Speaker 1: Oh boy, I'm the podcast man here to deliver pods
Speaker 1: to your ear cast. Beautiful, beautiful, Thanks David. You know
Speaker 1: what they say about being a professional is you should
Speaker 1: never learn how to do even the basic parts of
Speaker 1: your job at any point and just kind of muddle through.
Speaker 1: And that is the key to success, right because when
Speaker 1: you do like a fraction of it, then everybody is like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, they did it. That's amazing. You keep
Speaker 1: everybody's expectations, you keep everybody's look exactly. It's like when
Speaker 1: I'm when I'm um, you know, driving, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna use turn signals. I'm not going to turn
Speaker 1: my headlights on, you know, because that way, when I
Speaker 1: eventually slam on my brakes and narrowly miss running through
Speaker 1: a crosswalk, people are like, wow, pretty good guy, he
Speaker 1: didn't he didn't hit that crosswalk. Didn't hit that crosswalk.
Speaker 1: Yeah people, Yeah, they're all ready for death there. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were like, wow he was he was pretty drunk,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't so drunk that he blew through that crosswalk.
Speaker 1: That's that's the way in which I approached my career. Um, David,
Speaker 1: you have podcasts, You're David Bell this is behind the
Speaker 1: bastards by the way. Um, but you have a podcast
Speaker 1: network called game Fully Unemployed where you you talk about
Speaker 1: movies and in media and stuff. I got a bunch
Speaker 1: of shows on there, that's true. But I mean I
Speaker 1: feel like the plug. I think we did it. I
Speaker 1: think we're all set ready to go. Yeah, I'll plug.
Speaker 1: I'll plug our patreon, Patreon, dot com, slash gamefully Unemployed.
Speaker 1: But really just like search for gamefully Unemployed whatever wherever
Speaker 1: you game podcast, uh and check us out. We have
Speaker 1: we have a bunch of exclusive ones on our patreon. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pop it, yeah it, pull it twisted, tug it is
Speaker 1: tug one tuget. Absolutely treat it like a nipple. General
Speaker 1: rule of advice, Burnett, It's like a nipple, Dave. How
Speaker 1: do you like birds? Um? Lukewarm? Lukewarm on birds? Depends
Speaker 1: on the bird, to be honest. Um, I like the
Speaker 1: I like them in theory against them, you know, but
Speaker 1: again it's really is going to depend on the bird. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't have anything against birds. Categorically, I will say
Speaker 1: the animals I have most often had negative relationships with
Speaker 1: have been birds, particularly chickens. Yeah. Monstrous creatures, Oh, Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I was a child, I apparently brought a chicken
Speaker 1: into my house like holding it, and I still think
Speaker 1: back at that, like, how did I not get attacked
Speaker 1: by that chicken? Well, they're bad at that if you
Speaker 1: if you pick them upright, so would you must have done? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you may be a savant a chicken Savanah. You know
Speaker 1: much about the Audubon Society. No, okay, Well, today's episode
Speaker 1: is called John James Audubon Bird Monster, um. And we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about the namesake, not the founder, it was
Speaker 1: founded years and years after his death, um, but the
Speaker 1: namesake of the Audubon Society. And this guy sucks a
Speaker 1: lot more than than you would expect, dave a lot
Speaker 1: more than you would expect. Okay, I mean I don't
Speaker 1: know who this is. Yeah, you know. The Audbon Society
Speaker 1: is like people who like birds a bunch, you know,
Speaker 1: bird watchers. That's their group, is the Audubon Society, Like
Speaker 1: the n r A is for guns, and the Audubon
Speaker 1: Societies for people who like going into the woods and
Speaker 1: being like, look I saw a bird and then telling
Speaker 1: other people like I found this bird here. That's their
Speaker 1: whole thing. I think it's just no matter what my
Speaker 1: view of birds are, I do find bird watchers highly sinister.
Speaker 1: It is it is. It is unsettling right, like they
Speaker 1: could be doing anything with those binoculars. You know. It
Speaker 1: feels like when someone says what are you doing and
Speaker 1: they say bird watching, that sounds like an you're the FBI,
Speaker 1: Like we I already know right away you're you're doing
Speaker 1: some skullduggery, right, because the one thing I do know
Speaker 1: about birds who they're not fun to watch like that's
Speaker 1: but there's like a lot of people like to watch birds.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't get it. But also I will
Speaker 1: spend like hours just watching my cats live their lives.
Speaker 1: So everybody's got animals they like to they like to
Speaker 1: stare at like a creep. Yeah, and that Autubon society
Speaker 1: likes to do that with birds, which is fine broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: not not a bad but the guy they're named after
Speaker 1: real shitty. So John James Audubon was born gen I
Speaker 1: Bean like you know French John, like spelled like Jeans
Speaker 1: but without the S, but not like Sean Luke Jean No,
Speaker 1: no that one yeah j e a n gene Yeah.
Speaker 1: In san domain, which is modern Haiti right, Like he's
Speaker 1: born in what is today Haiti was then the slave colony.
Speaker 1: That right, Yeah, yeah, I did, I did. I did
Speaker 1: a video for some it was it's bleak. So he's
Speaker 1: born seventy five, which is not all that long before
Speaker 1: well before the cool thing happens, which is like the
Speaker 1: Haitians Haitian slaves are like, yeah, let's kill everybody who's
Speaker 1: want slaves to exist. Um, but that's not a great
Speaker 1: time to be the illegitimate son of a French sea captain. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, a mixed time and like slave trader. His
Speaker 1: dad is, who is also named John is a is
Speaker 1: a slave trader and a sea captain and owns a plantation. Now,
Speaker 1: depending on who you believe, Jen Rabine's mother is either
Speaker 1: a sugar plantation owner who died in the slave uprising
Speaker 1: that led to the creation of Haiti, or a mixed
Speaker 1: race chambermaid named Katherine Bouffard or a French chambermaid named
Speaker 1: gen iban Um, which is basically the same as his name.
Speaker 1: So there's a couple of different theories and and one
Speaker 1: of them is that he's a mixed he's kid, that
Speaker 1: he that he has black ancestry um and that's going
Speaker 1: to become very relevant later because of some of the
Speaker 1: things this guy chooses to do with his life. Um,
Speaker 1: whoever his mother was and whether or not he was
Speaker 1: mixed race, he was born able to pass as white,
Speaker 1: so if he is, if he is mixed race, he
Speaker 1: like white people in like the U. S And Europe
Speaker 1: don't notice that when they look at him, right, which
Speaker 1: is handy in this period of time. Right, Why why
Speaker 1: are we not sure who his mother is? Well, because
Speaker 1: he's he's a legitimate like his dad is a pretty
Speaker 1: well off guy, and he has a wife back in France,
Speaker 1: and he's just whoever he has his son with. It's
Speaker 1: not his wife, you know. Um. It's also the seventeen eighties,
Speaker 1: so it's not like it's not like if he'd wanted
Speaker 1: to know who his mom was, he could have gotte
Speaker 1: and done a DNA test at some point, but there's
Speaker 1: really not many options. Um, So the most likely cases
Speaker 1: that his mom was was J. E. A. N N. E.
Speaker 1: Rabine as opposed to gen Rabine. I'm sorry, they're French,
Speaker 1: so this this part is going to be kind of confusing. Um.
Speaker 1: And she died of an infection basically as soon as
Speaker 1: her baby came into the world, probably as a result
Speaker 1: of having a baby, not an uncommon story in se
Speaker 1: um So, James's dad, Geen Audubon, decided to leave the
Speaker 1: island shortly thereafter. He was not a dumb man, and
Speaker 1: he saw that tensions in Haiti, and by tensions I
Speaker 1: mean all of the angry people freeing themselves from plantations
Speaker 1: and getting weapons were on the rise. Right, So, as
Speaker 1: a rich white guy looking at Haiti in the late
Speaker 1: seventeen eighties and like, probably how to get out of here,
Speaker 1: but probably ain't gonna be. This ain't gonna be good
Speaker 1: for me anymore. Yeah, they're not gonna be. They're gonna
Speaker 1: not gonna be nice to him. Yeah, I probably don't
Speaker 1: want to be hanging around Haiti too much longer. Um So,
Speaker 1: the rumors that Jean may have been mixed race are
Speaker 1: mainly significant again for things that come up later. It's
Speaker 1: worth noting that his father, if he was mixed race,
Speaker 1: his father may not necessarily have seen this as a
Speaker 1: big deal. Well, this would have been like a thing
Speaker 1: in the United States as a time. Again, if you
Speaker 1: have like one drop of blood that isn't white, and
Speaker 1: kind of the parlance of the time in the US
Speaker 1: in this period, it can be a huge issue for you,
Speaker 1: right if if I remember correctly, Not not to say
Speaker 1: Haiti is progressive during this time, but like the revolution
Speaker 1: that happens oh sorry France, yeah, but like also the
Speaker 1: revolution that happens in Haiti, like they pretend it doesn't happen,
Speaker 1: right in a lot of places, France does and for
Speaker 1: a long time that's basically their policy. But within kind
Speaker 1: of the France itself and and France outside of the
Speaker 1: islands where they own a lot of slaves. The late
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds are a period in which, again you've had
Speaker 1: this revolution, there's all of these kind of radical ideas
Speaker 1: about equality. Um it is starting to become normalized for
Speaker 1: people who are not white to get the rights of
Speaker 1: citizens in the French Empire. Okay, so there, and there's
Speaker 1: this period where like there's still slavery, but also people
Speaker 1: who are mixed race are getting their citizenship. Um. I
Speaker 1: am thinking of the US because the US it was
Speaker 1: like they didn't want to talk about what was going
Speaker 1: on in Haiti because well the French did either, Like
Speaker 1: again they don't once Haiti rebels, France doesn't really want
Speaker 1: to acknowledge it. Right, they invaded a couple of times,
Speaker 1: and the US doesn't want. No one wants to acknowledge
Speaker 1: it because the idea of a slave rebellion is very
Speaker 1: frightening to everybody. But you have in the same period,
Speaker 1: because it's post revolutionary France, all these discussions about well,
Speaker 1: mixed race people in black people should be citizens to like,
Speaker 1: if we're gonna say everybody's equal, then these people have
Speaker 1: to be equal as well. And it's like this process
Speaker 1: going on. And this not to like whitewash the horrible
Speaker 1: colonial crimes of the French government, but this process does
Speaker 1: happen in France, and there are rights for people who
Speaker 1: are not white but are French citizens in France. That
Speaker 1: does not happen in the United States for like another
Speaker 1: seventy years, you know, um, and arguably a lot longer
Speaker 1: than that, right obviously, um. Whereas in France they do
Speaker 1: actually start to get functional citizenship. All mixed race Frenchmen
Speaker 1: received citizenship in sevent ninety too. UM. So the fact
Speaker 1: that like jeen uh Rabine may have been kind of
Speaker 1: mixed race would not have been a huge issue growing
Speaker 1: up in France, as it would have been in the
Speaker 1: United States. Now his dad does buy a farm in
Speaker 1: the United States, two four acres outside of Philadelphia. Um.
Speaker 1: And at this point, again I I normally we would
Speaker 1: call it something else. It's not Philly yet, you know
Speaker 1: it's Philadelphia. It's not it's not the gritty city that
Speaker 1: we we know and love. At this point, UM, I
Speaker 1: wanted to make a joke about the first sports related
Speaker 1: riot in US history here, like and that being the
Speaker 1: thing that made it Philly, because I was gonna be
Speaker 1: I was pretty sure the four first U s sports
Speaker 1: riot would have happened in Philadelphia, but I was I
Speaker 1: was wrong about that. Um yeah there was. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was the Johnson Jeffreys riots of nineteen ten. Um. And
Speaker 1: those happened in a bunch of cities, but not Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: There's like a shipload of US cities that have riots
Speaker 1: in nineteen ten over this it's a boxing match. None
Speaker 1: of them are Philly. Um. And yeah, it's what you'd expect.
Speaker 1: Jack Johnson becomes the first black world heavyweight champion, and
Speaker 1: then they so he becomes heavyweight champion, and all the
Speaker 1: white people in America are really pissed, and so they
Speaker 1: like find this white boxer to come out of retirement
Speaker 1: to fight him in nineteen ten. That's um, that's Jeffreys,
Speaker 1: who they call the Great White Hope. And then he
Speaker 1: gets his ass kicked. Yes, so there's I mean, it's
Speaker 1: not I mean there's horrible, horrible race riots where after
Speaker 1: it's a nightmare. But yes, the basic story is kind
Speaker 1: of funny. Um. Anyway, this was all because I wanted
Speaker 1: to make a joke about Philadelphia and sports riots, which
Speaker 1: wound up not being at all relevant. Uh So, sorry
Speaker 1: for the digression. But back to Jean. So in his
Speaker 1: dad takes him away from Haiti, they go to France. Um,
Speaker 1: and you know, they buy this farm in Philadelphia. It's
Speaker 1: mainly an investment farm, you know, so that they can
Speaker 1: make money. So that's kind of where the family money
Speaker 1: is coming from. While while Jean and his dad and
Speaker 1: his dad's wife who's not his mom raise him in
Speaker 1: Nantes in France. Um. And I should say that like
Speaker 1: his dad's wife, Anne Moynette Audubon, isn't like biologically his mom.
Speaker 1: I do think she like agrees, she is basically his mom,
Speaker 1: like she raises him and stuff, So credit to her
Speaker 1: for that. She seems to not as far as I know,
Speaker 1: doesn't take out on him the fact that his dad
Speaker 1: was just sleeping around with whoever the fuck, you know, Haiti,
Speaker 1: So that maybe maybe they had had a thing, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe they had a thing. Maybe she's who knows, Um
Speaker 1: they were French, you know, anything's possible. Uh. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: Anne was a pretty attentive mother as far as we knew.
Speaker 1: Jean Jacques, which is what he starts to become known as.
Speaker 1: So he's born gen Ibane, he starts to be known
Speaker 1: when they moved to France. They just treat him as
Speaker 1: their normal son and call him Jean Jacques audubon Um.
Speaker 1: So that's his name. Now he goes through a couple
Speaker 1: of names at this point. I know, it's kind of confusing.
Speaker 1: He is a pretty pampered upbringing. He's able to explore
Speaker 1: a wide variety of interests. He becomes fascinated by nature
Speaker 1: and spends long hours hiking through the countryside, drawing increasingly
Speaker 1: detailed depictions of landscapes and wildlife. And he had a
Speaker 1: particular fascination with birds. So he just loves hiking and
Speaker 1: drawing birds. So yeah, Vine, so far fine, Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: hiking is great. Hiking is wonderful being in nature. It's
Speaker 1: one of those things not enough people get to do anymore.
Speaker 1: And it really does like it, uh, it like resets you,
Speaker 1: you know, it balances you. I don't know why you
Speaker 1: look at a bunch of stupid birds and not, I
Speaker 1: don't know, get high or something. But like, good for him, Yeah,
Speaker 1: good for him. He's he's he's he's doing fine. So
Speaker 1: in eighteen o three, some dude named Napoleon gets all
Speaker 1: like Empiry and kind of gets into all these fights
Speaker 1: with basically everybody. You know, he's one of these one
Speaker 1: of these guys you get every now and then in
Speaker 1: Europe every eighty years or so. Who's like, you know what,
Speaker 1: I want to start a fight with everyone, every everybody
Speaker 1: in Europe? You know what? Yeah, I wanna try. I'm gonna,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna, I'm gonna go for it. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: go for it for a little. For a while, he
Speaker 1: got closer than most. Yeah, it does usually work out
Speaker 1: for a while. Um So during the period while it's
Speaker 1: working out, in order to make it keep working out,
Speaker 1: Napoleon's like, well, I got a conscript people, right, I
Speaker 1: need more young men to throw a Prussian guns and
Speaker 1: to eventually leave starving in the snow outside of Moscow. Right,
Speaker 1: it's as standard as we've all been there, you know
Speaker 1: where Napoleon is. I can't blame him for it, um.
Speaker 1: But John's father is like, well, I don't really want
Speaker 1: my son to die a pointless death in the snow
Speaker 1: outside of Moscow fighting for a dictator. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: just send him to the US. It seems like a
Speaker 1: better place for him right now. It's a little bit yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fine. Like I support draft dodging as a general rule,
Speaker 1: and that's yeah. I can see him looking at his
Speaker 1: son outside drawn birds. Yeah, he's gonna he's gonna die immediately.
Speaker 1: He's not gonna do well in this war thing. I've
Speaker 1: got a sensitive boy here. I'm not really I'm not
Speaker 1: feeling like the steps of Russia are a good spot
Speaker 1: for him. So Jean Jack lives on the family farm
Speaker 1: that you know. He moves to Pennsylvania and he lives
Speaker 1: on the family farm in mill Grove, Um And he's
Speaker 1: essentially a child of the aristocracy. Right. His family is
Speaker 1: not crazy rich, but they're well off, and he does
Speaker 1: not need to work for a living as a young man,
Speaker 1: he's like eighteen at this point, and so he takes
Speaker 1: up hiking and hunting with Gusto. He gets real into
Speaker 1: hunting when he moves to the US, and he becomes
Speaker 1: an excellent shot, which is not easy. The guns at
Speaker 1: the time are not rifled, which is like rifling are
Speaker 1: these little lines that they have going down the inside
Speaker 1: of a barrel that makes the bullet spin and it's
Speaker 1: like with a a football. The spin makes it so straight.
Speaker 1: They don't know how to do that yet, So shooting
Speaker 1: stuff is not easy. Um right, It's just like a
Speaker 1: stupid musket with a ball in it that you have
Speaker 1: to like take fifteen minutes to load and fires like
Speaker 1: feet maybe explodes in your face. Suck at this point.
Speaker 1: And yeah, but he's good with them. So he's he's
Speaker 1: good with them. I mean, they have enough money for
Speaker 1: the better guns at the time, so that's probably a factor.
Speaker 1: So he starts drawing the birds. He starts both shooting
Speaker 1: and then drawing birds, and he's using a shotgun for this,
Speaker 1: so it's it's easier to hit. Um. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: he'll he'll shoot birds and then he'll sketch them, and
Speaker 1: this becomes like his hobby, which is I don't know
Speaker 1: that a little creepy, right, I was about to say,
Speaker 1: that's a bird serial killer Jude Lan road to perdition
Speaker 1: taking photographs of his kills. It is one of those
Speaker 1: things because he gets very scientific about it and he
Speaker 1: has a huge impact on like the development of biology
Speaker 1: is a science because of what he does here, and
Speaker 1: it's worth acknowledging that, and it's also worth being like,
Speaker 1: but this is also like pretty close to stuff we
Speaker 1: get like serial killers do. He's not torturing them to
Speaker 1: his credit, like he's not extending their suffering, but having
Speaker 1: known people with interest in medical stuff. Um, there is
Speaker 1: a very fine line between a serial killer and a
Speaker 1: doctor or something who's interested in anatomy or like nature
Speaker 1: or a biologist, where it's like they're they're kind of
Speaker 1: doing it's the ven diagram. Yeah, Like there's some similar things.
Speaker 1: If if his parents had hit him a couple of
Speaker 1: times more, he probably would have been a lot worse
Speaker 1: to those birds, and then we might have gotten a
Speaker 1: real different story. Got a bond, you know, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I feel like if Jeffrey Dahmer was doing what
Speaker 1: he was doing to like monkeys in a labe. We
Speaker 1: wouldn't have even thought twice about it, well, some of it,
Speaker 1: because he was off probably probably wouldn't have been okay,
Speaker 1: although it depends like look, it depends on what kind
Speaker 1: of lab. If it's like a lab that likes to party, right,
Speaker 1: if if it's if it's one of those like fucking uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know enough about colog is to make a
Speaker 1: good joke here, actually, Arizona State. Oh that's solid. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we don't know what goes on in those labs.
Speaker 1: Nobody does. Nobody does break into a lab film them secretly,
Speaker 1: you know, to see what happens. So white people in
Speaker 1: this period of time no very little about North American wildlife. Right, Obviously,
Speaker 1: Indigenous people knew quite a bit about North American wildlife,
Speaker 1: but white people it's all this gigantic mystery too. So
Speaker 1: Jean ja Jean Jack decides that he's gonna he's gonna
Speaker 1: study wildlife a lot more than anyone has before. And
Speaker 1: one of the things he's curious about he keeps seeing
Speaker 1: these birds and he notices that, like, oh, these eastern phoebees,
Speaker 1: which is a type of bird, Like, there's birds here
Speaker 1: of that type every year at this time, I wonder
Speaker 1: if they're the same birds, right, because people don't know
Speaker 1: these white people don't know that, like migration is a
Speaker 1: thing in detail, right. I think there's people theorizing Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: why because you just see, like who knows if it's
Speaker 1: the same birds, maybe they all die and then I
Speaker 1: don't know. There's a bunch of things that are possible.
Speaker 1: So he's certain marking the Well, that's exactly what he decides.
Speaker 1: He's like, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna tie strings to
Speaker 1: the legs of a couple of different examples of this bird.
Speaker 1: And then if next year any birds with strings on
Speaker 1: their legs come back, Oh no, it's the same birds,
Speaker 1: and they're migrating in a set pattern. UM. And this
Speaker 1: this is what he does, and it works out great,
Speaker 1: Like they come back the next year and he's like, oh, ship,
Speaker 1: these are the same birds. You know, I have done
Speaker 1: a science UM and this is a huge step forward.
Speaker 1: He's the first person to ever do this, at least
Speaker 1: that we have any kind of documentation of. UM. And
Speaker 1: this is a massive like basically all modern like Avian
Speaker 1: science is pretty much descended from this experiment. UM. It's
Speaker 1: a big deal. You know, like establishing just like how
Speaker 1: birds work, kind of for the first time in a
Speaker 1: systemic way. Let me tell you right now, this guy,
Speaker 1: he seems to be fine right now, this is so
Speaker 1: far yeah, learning about birds. He's very curious to know
Speaker 1: how this goes horribly wrong. Well, it it does. It
Speaker 1: does because he's a terrible person, but not he's also
Speaker 1: a terrible person that does a bunch of Broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: his impact is more positive than negative, although that's quite debatable.
Speaker 1: We'll see where you how we feel about you know what,
Speaker 1: we'll have that conversation at how much you give a
Speaker 1: about birds. But you know who's you know whose impact
Speaker 1: on the world is definitely more positive than negative, Dave,
Speaker 1: it's me. Oh well yeah, for sure. Absolutely well, so
Speaker 1: far no one's and and you, Dave, are the primary
Speaker 1: sponsor of behind the Bastards. So we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: cut to these ads from companies you own, companies like
Speaker 1: Hello Fresh and the Washington State Highway patrol um all
Speaker 1: all the personal property of David Bell. Uh uh, we're back.
Speaker 1: We're back, and we're having a great time time. Everything's fine,
Speaker 1: I'm performing perfectly. So he certainly agrees with that, all right,
Speaker 1: So you know he's doing good. He bands these birds,
Speaker 1: he figures out that migration is a thing. Um. But
Speaker 1: he's also you know, he keeps shooting and drawing birds,
Speaker 1: painting birds, and this time and he's frustrated by something, um,
Speaker 1: which is that he would love to like. So there's
Speaker 1: other naturalists who are like drawing and sketching birds, but
Speaker 1: like the thing that they have to do is they
Speaker 1: have to kill them because you can't you don't have
Speaker 1: a great goggles are like glasses, and it's not easy
Speaker 1: to get a good look at a bird to draw
Speaker 1: it while it's alive. Yeah, I get it. So you
Speaker 1: shoot it. And then what bird nerds are doing at
Speaker 1: this period of time is they shoot the birds and
Speaker 1: then they're like preserving their corpses with arsenic and stuffing
Speaker 1: them with frayed rope and then trying to sketch them.
Speaker 1: And they don't look great when you do that to him.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've ever stuff to corpse with ropes,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't quite look like it does what it's alive.
Speaker 1: Probably not know what bird nerds are called, right, birds? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm man, Okay, sorry, I'm waiting for you to get
Speaker 1: to the part where he's like, you know what, I
Speaker 1: could also shooting stuff like that's not as far from
Speaker 1: what winds up happening as but he's not shooting them,
Speaker 1: so I don't know. Um, but yeah, so he's he's
Speaker 1: he's like, the dead birds here look like shit that
Speaker 1: I have to sketch from. And that's that's why kind
Speaker 1: of all anatomical sketches of birds look like ship like
Speaker 1: they all look gross and like fucked up and not
Speaker 1: like actual birds. Um. So he decides, well, the best thing,
Speaker 1: like what you gotta do is you've got to sketch
Speaker 1: them right away as soon as you shoot them. You
Speaker 1: can't like waste the time to preserve to like preserve them.
Speaker 1: But if you do that, they're just kind of like
Speaker 1: limp and flopping around because they're dead. So he builds this,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, he builds what he calls a wire armature
Speaker 1: in order to pose the corpses of birds so that
Speaker 1: he can draw the looking like they did before he
Speaker 1: shot them. Amazing, and he does this at age twenty,
Speaker 1: which again very important for biology, leads to the people
Speaker 1: who are like into birds will say to this day
Speaker 1: he's still maybe the best at at drawing avian wildlife
Speaker 1: there's ever been. And again, if you're if you're into
Speaker 1: medical stuff, this isn't that unusual. It's not unusual. And
Speaker 1: he's like, I had a friend who's into survivalism and
Speaker 1: he would do stuff like tan hides. Tanning hides in
Speaker 1: my garage right now, I have a bunch of like
Speaker 1: pieces of animals that i've Yeah, it's still it's what
Speaker 1: you gotta do. But the building an armature to pose
Speaker 1: their corpses to pay it is a little like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's where your head goes. Huh, and I guess
Speaker 1: good in this case, it's good. He draws some really
Speaker 1: pretty birds. Um he does this when he's twenty So again,
Speaker 1: you know, that's just where this guy's head is. Um. So,
Speaker 1: he falls in love around the same time a woman
Speaker 1: named Lucy Bakewell, which is like the most fifties wife
Speaker 1: name you could possibly have. It's it's it's incredible. Um
Speaker 1: she's the daughter of an English dude who owned a
Speaker 1: nearby estate called fat land Ford. It's pretty funny. It
Speaker 1: sounds like a dealership. Yeah, it does, sounds like a dealership.
Speaker 1: Um So, before her family moved to North America. She'd
Speaker 1: spent some of her childhood in England, cared for by
Speaker 1: a friend of the family who happened to be Erasimus Darwin,
Speaker 1: the grandfather of Charles Darwin, which does not really have
Speaker 1: much impact on the story. It's just kind of weird
Speaker 1: that there's this connection between Audubon. It's like a cinematic universe. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the the guys who figured out how to do
Speaker 1: science on animals. Cinematic universe, and Darwin and Audubon will
Speaker 1: have one very specific thing in common, but we're building
Speaker 1: to that. Um So, the Bakewells are a lot wealthier
Speaker 1: than the Audubons, and their family farm featured one of
Speaker 1: the first experiments and steam powered agricultural machines, so they're rich,
Speaker 1: they're into science. Obviously, she falls for for Jehan Jack Audubon,
Speaker 1: who is now going by John James Audubon because he
Speaker 1: he americanizes his name right. I don't want to be
Speaker 1: too French in the United Jean Jack, I think Autoban.
Speaker 1: If your last name is Autobon, I don't think it
Speaker 1: matters what you do with the first part. It's always
Speaker 1: gonna sound like, you know, for European Yeah. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: both families seem to have been pretty happy. When when
Speaker 1: Lucy and and John get hitched, her brother Will writes
Speaker 1: this about his future in law at the time. So
Speaker 1: this is like one of the earliest writings we have
Speaker 1: about John James Audubon. Upon entering his room, I was
Speaker 1: astonished and delighted to find that it was turned into
Speaker 1: a museum. The walls were fistooned with all kinds of birds,
Speaker 1: eggs carefully blown out and strung on a thread. The
Speaker 1: chimney piece was covered with stuffed squirrels, raccoons, and a possums,
Speaker 1: and the shelves around were likewise crowded with specimens, among
Speaker 1: which were fishes, frogs, snakes, lizards, and other reptiles. Besides
Speaker 1: these stuffed varieties, many paintings were raid on the walls,
Speaker 1: chiefly of birds. He was an admirable marksman and spirit swimmer,
Speaker 1: a clever writer, possessed of great activity in prodigious strength,
Speaker 1: and was notable for the elegance of his figure and
Speaker 1: the beauty of his features. And he hated nature by
Speaker 1: a careful attendance to his dress behind. Besides other accomplishments,
Speaker 1: he was musical, a good fencer, danced well and had
Speaker 1: some acquaintance with Ledger Main tricks, worked in hair and
Speaker 1: complete willow baskets. So he's a he's doing fine. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, so he's complimenting his like collection of stuffed animals, Yes,
Speaker 1: bacon baskets and stuff and corpses. I feel like these
Speaker 1: days that's the equivalent of like a DVD collection, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's what these guys would be doing these days.
Speaker 1: You go over to John James's house to like watch
Speaker 1: his dead animals. Yeah, yeah, which we put on tonight
Speaker 1: just you know, man, I've had a rough week. Just
Speaker 1: put on I know, we watched Fox last week, but
Speaker 1: just put Fox up again. Yeah why not? I mean,
Speaker 1: I know, I know every part part of Fox, but
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, it's just nice to fall asleep too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So after marrying in eight the couple decide to leave
Speaker 1: the family farm and strike out for a mysterious and
Speaker 1: untrod land, Kentucky. M Yeah, it's good. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: where the problems start, Dave, as they always do in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: In Kentucky, So they set up a house together and
Speaker 1: for a time, they get up every morning and they
Speaker 1: swim together across the Ohio River. A right up by
Speaker 1: the Audubon Society notes Lucy Bakewell was a tower of
Speaker 1: strength to her husband while he struggled to find his calling.
Speaker 1: Now this means that she stays home and raises the
Speaker 1: two sons that they have together. Well he well, he
Speaker 1: tries to make money. Now, despite his clear skill with
Speaker 1: all things birds, John James Um first tries his hand
Speaker 1: as a businessman. He starts a general store in Louisville,
Speaker 1: where they live, and this does well enough that he
Speaker 1: expands to a second location on the frontier, which is
Speaker 1: just a slightly further west part of Kentucky at this point, right,
Speaker 1: that's as far as white people have really gotten on
Speaker 1: the East coast. So keeping this bisness stocked keeps him
Speaker 1: heavily engaged, and his agreement with his business partner necessitates
Speaker 1: that he keeps the cooking pot filled with wild game.
Speaker 1: Right up in Smithsonian Magazine explains quote. As he hunted
Speaker 1: and traveled, he improved his art on American birds and
Speaker 1: kept careful field notes as well. His narrative of an
Speaker 1: encounter with a flood of passenger pigeons in Kentucky in
Speaker 1: autom eighteen thirteen is legendary. He gave up trying to
Speaker 1: count the passing multitudes of the grayish blue, pink breasted
Speaker 1: birds that numbered in the billions at the time of
Speaker 1: the European discovery of America and are now extinct. The
Speaker 1: air was literally filled with pigeons, he wrote of that encounter.
Speaker 1: The light of noonday was obscured as buy an eclipse.
Speaker 1: The dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow,
Speaker 1: and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to
Speaker 1: lull my senses to repose my goodness. Yeah, there were
Speaker 1: so many of these birds, we killed all of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that described it's like the classic film burdemic. It is
Speaker 1: like the classic film burdemic film about bird attacks I
Speaker 1: can think of. And like with bird dimmic, the only
Speaker 1: solution to passenger pigeons was it a side Yeah of course. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So paper pins and like colors and stuff are not
Speaker 1: cheap at this time, and and and this is his hobby,
Speaker 1: Like he doesn't he's not making enough money to both
Speaker 1: take care of his family and take care of his hobby.
Speaker 1: So in order to make extra cash, he gets involved
Speaker 1: in a vision in the kind of business that's gonna
Speaker 1: gonna make him his extra art money. Dave. You know,
Speaker 1: we we've all been there, right, Like, you know, you
Speaker 1: want to make a small short films or something, but
Speaker 1: you need extra cash, so you get a side gig.
Speaker 1: Yeah you did that, right, What did what did? What
Speaker 1: did you get into? Dave? Did you did you buy
Speaker 1: enslaved people and travel with them in order to sell
Speaker 1: them elsewhere in the state and market? Did you become
Speaker 1: a slave deal Do that? That's interesting? Yeah? Uh, you
Speaker 1: were just stuffing birds, You're just drawing and stuff in birds.
Speaker 1: Now he's selling human beings. You like surprisingly stayed out
Speaker 1: of history because it's like, you know, these aren't great times. Uh.
Speaker 1: He delves right into the not great part. It's fun
Speaker 1: because like the early biographies of him by like the
Speaker 1: Autumn Society will just say that like he did not
Speaker 1: have a problem with slavery. It's a little bit more
Speaker 1: direct than that. He was neutral slavery um And he's
Speaker 1: like he's not just a slave dealer, he's specifically like
Speaker 1: an exploiter of uh trends in the slave market, where
Speaker 1: he's like traveling to places where the slaves are dying
Speaker 1: because it's the frontier, and it's like, look, I brought
Speaker 1: some fresh slaves, but because it's far away, you gotta
Speaker 1: pay me more. You know. He's he's like, fuck, you
Speaker 1: know that's not there's good. There's no situation where this
Speaker 1: is good. But the fact that it's too fund a
Speaker 1: bird watching, yeah, well it's ship dude. Nice pencils aren't
Speaker 1: cheap today, Robert. That's true, they're not. Look, you gotta
Speaker 1: we've all done horrible things for good watercolor pencils, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean I've at least shoplift at that for sure.
Speaker 1: I'll still nice. Um. Have I ever trafficked, you know,
Speaker 1: a shipping container filled with human beings um from Canada? Uh,
Speaker 1: in order to pay for for for nice pastel markers? No,
Speaker 1: but you know I'm glad you got that on record. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm glad glad you got that. No, I have not. So.
Speaker 1: The Audubon Is also kept slaves at home, um, which
Speaker 1: allowed Lucy to work part time as a teacher. So
Speaker 1: at least, yeah, it's pretty bad. Um. Another right up
Speaker 1: by audubon dot Org notes they took a stand for
Speaker 1: slavery by choosing to own slaves in the eighteen teens,
Speaker 1: when the Audubons lived in Henderson, Kentucky, they had nine
Speaker 1: enslaved people working for them in their household, but by
Speaker 1: the end of the decade, when faced with financial difficulties,
Speaker 1: they had sold them. In early nineteen nineteen, for instance,
Speaker 1: Audubon took two enslaved men with him down the Mississippi
Speaker 1: to New Orleans on a skiff, and when he got there,
Speaker 1: he put the boat and the men up for sale.
Speaker 1: So this is like, you know, he he's he's maximizing
Speaker 1: his profits. Uh yeah, he's They're just any other commodity
Speaker 1: to him. Really, that's the way he treats this. So
Speaker 1: that's that's what's so like, I mean, it's insidious about
Speaker 1: the entire time and the whole time, right, It's just
Speaker 1: like this is a really good like example, like like
Speaker 1: this is something I would want kids to learn about,
Speaker 1: to show how mundane this horrifying thing was that this
Speaker 1: guy is like I'm trying to just make a living
Speaker 1: work my do my bird watching hobby, and it's just
Speaker 1: like you said, like I'm going to sell the boat
Speaker 1: and the slaves like no difference there, and that is yeah,
Speaker 1: that's about that's all he thinks about it, um which
Speaker 1: again I don't want to separate him from like the
Speaker 1: main stream. But there's also like a lot of them
Speaker 1: Americans who are saying this is horrible in the time, um,
Speaker 1: including like prominent dudes like Ben Franklin. Uh So, it's
Speaker 1: it's not like everyone is in agreement that this is
Speaker 1: fine either, Like he's picking a side, you know. Um So,
Speaker 1: in eighteen nineteen the bottom falls out of the economy
Speaker 1: and James businesses business collapses. This is not really his fault.
Speaker 1: The Panic of eighteen nineteen, as it was called, was
Speaker 1: caused by the end of a century long period of
Speaker 1: warfare between France and Great Britain. Like we don't talk
Speaker 1: about this that much, but they were at war for
Speaker 1: like a hundred years in this period. Like the US
Speaker 1: Revolution is kind of a side show in the century
Speaker 1: long war between France and Great Britain. And Great Britain
Speaker 1: kind of part of why they don't do more to
Speaker 1: stop the U S revolutions, Like they got a lot
Speaker 1: on their plate, you know, there's a bunch of ship
Speaker 1: going on. Um. So, this series of wars had caused
Speaker 1: a huge demand for US agricultural products because like they're needed.
Speaker 1: Right when you're fighting all these wars, you're getting all
Speaker 1: your men can scripted to go fight these wars. You
Speaker 1: don't have as many much you can't spend as much
Speaker 1: time farming. So the fact that the US is producing
Speaker 1: a lot of food, they're able to sell a shipload
Speaker 1: of it in Europe um and when these wars end,
Speaker 1: it's terrible for the U S. Economy. Right up in Ohio,
Speaker 1: History Central explains during the various various British French conflicts,
Speaker 1: United States goods, especially agricultural products, were in high demand
Speaker 1: in Europe. The U S public had purchased western land
Speaker 1: at an extravagant rate. In eighteen fifteen, people in the
Speaker 1: U S. Purchased roughly one million acres of land from
Speaker 1: the federal government. In eighteen nineteen, the amount of landed
Speaker 1: skyrocket into three and a half million acres. Many people
Speaker 1: in the United States could not afford to purchase the
Speaker 1: land out right. The federal government did allow buying land
Speaker 1: on credit. As the economy ground to a halt in
Speaker 1: eighteen nineteen, many people in the US did not have
Speaker 1: the money to pay off their loans. The Bank of
Speaker 1: the United States, as well as state and private banks
Speaker 1: began recalling loans demanding immediate payment. The bank's accident actions
Speaker 1: resulted in the banking crisis of eighteen nineteen and helped
Speaker 1: lead to the panic. So you know, it's like it's
Speaker 1: it's a mortgage crisis basically. Yeah, it's this the that
Speaker 1: keeps happening. Um. The resulting clusterfuck is particularly devastating in Kentucky,
Speaker 1: where the frontier is active and people have been buying
Speaker 1: a lot of land. Um. It was also like devastating
Speaker 1: in Ohio for the same reasons, and it it destroys
Speaker 1: basically anyone with a business, right Like the bottom falls
Speaker 1: out of the currency and the audubonds lose everything. James
Speaker 1: even goes to jail for his debts and is forced
Speaker 1: to declare bankruptcy in order to get out of being
Speaker 1: locked up. Um. Yeah, it's rough, rough times. The only
Speaker 1: meaningful possessions he has left at the end of this
Speaker 1: period are his art supplies and the portfolio of bird
Speaker 1: drawings he'd accumulated over the years. So the first stage
Speaker 1: of life business doesn't work out, but thanks to all
Speaker 1: the slave selling, he has art supplies. UM. I don't
Speaker 1: feel bad for him, but like rock bottom does look
Speaker 1: a lot like walking around with a bunch of pictures
Speaker 1: of birds and nothing else, and that that's rock bottom
Speaker 1: for this guy. Yeah, that makes sense. All he's got
Speaker 1: is his birds and his pencils. Um. So that's how
Speaker 1: he decides to get his family back on his feet.
Speaker 1: He starts by drawing portraits for five bucks ahead. Um
Speaker 1: of just like, whoever's got five dollars, I'll draw your portraits.
Speaker 1: And he's good enough that his friends help him find
Speaker 1: work painting museum exhibits and doing taxidermy for a museum
Speaker 1: in Cincinnati. Um. He gets a gig at the Peel
Speaker 1: Museum in Philadelphia, where he's hired to mountain stuffed birds
Speaker 1: on natural backgrounds. And again, he's better at this than
Speaker 1: anybody else alive is so he gets connections very quickly
Speaker 1: to wealthy and influential naturalists. Everyone notices like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: these are the only stuffed birds that don't look like shit.
Speaker 1: Um So, a well off young artist related to the
Speaker 1: Philly museum keeper tells Audubon that there's a job opportunity
Speaker 1: exploring the uncharted by white people lands beyond the Mississippi.
Speaker 1: The Cincinnati museum needed more birds specimen samples of the
Speaker 1: new species that we're waiting out in the wild. Um.
Speaker 1: People have been like, I documenting these animals, but like
Speaker 1: all you have his crew drawings really and so he's like, well,
Speaker 1: I want some shot and stuffed and and documented and
Speaker 1: brought back to the museum. So James goes out into
Speaker 1: the frontier and he just starts shooting and documenting a
Speaker 1: funckload of birds. He's been sent so many specimens back
Speaker 1: to the museum that they owe him twelve hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: which is like thirty grand and modern money, um, which
Speaker 1: would have been enough to get his family in good
Speaker 1: financial health. But Cincinnati is a town full of liars
Speaker 1: and cheats, and the museum refuses to pay him. Wow,
Speaker 1: scumbag museum. Fucking museums. That's why I don't go in them.
Speaker 1: This is why the motto of this show is burn
Speaker 1: every museum. That's it's right, it's behind the bastards, every
Speaker 1: one of them. I mean, honestly, depending on the museum,
Speaker 1: it's like, I mean, it's still have stolen ship. Anyway.
Speaker 1: The last the last museum I was in was in
Speaker 1: in Brussels, and they had an exhibit of those terra
Speaker 1: Cotta soldiers, and I almost got into a fist fight
Speaker 1: with those terras. What do you fucking doing in this museum?
Speaker 1: Fucking museum, asked, piece of shit? What I said to
Speaker 1: the terra Cotta soldier. I got ship faced in the
Speaker 1: gunner outside the London Museum and went in drunk. And
Speaker 1: that was a blast. Oh, because there's no like, there's
Speaker 1: a rule against being You could be as drunk as
Speaker 1: you want. No, no, I I They'll serve you alcohol
Speaker 1: in the lubra. And well, at least I brought alcohol
Speaker 1: into the lubra. In any case, I was drunk in
Speaker 1: the in the um, it's liberating. So he gets sucked
Speaker 1: over by this ship museum and he has to send
Speaker 1: his family to live with relatives while he sets off
Speaker 1: into the wild again to try and find make even
Speaker 1: more money. And he takes an eighteen year old boy
Speaker 1: with him. Um, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. Um,
Speaker 1: they gather a bunch of specimens. It wasn't fine until
Speaker 1: you said it like that. I mean, it's one of
Speaker 1: those things. I've never heard any allegations it wasn't. It's just,
Speaker 1: you know, it's when you say, what's happened. Yeah, these
Speaker 1: were the were like if we existed back in the day,
Speaker 1: we'd have like an eighteen year old boy. You have
Speaker 1: a boy who doesn't have a podcasting boy. We do
Speaker 1: have a podcasting boy here. So with an eighteen year
Speaker 1: old he goes into the woods and things are fine.
Speaker 1: He gets a lot of specimens to see if he
Speaker 1: can sell them to museum that's not run by crooks.
Speaker 1: And he shoots and he poses, and he sketches just
Speaker 1: thousands of animals. Smithsonian Magazine notes quote After drawing, he
Speaker 1: often performed an anatomical dissection. Then, because he usually worked
Speaker 1: deep in the wilderness, far from home, he cooked and
Speaker 1: ate his specimens. Many of the descriptions in his Ornithological
Speaker 1: Biography mentioned how a species tastes, testimony to how quickly
Speaker 1: the largely self taught artist drew. The flesh of this
Speaker 1: bird is tough and unfit for food, he writes of
Speaker 1: the raven. The green winged teal, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: has delicious flesh, probably the best of any of its tribe.
Speaker 1: And I would readily agree with any epicure in saying
Speaker 1: that when it has fed on wild oats at Green
Speaker 1: Bay or unsoaked rice in the fields of Georgia and
Speaker 1: the Carolinas for a few weeks after its arrival in
Speaker 1: those countries. It is much superior to the canvas back
Speaker 1: in tenderness, juiciness, and flavor. There's a lot of extinct
Speaker 1: birds that we know how they taste because he shot
Speaker 1: them and ate them. I love how this episode is
Speaker 1: behind the bastards for humans and for birds. Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: birds can listen to this episode if they want to. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is all of my content is meant
Speaker 1: for human beings and for crows. But I do get.
Speaker 1: I do get the use of also noting how tasty
Speaker 1: they are because they're like you shouldn't want to know. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna shoot him, you should also eat their meat.
Speaker 1: Like he's not. It's just again more, this guy is
Speaker 1: like a hair's breadth away from going serial killer. Yeah no,
Speaker 1: no again. It feels like at any second he'll be
Speaker 1: like next. This story could turn, and it does turn,
Speaker 1: but in a I mean it does turn um even
Speaker 1: more than it has so. The mid late night eighteen
Speaker 1: twenties is a time in which natural sciences in America
Speaker 1: in Europe are undergoing the period of what's called institutionalization. Previously,
Speaker 1: the work of documenting and studying animals had been done
Speaker 1: by volunteers who are like gentleman scientists. Right, They're they're
Speaker 1: rich dilettants with hobbies. Right. And that's what a lout
Speaker 1: of on is. He's a rich kid who, because he
Speaker 1: doesn't have to like struggle as a as a child
Speaker 1: and a young man, is able to just kind of
Speaker 1: like spend a lot of his time focusing on naturalism. Right.
Speaker 1: And and it feels like during this time it's less
Speaker 1: about like academic knowledge and more like who'll go out
Speaker 1: and stuff a bunch of birds? Yeah? Yeah, the work.
Speaker 1: Who has the time and the relative freedom to be
Speaker 1: able to do that? Kind of rich guy? Yeah, stick
Speaker 1: your head in all these holes, yeah, and just see
Speaker 1: what's in there. Well yeah, and then like write it
Speaker 1: down in this notebook, bring it back to us, and
Speaker 1: we'll figure out what to do with that information. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's that's starting to change in the eighteen twenties. Um,
Speaker 1: And there's kind of a solidifying body of scientific elites
Speaker 1: in this period that increasingly rests contempt for what they
Speaker 1: call amateurs um, which is silly because also at this time,
Speaker 1: none of the scientists are really that much better than
Speaker 1: the amateurs. But in eighteen twenty four, Audubon is rejected
Speaker 1: for membership in the Academy of Natural Sciences because they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you're an amateur and we um aren't because we've spent
Speaker 1: less time in the woods shooting birds. It doesn't make
Speaker 1: a lot of sense in this period. So and if
Speaker 1: only they knew that, like birds feels like it's keeping
Speaker 1: him from you know, yeah, yeah, you really want to
Speaker 1: encourage this guy to spend time with birds. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is this feels like his art school, you know. And
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, uh, he knows what he has
Speaker 1: done if he'd been stopped. But you know who won't
Speaker 1: be stopped day, That's right, That's right, you never will
Speaker 1: be Um often though we try, Uh, nothing stops David
Speaker 1: Bell like a mist. I'm like a fine mist coming
Speaker 1: out right doors, like a fog sweeping in through. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your doors, mainly mainly the doors. So here's a pot
Speaker 1: episode adds We're back and Sophie is complaining about things
Speaker 1: that I've done. UM's fine, which is fine. Just just
Speaker 1: know that I'm right. You usually are. But it doesn't matter, Sophie. No,
Speaker 1: it's like it's like all those people who protested the
Speaker 1: invasion of Iraq, but it still happened, just like this podcast.
Speaker 1: This is the Iraq of podcasts about the founder of ornithology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what it is. She's gonna throw a shoe
Speaker 1: at you at some point. Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: And Dave, you will form a terrorist group after I
Speaker 1: incarceraate you in a prison and take over large chunks
Speaker 1: of Syria and Iracta. That's me. You're going to be
Speaker 1: the Isis of this story. Yeah, this has gotten away
Speaker 1: from me. I'm gonna be honest with you. I mean
Speaker 1: I was. I was going to accept like Rumsfeld or something.
Speaker 1: I'm perfectly happy with Isis over here. That's better to
Speaker 1: be Isis than Donald Rumsfeld. That is the general streuth
Speaker 1: about history. So his drawings, he gets rejected kind of
Speaker 1: initially by the scientific community, but his drawings are just
Speaker 1: so good that he's able to build a solid career.
Speaker 1: Like they can't like, they don't like that he's this
Speaker 1: kind of dilettante scientist, but nobody's better at at drawing birds.
Speaker 1: So he continually builds a name for himself, and eventually
Speaker 1: he's able to Yeah, I'm sorry, that's the thing. I realized.
Speaker 1: My dad, who's an artist in like the seventies, he
Speaker 1: used to like drew schematics and stuff, and you realize
Speaker 1: during that time, it's like, yeah, I mean, how else
Speaker 1: are they going to get them? Yeah, Like, there's no computers.
Speaker 1: You just need to hire someone who can draw ship
Speaker 1: and that was important. That was important. And he does
Speaker 1: well enough at this that finally, Dave, he's able to
Speaker 1: buy more human beings for his wife and children to
Speaker 1: he's able to do it. He gets bad, he's able
Speaker 1: to finally after you know, it's like pawning, you know,
Speaker 1: your car or your TV. He's a that's that's human
Speaker 1: beings for him. Finally, Kevin his comic book collection after yeah,
Speaker 1: good good not no no no, So this is bad bad.
Speaker 1: The fact that he has slaves again allows him to
Speaker 1: continue spending the vast majority of his time nowhere near
Speaker 1: his family, gunning down and drawing birds in the wilderness,
Speaker 1: you know, right up for Audubon dot Org, Gregor Gregory
Speaker 1: Nobles notes quote, although never fully acknowledged, people of color,
Speaker 1: African Americans, and Native Americans had a part in making
Speaker 1: that massive project possible. Audubon occasionally relied on these local
Speaker 1: observer for assistance in collecting specimens, and he sometimes accepted
Speaker 1: their information about birds and incorporated it into his writings.
Speaker 1: But even though Audubon found black and indigenous people scientifically useful,
Speaker 1: he never accepted them as socially or racially equal. He
Speaker 1: took pains to distinguish himself from them, and writing about
Speaker 1: an expedition in Florida in December eighteen thirty one, Audubon
Speaker 1: noted that he set out in a boat with sixtens,
Speaker 1: with six enslaved black men hands as he called them,
Speaker 1: and three white men, his emphasis clearly underscoring the racial
Speaker 1: divide in the boat and his place on the white
Speaker 1: side of it. So he's he writes in this that
Speaker 1: like we we set out with six hands and three
Speaker 1: white men. Right. Like, he's very consciously not referring to
Speaker 1: the black people as humans. Um, because he's a racist. Um.
Speaker 1: He sucks. Yeah. So by eighteen twenty six, John James
Speaker 1: had realized that he had a purpose on this earth.
Speaker 1: His great work, which is what he calls it, would
Speaker 1: be to decisively identify name and sketch every single bird
Speaker 1: species and the parts of North America controlled by the
Speaker 1: US government. He called this book the Birds of America,
Speaker 1: and it was to be a four volume massive work
Speaker 1: of art and science. There would be engraved images of
Speaker 1: four nineties species, each drawing the actual size of life
Speaker 1: of the bird itself. This is like a massive massively.
Speaker 1: You can see some of them in like museums like
Speaker 1: it's it's the size like a person sized book um.
Speaker 1: Most experts agree that even today he has not been
Speaker 1: surpassed in depicting birds in this manner. He's like the
Speaker 1: best there's ever been at drawn birds. So no one
Speaker 1: in the US cares to fund his ridiculous giant bird book.
Speaker 1: So he leaves his family behind and he sails to
Speaker 1: Europe for several years, and he brings with him a plan.
Speaker 1: He knew Europeans were obsessed with big new animals no
Speaker 1: one had seen before, so Audubon brought with him a
Speaker 1: drawing of a brand new species of North American eagle
Speaker 1: he called the bird of Washington, which he claimed to
Speaker 1: have sketched in the Pacific Northwest. Now this bird didn't exist,
Speaker 1: it never has. He made it up, So yes, I
Speaker 1: can get behind behind. He have been doing this from
Speaker 1: day one. He should have been lying way more about birds.
Speaker 1: You didn't even nego shoot anything, Just make draw some
Speaker 1: fake birds, man, fake no human suffering. Just draw fake birds,
Speaker 1: claim you saw them. We would have believed, We would
Speaker 1: be believing him. Now. There would be people if he
Speaker 1: had just like been like, oh, yeah, there's like a
Speaker 1: four winged bird in uh in a in Michigan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a ton of them. There would be people whose whole
Speaker 1: life would revolve around finding hiding in the like waiting
Speaker 1: in the woods for that bird. There card stone statues
Speaker 1: of them out in front of like rest stops in
Speaker 1: the middle of nowhere. We just assumed that we like
Speaker 1: killed them all, you know, we just assumed, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I guess our pollution or whatever like you could have
Speaker 1: this is the time. He doesn't Maybe he doesn't know it,
Speaker 1: but this is the time to invent birds. It's a
Speaker 1: shame bird invent We could have so many more cryptids
Speaker 1: if he had really, if he'd gone really gone for it.
Speaker 1: So you know, there is some debate over whether or
Speaker 1: not he made a mistake or lied, but most experts
Speaker 1: seemed to agree that he was just kind of forging
Speaker 1: a bird in order to m up more excitement about
Speaker 1: his book. Um. For one thing, by this point, it
Speaker 1: was the standard scientifically that when you proposed the existence
Speaker 1: of a new species, you provided physical evidence. You would
Speaker 1: like shoot it and and preserve it and be like,
Speaker 1: look here's this, Like there's a new bird, and here's
Speaker 1: the pieces of it. Um. And he did this for
Speaker 1: a lot of other birds, like he was doing this
Speaker 1: for hundreds of animals. He doesn't do this for the
Speaker 1: bird of Washington. Um. And so a lot of people
Speaker 1: will note that, like, well, maybe that's evidence that he
Speaker 1: was just this was just a con from the beginning. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, And this, the bird of Washington is the
Speaker 1: first bird that Audubon would display when he would like
Speaker 1: sit in front of gatherings of wealthy people to try
Speaker 1: to get him to pay money. Um. And he succeeds.
Speaker 1: He drums up a lot of huge amounts of money,
Speaker 1: enough to fund the Birds of America. That's good God,
Speaker 1: it's just this. Everything everything sucks about this time, like
Speaker 1: mostly the slavery mostly, but also the fact that like
Speaker 1: you could commit bird forgery to get funding from wealthy
Speaker 1: people who are like, yes, I will fund your bird
Speaker 1: exposition to like, like, we're still at that point in
Speaker 1: the world where it's just like I would like to
Speaker 1: know about all the birds that's around my god damn motherfucker.
Speaker 1: Again to your point earlier, if it's that easy to
Speaker 1: con rich people out of money by making up birds,
Speaker 1: why didn't you make up more birds? Come on, come on,
Speaker 1: man it from the start. As a lover of think
Speaker 1: of the X Files episodes we could have gotten if
Speaker 1: he'd made up like a bird with with claw went
Speaker 1: after the Jersey Devil episode was pretty damn good. We
Speaker 1: could have had like two or three more. They would
Speaker 1: have been amazing. We could have got the whole more
Speaker 1: other season out of just birds. Yeah, they could have
Speaker 1: been a spinoff called Agent Mulder bird Hunter. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: he just he just fights man size birds all the time.
Speaker 1: What a tragedy inc he makes. He gets people give
Speaker 1: him a bunch of money. Uh, and he returns to
Speaker 1: North America and he finishes his great work. And while
Speaker 1: he's doing this, he's able to mix his two passions
Speaker 1: at this point, which you should know are lying in racism.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from Gregory Nobles again. Audubon also
Speaker 1: through his writing manipulated racial tensions to enhance his notoriety.
Speaker 1: The Tale of the Runaway, one of the episodes about
Speaker 1: American life he inserted into his three thousand page five
Speaker 1: volume Ornithological Biography, A companion to Birds of America, spins
Speaker 1: the tale of an encounter with a black man in
Speaker 1: a Louisiana swamp. Audubon, who had been hunting wood storks
Speaker 1: with his dog Plato, had a gun, but so did
Speaker 1: the black man. After a brief face off, both men
Speaker 1: put down their weapons. Even as he described the tension easing,
Speaker 1: Audubon had already hooked into the fears of his readers.
Speaker 1: Published three years after Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion in eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty one, The Runaway presented the most menacing image of
Speaker 1: imaginable for many white people, the sudden specter of an
Speaker 1: armed black man. Audubon knew how to get people's attention.
Speaker 1: He also knew how to put himself in the most
Speaker 1: favorable light. The man and his family had escaped slavery,
Speaker 1: and we're living in the s As the and as
Speaker 1: the tail unfolds, Audubon spent the night at the family's encampment.
Speaker 1: Companion of believe it also quite at their mercy. It
Speaker 1: was the fugitives, however, who were really the most vulnerable.
Speaker 1: The next morning, Audubon took them back to the plantation
Speaker 1: of their first master and convinced the planter to buy
Speaker 1: the enslaved people back from the masters, to which the
Speaker 1: family had been divided and sold. And that was that.
Speaker 1: Reunited but still enslaved, the black family was rendered as
Speaker 1: happy as slaves generally are in that country. That's Audubon's words,
Speaker 1: exactly what happiness. Audubon did not say in the span
Speaker 1: of a single story, true or not, and many of
Speaker 1: Audubon's episodes were not. Audubon portrayed himself as both the
Speaker 1: savior of a fugitive family and a defender of slaveholders
Speaker 1: claims to human property rights. Because bleak, that's a really
Speaker 1: bleak story. It's bleak if he made it all up.
Speaker 1: It's also bleak if he took this family who had
Speaker 1: like freed themselves after getting split up back to a
Speaker 1: slave owner where they were surely split up again, right
Speaker 1: to quote unquote like save them. Ah, it's pretty bad.
Speaker 1: That's a that's that's that's a blique story. Um. The
Speaker 1: Birds of America and the works that followed made Audubon
Speaker 1: a household name among people who liked birds. He traveled
Speaker 1: back and forth to Europe, where he was a celebrity,
Speaker 1: and he doubled and trebled down on his racism. In
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty four, he wrote his wife to complain when
Speaker 1: the British government made slavery illegal, arguing they had quote
Speaker 1: acted imprudently and to precipitously. Now, in his later life,
Speaker 1: Audubon seems to have taken personal umbrage at the idea
Speaker 1: of enslaved people, some of whom may well have been
Speaker 1: his ancestors, freeing themselves. In a letter written for his sons,
Speaker 1: he described his birth mother, who he had never known,
Speaker 1: as a lady of Spanish extraction from Louisiana, which is
Speaker 1: not true. He claimed she had gone back to San
Speaker 1: Domain with his father and become quote one of the
Speaker 1: victims during the ever to be limited period of Negro
Speaker 1: insurrection on that island. So he lies and claims that
Speaker 1: his mom had been murdered during a slave uprising, when
Speaker 1: the reality is that his mom may have been in uh,
Speaker 1: if not just mixed race, that possibly even an enslaved person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: involved in something. Yea, it is unclear what the truth
Speaker 1: is of his parentage, but we know that he is
Speaker 1: lying about this. Um and Gregory Nobles, who is He's
Speaker 1: writing for the Audubon Society. Nobles is a is a
Speaker 1: a black member of the Audubon Society, and suspects that
Speaker 1: Audubon may have made this claim because quote having a
Speaker 1: European mother killed by black rebels reinforced a white identity
Speaker 1: and in an American society where whiteness proved and still
Speaker 1: proves the safest form of social identity, which you know,
Speaker 1: it makes sense. Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense overall.
Speaker 1: The story. It just shows like, yeah, I just think
Speaker 1: it's a it's an amazing example of how slavery and
Speaker 1: racism is just was fucking like you can put an
Speaker 1: asterisk like under basically any invention that started during this
Speaker 1: time and saying like yeah, and it was built upon
Speaker 1: the suffering of a bunch of people, like fucking bird watching.
Speaker 1: I gotta pay for those pencils somehow, Dave, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it seems like you could have avoided this.
Speaker 1: A person could have avoided inventing bird watching without brutalizing.
Speaker 1: A bunch of people would have figured out how to
Speaker 1: draw birds right like we would have gotten that down
Speaker 1: without the slavery. In eighteen forty three, John James set
Speaker 1: out on what was to be his last adventure into
Speaker 1: the wilds. He went up the Missus. He went up
Speaker 1: the Missouri River and out the yellow Stone. At fifty
Speaker 1: eight years old, he was just on the verge of
Speaker 1: being too old to handle the rigors of the journey.
Speaker 1: His project this trip was a catalog of specimens and
Speaker 1: engravings to be called Quadrupeds of North America. This was
Speaker 1: a worthy scientific undertaking, Yet John James embarked on another,
Speaker 1: much less worthy endeavor. The eighteen forties was a period
Speaker 1: in which Dr Samuel George Morton was beginning to lay
Speaker 1: out the underpinnings of what would become scientific racism. He
Speaker 1: believed that cranial capacity and thus, in his belief, intelligence
Speaker 1: must mirror his preconceptions about the intelligence of races. Thus, black, indigenous,
Speaker 1: Hispanic people, et cetera must have less cranial capacity than
Speaker 1: white people. Now this is the branch of science that
Speaker 1: becomes phrenology and eventually a punch of even worship. Besides
Speaker 1: John James Audubon was super into it, and he was
Speaker 1: also way into Morton, who had become his patron right
Speaker 1: up and Commonplace Online notes Morton was a generation younger
Speaker 1: than Audubon, but the friendship between the two men ran
Speaker 1: back through the eighteen thirties. Morton, with his institutional connections,
Speaker 1: helped to share Audubon a place in the country's scientific establishment.
Speaker 1: He settled some of Audubon's debts when the artist was
Speaker 1: in England and soothed his worries about upstart rivals. In return,
Speaker 1: Audubon looked for skulls for Morton. European craniologists weren't ready
Speaker 1: to share their skulls with the Americans, although Audubon did
Speaker 1: find Morton a portfolio of sketches. So while he's shooting
Speaker 1: a drawing squirrels, he visits indigenous villages, villages of the
Speaker 1: Mandan and sen Boyne, indigenous people's um and these villages
Speaker 1: have been like smallpox is like killed most of the
Speaker 1: people there, right, So he's he's he's stumbling into these
Speaker 1: villages after watching them get wiped out. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from Commonplace Online again about what he does next.
Speaker 1: The epidemic had been devastating. Audubon new during the week
Speaker 1: spent at Fort Union, he penned an account of the
Speaker 1: fearful ravages of smallpox. He must have known that a
Speaker 1: people nearly exterminated left few to help bury the dead.
Speaker 1: The skulls Audubon collected for Morton that summer earned casual
Speaker 1: mentions in his journal. On June eighteenth, he and his
Speaker 1: companions puzzled over when it might be best to take
Speaker 1: away the schools, some six or seven in number, all
Speaker 1: a sinaboy in Indians. On June twenty two, walking over
Speaker 1: the prairie, I found an Indian skull and put it
Speaker 1: in my game pouch. And on July two he and
Speaker 1: a companion walked off with a bag of instruments to
Speaker 1: take off the head of a three year old dead
Speaker 1: Indian chief called the White Cow. They tumbled the coffin
Speaker 1: out of a tree burial and found a body wrapped
Speaker 1: into buffalo ropes and enveloped in an American flag. They
Speaker 1: took the head, Audubon wrote, and left the rest on
Speaker 1: the ground. Morton's catalog also credited Audubon with contributing the
Speaker 1: skull of a fifty year old blackfoot man named Bloody Hand,
Speaker 1: along with the heads of two Upsaroka men, both about
Speaker 1: forty years old, and two schools twelve thirty a centaboy
Speaker 1: in Indian of Missouri, woman estimated twenty years old, centa
Speaker 1: boy and woman estimated like, yeah, they're eighty five years old.
Speaker 1: He gives all these like different that's all they've become,
Speaker 1: like numbers twelve thirty and twelve thirty one from J. J.
Speaker 1: Audubon Esquire, you know, like a d eighteen forty five,
Speaker 1: like the year it's found, the number of the skull,
Speaker 1: and the guy who found it no attempts to find
Speaker 1: the numbers of the human beings. These these belong to um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's one of those things. It's also just
Speaker 1: like bad anthropology because it's not about anthropology, it's about
Speaker 1: proving racism. Because they're there for it's for shitty science. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's grave robbing for bad science. Yeah, because they like
Speaker 1: find this cheap. Not that it would have been good
Speaker 1: if they had like done what you know Egyptologists do,
Speaker 1: and like you find this chief who has been buried
Speaker 1: in the specific way with with artifacts, and you like
Speaker 1: take the whole thing to a museum like that would
Speaker 1: have been bad too, But they're not even doing that.
Speaker 1: They're just like ripping the skull out and leaving the
Speaker 1: rest on the ground, right, they just need skulls. It's
Speaker 1: like even worse than normal gray robbing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's none of it's great. Like like you said,
Speaker 1: even if it was for a science that like made sense, Yeah,
Speaker 1: even if it was getting useful scientific data, it would
Speaker 1: be bad. And it's absolutely not. Um So, Audubon was
Speaker 1: not quite as prolific at skull stealing as he wasn't
Speaker 1: shooting random animals and sketching them, but he was still
Speaker 1: pretty prolific. Skull collection is listed in one of his books,
Speaker 1: and in eighteen forty it contained a lot of Audubon
Speaker 1: stolen skulls um and not all of them him belonged
Speaker 1: to indigenous people. I'm gonna quote now from Morton's like
Speaker 1: Skull Diary number five five five Mexican soldier with three
Speaker 1: sick a tricks gunshot wounds in the right prietal bone,
Speaker 1: slain at sand just said to eight thirty six J. J.
Speaker 1: Audibon esquire five five six Mexican soldier with Cicatrix Depression
Speaker 1: of frontal and nasal bones Lane at San Jacinto, eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty six. J. J. Audubon est like he goes to
Speaker 1: battlefields and he just digs up corpses of Mexican soldiers
Speaker 1: and takes their skulls. Look, there are worse ways to
Speaker 1: get skulls, but not many, but not like not a lot.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm mostly thinking of the one other way. But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is pretty scummy. Yeah, it's it's pretty bad.
Speaker 1: It's pretty bad, like just go into a battlefield and
Speaker 1: digging up dead men and taking their sucking bones to
Speaker 1: give to your friend in New York or where Philly.
Speaker 1: I think so. Obviously, John Audubon is not the only
Speaker 1: racist naturalist who would play a foundational role in White
Speaker 1: America's concept of the great outdoors. We will one day
Speaker 1: to talk about John Muir, who is it plays a
Speaker 1: huge positive role in a lot of aspects of the
Speaker 1: national park system and stuff. He's got a great park
Speaker 1: near San Francisco named after him. Also just the most
Speaker 1: racist dude you can like, so, and there's a yeah,
Speaker 1: it'd be hard to think that the person who like
Speaker 1: established parks wasn't like a massive racist right, right, because
Speaker 1: there's a lot of that in the idea of like
Speaker 1: the idea that develops of the great outdoors, which is
Speaker 1: nearly always a place in which like, well it's just
Speaker 1: white people who are supposed to be partaking in at
Speaker 1: like yeah, um, and obviously it's It's also worth noting
Speaker 1: John James Audubon is not even like the only famous
Speaker 1: bird watcher in this period to steal indigenous people's skulls.
Speaker 1: It's it's a it's a way to make extra money.
Speaker 1: If if you're a naturalist, is like, well, you can
Speaker 1: also steal some skulls, you know. Yeah, it makes sense
Speaker 1: in the sense of like, so when you're playing a
Speaker 1: video game, they often have the like go collect these
Speaker 1: items and this items, and you can do both at once.
Speaker 1: So it's like, yeah, I'm out in the woods collecting
Speaker 1: some extra XP and I can grab grab some skulls
Speaker 1: while I'm atic. Right, If they were saying, like, pick
Speaker 1: some berries, they would do that, but no, they want skulls,
Speaker 1: so there picking picking skulls. John Kirk Townsend was a
Speaker 1: pioneering ornithologist. In eighteen thirty four, he won a grant
Speaker 1: from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and he
Speaker 1: crossed over the Pacific coast to gather specimens, many of
Speaker 1: which were then sketched by Audubon, so he and Audubon
Speaker 1: would work together. Researcher Matthew Holly recently discovered a letter
Speaker 1: from Townsend to Morton which gives good insight and how
Speaker 1: he and Audubon went about their grim work. Quote. I
Speaker 1: was enjoying the society of civilized beings again. And believe me,
Speaker 1: my dear doctor, that this was no small treat to me,
Speaker 1: after having been compelled to sojourn for such a length
Speaker 1: of time amongst savages little better than brutal beasts. I
Speaker 1: send you a few skulls, one of a clickitat Indian.
Speaker 1: You will observe the characteristic flat also put and some
Speaker 1: quadrupeds and birds. It is rather a perilous business to
Speaker 1: procure Indian skulls in this country. The natives are so
Speaker 1: jealous of you that they watch you very closely while
Speaker 1: you are wandering near their mausoleums. An instant to sanguineous
Speaker 1: vngeance would fall upon the luckless white who should presume
Speaker 1: to interfere with the sacred relics. I have succeeded in
Speaker 1: hooking one, however, such as it is, and no doubt
Speaker 1: in the course of the winter I shall get more.
Speaker 1: There's an epidemic raging among them, which carries them off
Speaker 1: so fast that the cemeteries will soon lack watchers. I
Speaker 1: don't rejoice in the prospect of the death of the
Speaker 1: poor creatures, certainly, but then you know, it will be
Speaker 1: very convenient for my purposes. Yeah, that's pretty bad. They're
Speaker 1: poor creatures. Yeah, yeah, he's he's treating them just like animals.
Speaker 1: He's like, oh, well, they're all dying, but that's gonna
Speaker 1: be good for me. He's treating them like birds. He
Speaker 1: also he calls himself a white which is like a ghoule,
Speaker 1: like stealing from a graveyard. So he knows kind of
Speaker 1: what he's doing, right, Yeah, but it makes sense because
Speaker 1: he doesn't think of them as people. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of like we we talk about animals where we're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're kind of we're kind of like they're boogeymen, you know, like,
Speaker 1: and so he's because he's humanized him them, he could
Speaker 1: kind of be like, yeah, I'm kind of an I'm
Speaker 1: kind of a little bit of a boogeyman. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: they're not people, so it's it doesn't matter. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's exactly his attitude. Now, obviously, Dave, it was not
Speaker 1: terribly long before large numbers of people began to consider
Speaker 1: the mass theft of indigenous human beings remains to be
Speaker 1: evil um and in the article he writes on this process,
Speaker 1: Hallie does a good job of summarizing how modern institutions
Speaker 1: have protected the collection of these stolen skulls, which both
Speaker 1: Audubon and towns and contributed towards. The skulls mentioned in
Speaker 1: this letter and others stolen by towns in an Audubond
Speaker 1: were in the collection of the A n SP until
Speaker 1: the mid twentieth century, when they were transferred to the
Speaker 1: University of Pennsylvania's Penn Museum. The institutions that were culpable
Speaker 1: in the assembly of the Morton collection have not publicly apologized,
Speaker 1: to my knowledge, to the tribes that the materials were
Speaker 1: stolen from. Rather, they have passed the buck of responsibility.
Speaker 1: Pin unsurprisingly considers the collection an exceptional historic resource and
Speaker 1: has delayed the repatriation of the materials. According to the
Speaker 1: Native American Graves Project and Repatriation Act. Institutions that take
Speaker 1: federal funding, as pinned it in two thousand five for
Speaker 1: the expansion and improvement of the Pin Cranials Database, must
Speaker 1: repatriot materials with providence at the tribe's request. It is
Speaker 1: true that some remains from the Morton Correct collection have
Speaker 1: been repatriated, but nearly thirty years have passed since Nagara
Speaker 1: was signed into law. PIN is moving at a glacial
Speaker 1: pace considering the magnitude of the of the infraction, and
Speaker 1: the institutions that helped to assemble the Racist skull collection
Speaker 1: are tight lipped. And I have read there's a book
Speaker 1: I found about the bone trade in in Stolen Bones
Speaker 1: UM called Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits by Chip cole Well,
Speaker 1: who's like doing part of his job is to like
Speaker 1: sit in a museum and put together groups of bones
Speaker 1: to send back to the tribes they were stolen from UM.
Speaker 1: And there's always like he describes in like kind of
Speaker 1: in very stirring detail, like what what this process is
Speaker 1: like because the kind of a ritual element to it,
Speaker 1: because it's essentially kind of a funereal, Right, it's this
Speaker 1: whole is this whole thing. It is proceeding slowly now, um,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of worth noting how much work different
Speaker 1: college is put into like not doing this. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: really dragging ass something because they were bones. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: what what is? Why do they need the goddamn bones?
Speaker 1: How what use could they possibly have now if not
Speaker 1: just shame where they're like, we don't want to admit
Speaker 1: that we have all these bones. We don't want to
Speaker 1: give them up, you know, just give back the bones.
Speaker 1: There's only one acceptable way to get a skull, and
Speaker 1: it is to ask the person, can I have your skull?
Speaker 1: If you die before me, and then you put it,
Speaker 1: you write it down, you have it written down, and
Speaker 1: then you get a skull. And I'm sorry that if
Speaker 1: that sounds inconvenient to all you skull collectors, I don't
Speaker 1: know what to tell you. That's how. That's the only
Speaker 1: way to get a skull. I don't. I feel like
Speaker 1: winning them in battle is okay? Yeah, yeah, women in battle.
Speaker 1: If you take a skull in battle, you get to
Speaker 1: keep it. Um. Those are the two ways. Um. But
Speaker 1: but it's gotta be like it's gotta be like hand
Speaker 1: to hand, you know, you can't be like shooting people
Speaker 1: for the skulls. You've gotta be like fist fighting. If
Speaker 1: you fist fight a dude and take his skull, you
Speaker 1: get to keep it. Yeah, and you better. You got
Speaker 1: to take the skull. You're so you gotta take that
Speaker 1: skull yourself. That's on you. That's you. Yeah, that is
Speaker 1: a way to earn a skull. But pretty two ways,
Speaker 1: two ways, yeah, although I do feel like you'd want
Speaker 1: to because it's two it's two very different skulls, right, Like, uh,
Speaker 1: if I have a skull that I just politely asked for,
Speaker 1: I don't want to misrepresent how I got that skull
Speaker 1: because then I feel like a fraud. But yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's it. Yeah. So these give give the bone back,
Speaker 1: Give the bones back, that's it, get back, get back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not hard. Yeah. So Audubon Society gets formed in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty one, or yeah, sorry, the Audubon Society gets
Speaker 1: formed years after John James Audubon dies in eighteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: M And from a purely scientific standpoint, like obviously he
Speaker 1: did a lot for bird watching. Um, and you know,
Speaker 1: for a while they try to ignore this. There's biographies
Speaker 1: published that really whitewash all the racism and skull stealing.
Speaker 1: The Audubon society really didn't start to grapple with it
Speaker 1: in a major open way until May. Uh can you
Speaker 1: guys why? Yeah? And actually a big part is remember
Speaker 1: when that that black birdwatcher in New York got like
Speaker 1: accosted by a white woman who like called the police
Speaker 1: on him. After that was like a big inciting incident
Speaker 1: in the Audubon society being like, we should probably deal,
Speaker 1: we'd probably acknowledge some of this. Man, Just I don't
Speaker 1: think it's another thing. It's like returning the bones. It's like,
Speaker 1: just acknowledge it. Like it's yeah, if your ancestors or
Speaker 1: you're like everything was built upon fucking slavery and racism
Speaker 1: in this country, it's not gonna shock anybody. It's like
Speaker 1: when Ben Affleck like paid to have that PBS show
Speaker 1: ignore that he was like the descendant of slave owners,
Speaker 1: and it's like, did you think, like you're the only one,
Speaker 1: But it's we're built upon shame and we have to
Speaker 1: own it because that's the only thing you can do, right. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would have ridiculous, it would have been like and
Speaker 1: it's like, especially with the Autumn Society. It's a good
Speaker 1: comparison because like they were founded after his death. It's
Speaker 1: not like the Audubon Society is like personally responsible for
Speaker 1: John James Audubon, since they just like thought he was
Speaker 1: a good dude to name themselves at. You could change
Speaker 1: the name and we'd be like, Okay, well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess bird watching probably isn't complicit in racism much beyond that, right,
Speaker 1: it'd be wild if you looked into and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I guess they're also all racists, Like the the Audubon
Speaker 1: Society is also like a white supremacy society. That would
Speaker 1: be one thing, But no, they're just fucking bird watchers
Speaker 1: who named their thing after some racist guy, and it's there.
Speaker 1: I recommend the article and Audubon dot org that I've
Speaker 1: quoted from by Gregory Noble, which is like he writes
Speaker 1: this right after that altercation, where like the woman tries
Speaker 1: to have cops kill a blackbird watcher. Like it's probably
Speaker 1: the best thing they've done in terms of like pivoting
Speaker 1: to acknowledging the problematic past. I assume there's a lot
Speaker 1: more that could be done. Again, if you want to
Speaker 1: read the articles will list of sources you can get
Speaker 1: a better idea of like some of the things people
Speaker 1: are asking and pushing. Um. But yeah, that's the story.
Speaker 1: That's a hell of a story. Yep. Thanks thanks for
Speaker 1: telling me about it. I'm glad I heard about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's yeah, it's it's you know again what
Speaker 1: I said it was. It's shocking, but not because it's like,
Speaker 1: of course every everything is fucking built upon this ship. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's more it's like almost more surprising when it's not
Speaker 1: it's fucked up. This guy sucks, yea, I will. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go steal his skull. Yeah, look, I do feel
Speaker 1: that's something we can do. Dave find where he's buried
Speaker 1: and take his bones. Yeah I think I think there's
Speaker 1: no shame in that, right, and stealing this guy's bones
Speaker 1: and then like putting in a contraption and drawing pictures
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, put it in a contraption, but also
Speaker 1: like making like a flat Stanley where we just like
Speaker 1: mail it around, like you never know when you're gonna
Speaker 1: get this guy's fucking bones, but when you get him,
Speaker 1: you can do whatever with them, you know, right, It's
Speaker 1: like everybody in America has a chance of getting This
Speaker 1: guy's getting bones. It's like cherry duty or something where
Speaker 1: you getta go out this weekend. Now I got the
Speaker 1: bones this week right, I gotta I gotta take pictures
Speaker 1: of it and figure out who to send it to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh god, what that's man. We should do that with
Speaker 1: all the problematic people. Yes, just just pass their bones
Speaker 1: around for whatever, for whatever, for whatever you feel like
Speaker 1: doing with those bones. My friend got George Washington's bones,
Speaker 1: We're gonna do blow off his skull. You want to
Speaker 1: come over for a party, like absolutely, Yeah, it sounds dope.
Speaker 1: I would do so much. I would die doing cocaine
Speaker 1: off with George Washington bones. You've never done coke? If
Speaker 1: you haven't done coke off of the stolen skull of
Speaker 1: George Washington. Yeah, oh yeah, let's do that right now.
Speaker 1: You're right, Dave, let's go Grave Robin Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: any bones, yeah, any bones? Suck it? Wait no, no, no, no, Dave,
Speaker 1: that's what got everyone into day, damn it. Alright, bones,
Speaker 1: you gotta plug anything day. I don't know, man, um,
Speaker 1: I never plug my Twitter at movie hool again, as
Speaker 1: mentioned I have with Tom Or I'm in a podcast network,
Speaker 1: and I'm the head writer over at the what's it called,
Speaker 1: someone who's so check all those things out, which I
Speaker 1: feel like most people know about most of that stuff.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and grave Rob, but only bad people, Only
Speaker 1: bad people steal the corpses of racists, all right,