Episode 77: Marc James Carpenter Calls A Lie A Lie

This episode's guest and I share a last name (no relation, though), but that's not the only thing we have in common. We both grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where our history education left out most of the violence by white settlers against the region's Indigenous people. It was his righteous anger over the differences between what he had learned and what he read in the archives that prompted my guest today to write first a dissertation and now a book about that violence and the efforts of historians to cover it up. You're listening to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm Kate Carpenter, and in this episode I'm joined by Dr. Marc James Carpenter.

Marc is an associate professor at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. His first book, out with Yale University Press, is The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest. I was delighted to have him on the show to talk more about how he dealt with layers of deceptive source material, the research loops he employed to work through those sources, and how a dash of humor is a vital ingredient in this and other dark histories. Here's my conversation with Dr. Marc James Carpenter.

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For links to the books we talked about and a complete transcript, visit draftingthepast.com. Sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter for updates on the show and more.