court, and leave those records, and then enslaved people in Spain, because technically, it's illegal to enslave most Indigenous people.

We have all these amazing records of people giving their own testimonies in order to try and secure their freedom. Then we can hear their own stories in their own words, albeit within the formal legal structures.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe. My guess is Caroline Dodds Pennock. The first chapter is titled Slavery. What do we know about the enslavement of Indigenous people, how it operated, and which European nations participated in the slave trade?

Caroline Dodds Pennock: In particular, Spain and Portugal are very heavily involved in the Indigenous slave trade in this period. Now, I'm talking here, particularly about the trans-Atlantic trade and enslaved people. There's been lots of great work in recent years showing that Indigenous peoples are often enslaved alongside African and African-descended peoples in the Americas, right up into the 19th century in what is now the US and across the Americas. What I'm thinking about here is particularly that early period of trans-Atlantic slavery, where Indigenous people are often left out of that story.

There's a wonderful book called the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and it doesn't even mention that Indigenous peoples are enslaved across the Atlantic. It is a great book and it does come from the fact they're using a particular kind of sources, but it doesn't occur to me to put a footnote saying, "We also have tens of thousands, probably of Indigenous people enslaved in this period." Now, Columbus alone is perhaps the largest single trader in enslaved Indigenous people. He trades around 3,000 Indigenous people according to the slave licenses that exist in Spain. We have, from the very beginning, Indigenous people being seized and traded across the Atlantic.

The trouble is that often that slavery is hidden because it's illegal, actually, to enslave Indigenous people, except under certain exceptions. The most prominent ones being that if they're cannibals, if they are already enslaved to someone else, because, of course, it's worse to be enslaved to a non-Christian than a Christian, so you can enslave these people, or according to the law, or just under just war. You do see a lot of Spanish going around and declaring just war against people or declaring these islands are cannibal in order to justify enslavement.

That said, in Spain, it does seem entirely possible for Indigenous people to appeal for their freedom under those laws, and they do so regularly, often with the aid of the crown. What happens is that you get the trade going underground and people start to be referred by words like louro, which means brown, rather than Indio,which is the word in the sources that really makes clear who those people are.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe. We'll have more with its author, Caroline Dodds Pennock, after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and on we go with our show of conversations about Indigenous Americans of both the past and present. Before the break, we've been speaking with Caroline Dodds Pennock. Her book is called On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe. Let's get back into it. I asked Caroline about an enslaved Indigenous woman named Malintzin and what we know about her relationship with Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.

Caroline Dodds Pennock: Malintzin is a famous figure in Mexican history. She is a young woman who is given-- That word hides a multitude of sins, doesn't it? That often happens to sources. She is given to Hernándo Cortés, along with a part of a large group of Maya enslaved women, when he is on his way to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. It becomes an absolutely pivotal moment in the conquest because he learned quite quickly that she speaks both Nahuatl and Maya. Now in his company is another man who has been shipwrecked in the Maya territories, and he speaks Maya and Spanish.

Between them, translating from Spanish to Maya to Maya Nahuatl, and back again, obviously an imperfect process, let's say, but between them, it enables him to communicate with the people that he meets. Malintzin learn Spanish very, very quickly. It seems that she's a very intelligent, very capable woman, and she essentially becomes his aide, his right hand woman, as it were, during the invasion, so much so that when you look at the Indigenous sources about what happened during the Spanish invasion, they talk about her rather than about him in many cases. She is seen as the figure in front.

They even call him Malinche because it's her voice that he's speaking through her, essentially. Now, this is a problematic position for her because in Mexican history, her legacy is really complex. All people who betray their own culture, Malinchistas, the Malinches, essentially, after her. Some people see her as the mother of mestizos, of mixed culture, and other people see her as the ultimate betrayer of her people. The difficulty with the second narrative, of course, is that there is no one Mexican people, there were hundreds of different city-states in that period.

According to what few sources we have about her early life, she had been sold into slavery by the very people that she was now assisting and attack on. She hardly had any reason to be loyal to that group of people, if that's the case. That said, she's become this huge figure in memory and in identity, and is really a big power player, and particularly fascinating for me, because she has a son with Cortés, who then comes to Europe, and lives at the Spanish court. He comes with his father, and he becomes a very respected Spanish noble figure before he eventually returned to Mexico and gets himself into trouble as part of a conspiracy.

Alison Stewart: He would be considered of mixed race, correct?

Caroline Dodds Pennock: Yes, that's right. He is of mixed heritage. He is both Spanish and Indigenous. One of the amazing things about that is that that mixed identity is actually used to his advantage in Spain in many cases. His father had applied to become a member of the Order of Santiago, which is the highest religious order in Spain, an order of knights. He'd been turned down, Hernando Cortés because he wasn't noble enough. His application, when he's very small boy, actually, only six or seven, Malintzin's application is approved because his father is this conquistador, and she, his mother, is this noble woman, as she's framed, who assists in the conquest.

One of the amazing things about this period is that your social status seems to matter more than your race or your heritage, especially in Spain and in Spanish culture. Diplomats are treated, and this is actually true in England to a reasonably great degree. We haven't quite got to the foundations of scientific racism and so on. That comes slightly later, these categorizations. That's not to say that people aren't treated in a racist way. Of course, they are.

There is plenty of prejudice, but in legal terms, if you are an elite, noble, Indigenous Mexican person, Spaniards are very likely to want to intermarry with you in order to establish their rights in Mexico because they're in quite a precarious position. We have quite a lot of Indigenous nobles coming to Spain, drawing on crown funds, people who are the children of the Inca, getting millions from the crown in today's money in order to keep them in the manner to which they are considered warranted because of their status.

Alison Stewart: Many of the Indigenous folks who came to Europe came as part of war delegations, and they were there to negotiate with European leaders and forcers and invaders. How were these visitors who came as part of war delegations, even from some of these families, as you mentioned, who had status, how were they treated when they came to Europe? Was this negotiation in good faith?

Caroline Dodds Pennock: It's hard to tell, isn't it? Certainly, because the crowns are playing one group off against another. They wouldn't have called themselves war delegations in this period, but rather they're more ambassadorial in the way they present themselves. We have, for example, the Tlaxcalans who were the Spaniard's main allies come repeatedly to court. Don Lorenzo, who is a leader of the Tlaxcalan city polities, comes and he appeals to have special status observed for the Tlaxcalans, the very first time that Cortés comes back to Spain with a big group of people in 1528. They successfully secure rights for their city exemptions from tribute, rights to be controlled under the crown.

In later periods, a little bit beyond the scope of the book, we do see very definitely war delegations coming to the Spanish court and to the English court. In this period, we're dealing with slightly more fragmentary evidence. For example, there was a Brazilian king at the court of Henry VIII. He seems to have been there voluntarily because they left an English hostage for his safe return. He seems to have come to speak to the king to see what England is like, what these places are like. We know the Puritans do the same thing from as early as when Matoaka comes to England, who is often called Pocahontas.

You have these delegations again and again who are clearly hoping to negotiate in person with the crown and to find out what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic because there's an awful lot of whisper and rumor in this early period. Mostly, they're treated as very high-status visitors though. They are treated as objects of curiosity. People stare at them. They're seen as very unusual. We know when they're coming through the countryside that people come out to stare at them and see these very, very different people. Once they get to court, they are treated in the manner that the crowns consider worthy of a royal or a noble, or an elite delegation. As I mentioned, the Spanish crown shells out huge amounts of money looking after diplomatic embassies.

Alison Stewart: Well, so we've talked about Indigenous people who are enslaved and forced to come. We've talked about ones who were considered useful because they could be interpreters or go-betweens. We've just talked about people who had status, who had come to the court. Is there any other group that we should talk about or were those the three major ways that Indigenous people engaged with Europe, travel to Europe?

Caroline Dodds Pennock: I think those are the three major ways, but then we also have, I would say, people who are brought as spectacles. They're not technically enslaved, but they're brought in order for people to gawp at them. This is very characteristic of the British travelers to what is now Canada. The story that probably sticks with me most of all the histories that I looked at, these thousands of lives, is the story of an Inuk baby called Nutaaq, who is kidnapped by Martin Frobisher from Qikiqtaaluk, what is now Baffin Island and brought to London with his mother and an unrelated man. They're brought simply as a curiosity, but the man Kalicho, and he's the man who harpoons ducks in order to demonstrate his skill.

That's a beautiful little vignette, isn't it? Really lively picture. He dies after less than two weeks on English shores, partly of injuries that he sustained during his capture. Partly it seems of what we have as incredibly a record of his autopsy by the doctor who treated him during his last days. We have this amazing account of the final days of his life, and he diagnoses him with what he calls Anglophobia, which sounds an awful lot like a man putting a brave face on a dreadful situation, really. He has a head injury, and he had a collapsed lung from his capture. The woman, Arnaq, who came with him, she dies of what we think is measles very soon after Kalicho.

The baby Nutaaq, who is still nursing when his mother dies, and so must have been absolutely terrified, is taken to London and put on display in a London pub in the heart of a city that even then considered itself one of the most civilized in the world, is putting this baby on show. The baby Nutaaq dies after eight days in the Capitol and is buried at a church called St. Olave's in London. He is still there. His remains are there, but he's unmarked in the church record or in the graveyard. One of the most remarkable things about this, apart from the fact that there is a drawing of him from life by John White who did those famous drawings of the North Carolina Indigenous peoples that people might have seen, is that people go to this church to visit it because it's the church that Samuel Pepys, the famous early modern diarist, worshiped.

There's incredible memorials to Pepys. His face glares out from the stonework. We know more about Pepys than we ever would want to, I think, really. Anyone who's read his diary will know that he tells you things that you really don't want to know about. Yet nearby is this baby Inuk child, we think a boy. There's only one source that even gives the baby a gender who is unmarked and unremarked. We have to look really hard at the past to even detect his life where Pepys is right there staring out in the nave. It's this astonishing contrast.

I'm not making spectacle sound very spectacular but rather small and poignant. There are also very large spectacles, of course, but that is one type of traveler that is quite prominently in the book because, of course, they're often widely recorded. They have a whole Brazilian village that they set up on the banks of the Seine at Rouen, for example, in France. It's this incredible spectacle, which is part of Brazilian politics as well as European politics. That's a totally different kind of spectacle, but that's another aspect of travel that you see a lot.

Alison Stewart: I feel like I need to ask you this before we go, because as you mentioned, the death of this child, there are Indigenous people who died in Europe. Some are forgotten, or them or their belongings are in museums. Has there been any movements for repatriation?

Caroline Dodds Pennock: There are an awful lot of Indigenous people who die in Europe because they are subject to the same diseases that Indigenous peoples in the Americas are. The same endemic diseases are absolutely rife. We have that mass death of Indigenous peoples, often as many as half or more of the end Indigenous travelers who are gradually dying during the course of their visits which reflects that tragedy that is happening on the other side of the Atlantic. At the same time, this is a transatlantic story. Often their remains are unmarked, but we do know where some of their remains are buried.

There hasn't been a move to repatriate any of their physical remains where they're buried so far as I know. There certainly have been a lot of demands from the British Museum to return remains that are held in storage. Sometimes they return remains, but they have quite frequently refused to do so on the grounds that they may have value to science in the future. There have been some moves to repatriate objects that came along with travelers. For example, Glasgow has quite a large collection of objects because there were the Buffalo Bill Wild West shows went to Glasgow, and many of the objects that came with the large Lakota community that traveled were left in Glasgow.

The most sensitive of those were repatriated several years ago because they were associated with the Wounded Knee Massacre. They remain quite a few in Glasgow. I was part of a group this summer talking about Indigenous histories in Glasgow, along with native scholars and native peoples, and we were talking about how to move that conversation on in Glasgow in particular. I think there are conversations about that happening, but not nearly, probably as fast or as prominently as I would like.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Caroline Dodds Pennock. Her book is called On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe. Stay tuned for more All Of It.

Next hour, we'll hear excerpts of a new album from Canadian and Peguis First Nation singer-songwriter William Prince called Stand In the Joy. Also a local exhibit of community curated clay works at the Met and a new collection of Lenape folk tales. We'll get to all of it right after the news.

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