Episode 50: The Last of the Mohicans with Wayne E. Lee

This is HATM's 50th episode and I wanted to do something special. This week we are joined by military historian Wayne E. Lee from the University of North Carolina to talk about The Last of the Mohicans and his new book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800. We talk about historical misconceptions of Indigenous warfare, how warfare in the Americas compares to conflict in other parts of the globe, the beauty of North Carolina, and that waterfall scene.

About our guest:
Wayne Lee specializes in early modern military history, with a particular focus on North America and the Atlantic World, but he teaches military history from a full global perspective at the undergraduate and graduate level. He also teaches courses on violence as well as on the early English exploration of the Atlantic. As a kind of additional career, he works with archaeology projects in the Balkans and has numerous publications in that field. You can find him on twitter at @MilHist_Lee

Transcript

Jason Herbert (00:00.17)
Anyway, uh, Wayne Lee, what's going on, man? How are you?

Wayne Lee (00:03.415)
Doing well, nice to be here. Always happy to talk about this movie and all the things that go with it.

Jason Herbert (00:10.934)
Man, I am, I'm stoked. First of all, to talk to you. I've been wanting to talk to you forever. I mean, we talk, when I heard the book was coming out, I was really excited to hear about it. And I was talking to my very good friend, Andrew Frank about this and a lot of us guys who studied in the native South were really excited about it. And then I was able to finally get a hold of you and you're like, let's do last of Mohicans, which was exactly what I was hoping you to say. Sometimes.

Sometimes I reach out to people and they're like, I've got a silent film from 1912 about, you know, grasshoppers in love that I'd like to talk about. And it doesn't quite hit the dynamic that we're looking for. Not that not that that's not important, but you know, so.

Wayne Lee (00:41.987)
Hahaha! Right.

Wayne Lee (00:56.403)
Oh no, I was shocked that you hadn't already done it, so I went and looked at the archive and I was like, wait a minute, Les Weekends is sitting there waiting for the taking.

Jason Herbert (01:05.022)
You know, it was funny. One of my best friends yesterday, he's in Nashville right now. And he's, he's waxing poetically to me right now about how much he loves bluegrass music. And I'm from Kentucky. So I'm like, I already know. And he says, you should do over other, we're out there sometime. And I said, great idea. That's episode 18. So, you know, I don't know if I think 44, 45, whatever it is that work. The route. And you're right. Um, so this movie is one I've been wanting to do on HATM. And actually we've never done it on the live tweet.

thing that we do on Sunday nights either. It's never been available, which is crazy because this movie has so much stuff that you can talk about, especially if you're interested in colonial history, indigenous history, American history, military history, like there are all these different things that you can do, soundtracks, West Doody, Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeline Stowe, all of these people and things and places I can talk about on end. And that in this film was actually shot in your neck of the woods, it turns out, because you're in Chapel Hill, right?

Wayne Lee (02:01.491)
Mm-hmm. Yes, very much so. Well, yeah, but even more than that, it was shot in, much of it was shot in Chimney Rock State Park, and which is near where my family has some land in the mountains of North Carolina. And when this film first hit the theaters, I was in graduate school. I think it was my first year in graduate school, and a bunch of us went to see it together. You know, we were all excited. And I'm watching it, and early on in the movie, I'm like, hang on, that looks very familiar.

And then at the, toward the end, when they're running along the little cliffside trail and headed for the waterfalls, I was like, yep, I've been on that trail and know exactly where that is. Uh, yeah. So it's, it's a big deal in the Western North Carolina. Uh, in fact, at the chimney rock state park, they've, you know, they got pictures of course, up of Daniel Day-Lewis and all sorts of things. And that's part of their marketing. Uh, it used to be a private park. And then it was sold to the state park system. I don't remember when, but it hasn't been that long.

Jason Herbert (02:40.354)
Are you serious?

Wayne Lee (03:01.323)
When I first went there, it was a private park still.

Jason Herbert (03:04.694)
This movie, people know that it's in Western North Carolina, sells the hell out of Western North Carolina because it's stunningly beautiful. And I was just in Western North Carolina last December, I stopped off to visit Cherokee Reservation and see some friends of mine up there in Cherokee and got to see some of that land and see some of the Cherokee homelands and Gidua and some of the mountains there. It was just blown away. It's that whole region. It's insane.

Wayne Lee (03:11.255)
Right.

Wayne Lee (03:31.767)
Yeah, it's a beautiful country.

Jason Herbert (03:35.062)
Um, but before we get going here, I thought maybe we might, uh, start with some basic stuff, if you, maybe you want to introduce yourself and talk about a little bit about, uh, who you are and what you do.

Wayne Lee (03:44.867)
Sure. So I'm a professor at the University of North Carolina. You mentioned during our prologue before we started recording that you're from Kentucky. But my first six years of teaching were at the University of Louisville. And then I went to, my grad school was at Duke. And before that I was in the Army for five years of active duty. And before that I was an undergraduate at Duke. And so I've...

Jason Herbert (04:03.31)
Mm.

Wayne Lee (04:10.519)
Despite my army time in my army brat time because my father had a career in the army I moved around a lot during that period but then I've keep coming back to North Carolina I've been here for a long time in one way or another And I'm a military historian for the most part. I write about lots of different things I've sort of tried to move from being a historian of one thing in one time Which you turned out to be revolutionary era, North Carolina To being a historian of the Atlantic world and then of world

interactions and connectivities and comparisons. This is what world history does. We talk about both connectivity, that is the influences that move around the world, but also comparisons. You know, the classic being medieval Europe to feudal Japan. Are there similarities or the differences? Is this a useful analogy or not? But in my effort to do world military history, sometimes I've joked that the weird thing is the last three things that I published. One was about

Jason Herbert (04:48.866)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (05:07.051)
Mongols one was about Ottomans and ones now about Native Americans. And so I've moved around quite a bit but Native Americans have always been Central to my projects in one way or another And sometimes without even me realizing it One of the most important turning points in my study of Native Americans and I want to say clearly that I'm study Native American history, but I'm

Like a lot of people, I have a specialty, right? So I study Native American military history. So I'm not an expert on native religion or on labor. Or I'm getting to be more of an expert on agriculture because it was so important to this particular book. But one of my first experiences teaching graduate school was to TA Peter Wood's Native American history class at Duke. And that was crucial foundational understanding.

not just TAing for him, but also taking my graduate level courses from him in early American history. But the real turning point was when I wrote my dissertation, I said some things in there about Native American warfare in passing, based on sort of standard literature. I didn't do a lot of primary source research. I was actually interested in what white settlers were doing and not just two Indians, but about all kinds of things in different kinds of aspects of warfare.

And one of the issues that I was briefly wrestled with in that book was the ways in which Native American styles of warfare and the nature of the threat that they represented and how that affected white forms and styles of warfare. But I didn't go very deep into the Native American side and I knew that. But as soon as I concluded the book converting the dissertation to the book, I said I need to know more about Native American warfare.

And that's when I started really doing deep dive into how that worked. And again, this gets us into the whole issue of generalizations about Native Americans and warfare and, you know, differences we can talk about. But that was how it started. And that, how it started means 2004. Parts of this book were written in 2004.

Jason Herbert (07:16.225)
Sure.

Wayne Lee (07:32.899)
This book is an accumulation now of 20 years of work, sort of going away from Native American warfare, coming back to it, going away from it, coming back to it. And all of a sudden, at a certain point, I realized that I needed to know even more because of a big comparative project I'm working on, on the nature of conquest in the pre-industrial world. And this book was necessary for me to write in order to write that book. It's a part of a...

building project. And so it brings together stuff that I was doing in 2004 with stuff that I was doing six weeks ago. And so it really is a culmination and continuation of a lot of different projects.

Jason Herbert (08:18.274)
Did you find, you know, with this book, The Cutting Off Way, which is, you know, through University of North Carolina Press, as a guy who came up studying the native south, like UNC Press has always been my favorite press, because all my heroes were publishing there as I was coming up. But, you know, did you find a call to study, say, Eastern Woodlands peoples, say, versus, say, the West? I mean, why, you know...

This book's focusing on indigenous warfare in Eastern North America. Why this particular region is just because you're from North Carolina, from the area? I mean, what was the reasoning for that? Because I do want to talk about the differences in like indigenous warfare in the Americas.

Wayne Lee (08:58.223)
Sure. No, it's because of my original background interest in colonization and the process of colonization, which was hitting primarily from my perspective, from my interest perspective, from the Eastern seaboard going west, as opposed to Spanish, Southern coming up, or the French even, North going down. And partly that's linguistic issues. My foreign languages are German and Greek and Albanian.

not Spanish and French, unfortunately. I mean, I can work my way through a lot of French texts. I can figure out what's going on. My wife's from Montreal, so she sometimes helps me with French. She's Francophone and Anglophone. And so I was interested in the colonial experience. And then the other thing that happened that really made me sort of open my eyes in some other ways was that during graduate school, right near the end when I was finishing

There is a seminar program at the Folger Shakespeare Library where a scholar will run a seminar every Friday for a semester. And they'll fly in scholars who've applied to participate to participate in the seminar, so say 10, 12 people. And scholars typically meaning senior graduate students, junior faculty, but not exclusive.

And the one that I participated in was with Karen Kuperman, who does a lot of very early contact work. Roanoke was a book that she wrote. She also wrote a book on the colony at Providence, the failed colony at Providence, not Providence, Rhode Island. And she's done a lot of other work on the very earliest 16th century stuff, you know, the attempts in Newfoundland that failed and all of Raleigh's adventuring around.

Jason Herbert (10:38.027)
Mm.

Wayne Lee (10:51.511)
Walter Raleigh's adventuring around the Caribbean as well as North Carolina, although not in person in North Carolina. And so I really got very much into those early documents, the Anglophone experience, the early documents. And I've been teaching a variation of that seminar for years now, very often in London. UNC has a house in London. And so we go to London and we read those documents there. We go visit sites in Ireland and in...

Jason Herbert (10:53.079)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (11:18.459)
England that are relevant to the early colonial experience. And so I had a deep familiarity with, you know, everything John White did and wrote, everything John Smith did and wrote, and all of the people in the ilk, plus the early Massachusetts Bay and other Northern colonies as well, so that there was a really, again, deep familiarity with those texts. And in particular, I was continuously returning to

Jason Herbert (11:34.208)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (11:47.959)
the interaction with Native Americans aspects of those texts. Because those texts all have their own purposes. They have economic hopes, they've got what kinds of plants and animals are these, you know, descriptive materials, but all the ways they were conceiving of Native Americans and then having occasionally to fight them. And that's, those of course were where my interests went. And one of the reasons I like to say this and it's because I think it interests students.

not directly related to warfare, but one of the reasons that early period is so interesting to me, one of the reasons I first gravitated towards it, all the move beyond it, is the fact that those early explorers thought that anything was possible. You know, they basically, I mean, to put it in very simple terms, they believed in magic. And they believed that anything could walk out of the trees. Any kind of creature was possible.

Jason Herbert (12:34.198)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (12:42.643)
And so there's this sort of wide-eyed, naïve Tate while also simultaneously looking for the main chance and devil bar the door for anybody who got in their way. It's just a really interesting human story of greed, chaos, magic, belief, superstition. It's just a mishmash of all sorts of things. And that's how I got started on it. And that's why I can...

continued that focus on Eastern.

Jason Herbert (13:14.994)
Yeah, I have so many questions. I, you know, I wrote my master's thesis was actually about warfare in Eastern North America as well. Uh, when I was writing about the Creek Choctaw war that takes place immediately before the American revolution. And, you know, I thought coming up, I would end up writing a lot about warfare as I went into my dissertation and eventually my first book. And certainly there's some in that. Uh, but I ended up turning away maybe to focus more on environment. So I'm definitely interested in your thoughts on agriculture.

Uh, as well. I talk a lot about cattle in my life, which I never, ever, ever experienced. I ran away from Kentucky as fast as I could to get away from tobacco and cattle and everything else like that. And it's like a Pacino and Godfather three, just what I thought I was out. You know, you know, probably, you know,

Wayne Lee (14:01.131)
Well, one of my jokes with the students in my world history class is that, you know, none of you know enough about farming. I mean, so we've got to do some basics on farming. And I start with when do poor people in Europe, when do poor people eat meat? And they just, they can't puzzle their way through it. And so we have to do the whole thing about it's around Thanksgiving. Why would it be around Thanksgiving? You know, it's because...

Jason Herbert (14:13.463)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (14:23.982)
Hmm.

Wayne Lee (14:28.795)
You've fatted up the animals all spring and you can't afford to feed them on hay through the winter, so you eat them, you keep a breeding pair or several, and you have a big feast. And then you salt the rest and that's it. But the big meat feast, especially fresh meat, is at the time it comes you got to kill a lot of the animals because you can't afford to keep them through the winter. And it's just these sort of basic calculations about the agricultural calendar that students don't have access to.

Jason Herbert (14:57.13)
Yeah, it feels like it's a thing that maybe students, I'm not making light, right? Because it's a thing that maybe you tend not to think about in 2023. There's an assumption because I think in a lot of experiences, agricultural products, you know, are products that you go and buy at the store. It's I'm not buying cattle. I'm buying beef or I'm buying hamburger meat. I'm buying this commodity at this point in time. And the disassociation of the animal to the product, I think is, you know,

Wayne Lee (15:02.936)
Hmm

Jason Herbert (15:26.562)
pretty well established out in 2023 for most folks, not all, but certainly for most of them. So there were a couple of books that came to mind when I first saw yours were coming up and you talk about them both in your book. First is Skull King Way of War that I thought about. And then also David J. Silverman's Thundersticks well, kind of popped in my, those were like the first two things when I heard about your book, I was like.

Wayne Lee (15:31.027)
Right. Yep.

Wayne Lee (15:43.372)
Right.

Jason Herbert (15:51.874)
what's this about and so forth. But before I get into like maybe comparing, say your work to some of the other stuff, I wanna talk a little bit about this cutting off way in this paradigm that you're talking about. And then maybe how we see that in Last of the Awakens. And we're kind of famous on this podcast for not talking about the movie for like the first 45 minutes, which is a really weird thing to do about a podcast, but I just never know where these things are gonna go. And I kind of like it that way.

Wayne Lee (16:09.807)
Hahaha.

Jason Herbert (16:17.574)
So maybe you could talk a little bit about what this cutting off way paradigm is and kind of go from there.

Wayne Lee (16:23.695)
Sure. The basic idea is that it's not the skulking way of war, which is the Malone's book that you're referring to. And it's not that everything in Malone's book is wrong. It's in part, it's the shortcut that it became for other scholars. Other people started referring to it.

Jason Herbert (16:32.364)
Okay.

Wayne Lee (16:46.391)
in saying that this was the way it worked. And I, but I think there's a couple of fundamental things that Malone got wrong and I thought was really important to correct. And the first, most important was the idea that Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans fought highly ritualized, limited and relatively bloodless wars. And I don't think that's even remotely true. I think that is certainly not true in intent, in strategic or tactical intent. It very often was true in fact, because it was hard

with technologically balanced combatants to achieve overwhelming success that would generate highly lethal outcomes in any one encounter. But that's something we actually know from the anthropological literature from all around the world, that open fighting between two technologically balanced societies, pre-industrial societies, does not create massive levels of lethality.

What you get instead is a lethality created by repeated attacks, repeated small scale attacks, little ambushes that can be lethal on a per capita scale and that can accumulate per capita to have a devastating effect on the demographics of a society. So I wanted to confront Malone about that to say that there's no

necessary escalation created by European arrival. I think there is escalation, but it doesn't come because Native Americans didn't believe in killing people. And actually, I sat in a conference once at the Organization of American Historians and listened to a paper and I listened to a well-respected and now multi-published historian say out loud that before European arrival, Native Americans didn't kill other Native Americans. And I just was flabbergasted. I mean,

Among other things, even if we throw out all of the text, because they're written by white people, the archaeological evidence is clear on this. There's just no question about the levels of death created by violence amongst Native American people. And not that they're any more violent than anybody else. That is definitely not the direction that I'm trying to push this. I'm just trying to say they're human, like everybody else. And therefore they use violence for political purpose.

Wayne Lee (19:08.111)
for strategic intent, for the control and acquisition of resources, just like every other human being on the planet and in our history. And so that was another motivation for the book. And what the cutting-off way is, I tried to describe this in the introduction, that our sources, because they're coming from colonial sources, are best at describing what happens when Indians attack white people. Because that's really important.

Jason Herbert (19:13.577)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (19:36.831)
And it's important to get it right, to describe it accurately, so that you can defend yourself from it. And so they're very real. Those sources tend to be pretty reliable and pretty repetitive because they're all telling the similar story. But you have to look at a whole bunch of them before you start to see the patterns that would indicate the strategic intent behind the pattern. Like the attack is the outcome. What are the? It's the end point on the on the.

the action scale of planning and mobilization and marching and feeding and then attacking and then going home we see only through certain sources also which we can talk about. But the cutting-off way is a Native American system of warfare that is designed to prevent massive casualties for the attack.

because they're generally small-scale demographic societies. I don't mean to buy that to say they live in bands of 20 or 30. I mean, we're talking about tribes of hundreds and thousands, but that's still a relatively small scale on any, especially compared at that time to European states. When they attacked, you can't afford to take a lot of casualties. And so you want to rely on surprise. This is an old human story. You rely on surprise to avoid your own casualties. Now, who do you surprise?

Well, you want to surprise someone who is isolated in some way from the rest of their supportive community. So if you have a small war party, you can attack a group of people who are out hunting, or a group of people out gathering wood or getting water. And you catch them isolated and you kill them or attack them, take some of them prisoners and kill the people who were defending themselves, and then get away. To avoid taking your own casualties, you flee.

Now if you have a much larger strategic intent, so much so that, and you have the manpower because there's motivation, we should pause here and make sure that there's a really clear delineation, and I try to make this clear in the book, between individual motivation to go to war and the communal motivation to go to war. Because individuals can be highly responsive to status needs and revenge needs, and the community can have status and revenge needs, but

Jason Herbert (21:47.32)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (21:55.859)
more often than not, they also have some sort of political need. And they will use individual needs for status and honor and even revenge to get those people to join the mobilization effort. So the group may come out, go out on a war party with both sets of motivations in play. Or they may go out with just the individual motivations in play, in very small groups.

And I actually tell some of those stories in the book of very small parties, like sometimes going hundreds of miles over land to take revenge or to gain honor. But that didn't necessarily reflect any larger political intent. But if you have that larger political intent, and if you have successfully mobilized, you might start to make your target a whole enemy town. And this is where understanding geography and military history

becomes helpful because if you hit an enemy town at the edge of what generally were clusters of related towns, you know as the attacker that you only have a certain amount of time before all of the other related towns send reinforcements. And the surprise will have been lost, you will have taken your shot and if it doesn't work you generally leave because those reinforcements are coming.

And so you're always as the attacker, you're always calculating, well, how far is it from this town that I want to attack to the next neighboring town and from that place to the next neighboring town, how long will it take for them to get to where I am? So how many hours, sometimes days do I have to do as much damage as I can get as much plunder or prisoners from this town as I can before I need to get out of here? Knowing that when I leave, I'm going to have prisoners, we're going to be moving more slowly.

I'm gonna try to set up my logistics so that when I do leave I don't use any for a long period of time I might march for 48 hours straight before I stop to eat. I'm gonna put distance between myself and my pursuers Meanwhile because these paths through the woods are relatively well understood by all involved The people who've just been attacked Their best bet for taking revenge is to catch you on the way home

Wayne Lee (24:10.475)
while you're burdened with prisoners and plunder and all these other things. And they know the paths you're likely to take. And so they're going to try to get ahead of you. They're going to try to take a different route to get in front of you. They'll try to catch up on your rear and then launch those little, tiny isolating attacks. Like we're going to try to nibble away at the edges. And very often when you do the numbers, it's those retreating parties, the successful retreating parties that...

Jason Herbert (24:27.213)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (24:37.507)
when they lose most of their casualties is during the retreat, when they're being pursued. So this creates a pattern of behavior that once you understand it and sort of see it, helps you then read the sources, which is why I make it the title of the book, because it's not that this describes every native attack.

But it's that when you understand that this is a standard pattern and you're reading what are often very obscure and obtuse sources that are describing things in ways they don't entirely understand, you can be like, wait a minute, OK, that's they're not running away. And I tell this story in the first chapter, not in the introduction, but in the first chapter of the book, they're not running away because they ran out of ammunition. They're running away because they know the reinforcements are coming.

This is a calculated decision. This is not foolish planning. This is actual planning. And understanding this pattern actually helped me understand something that I didn't even understand until I was writing the book, which is that cluster of related towns. That's what we call in military strategy analysis, strategic depth. So you have recourse.

You can retreat from your village if you know it's going to be attacked. You can call on reinforcements from other neighboring related villages if you're being attacked or about to be attacked. When population loss and demographic disaster starts hitting Native American populations, we know many of these stories very well. They'll start to confederate or consolidate and create new tribes, and there's ethnogenesis and the creation of new peoples. But some of those people's stories are solitary.

That is to say, they shrink and they'll become smaller and smaller communities and it becomes one town. And very often we see these as the settlement Indians. There'll be one town of what were called settlement Indians, people who choose to live closer to the white people rather than moving away from them. And those settlement towns have no strategic depth. That's what makes them vulnerable. And their solution...

Wayne Lee (26:55.727)
to that vulnerability is European nearness rather than farness. They're hoping for strategic depth from European neighbors because they have, at least for the moment, lost the other kind. And some of those we see, for example, some smaller native groups in the 17th century cleaving to Virginia. Virginia is not a good neighbor. They're a terrible neighbor for Native Americans because they've got no discrimination on how they use violence.

And so some of those smaller peoples who initially cleave when they become single town sized and they've lost strategic depth, so they're cleaving to Virginia, some of them flee and join the Katabas. That's where some of the Katabas Nation ethnogenesis comes from, is departing groups from the Virginia frontier. So the cutting off way for me was very helpful. As I slowly realized that this was the pattern I was seeing in the sources, it then became more useful for reading the sources and I could see that

more and more often. I can see its implications.

That's a long winded answer.

Jason Herbert (28:01.002)
No, it's great because you're so really better than I could ever hope to explain. I remember reading archival documents about the French who plowed into Chickasaw country only to find themselves immediately surrounded because of, again, this withdrawal. And you know, Chickasaw's, gosh, this would have been mid-18th century, did not number as many as, say,

Choctaw or Cree groups in the area, but were so good at relaying information back and forth and drawing people in. They were able to withstand, I mean the French threw everything they had with them including every amount of Choctaw alliance they could at the Chickasaws and they were able to continually push back against that. I mean and you know continue to this day.

Jason Herbert (28:57.502)
I wanted to ask you, because you talked about reading the sources and things like that. I'm kind of wondering, because you've got this wide experience of, as a historian, of writing about different types of histories and different peoples throughout time. And I was hoping maybe we could talk a little bit about the challenges, maybe the surprises, the enjoyment even, of writing Native history, say, versus say, other eras or other people's histories. And how do you...

that as a scholar in 2023, or going back to early 2020s, or early 2000s, how do you do Native history? What does that look like as you're trying to understand, because your book is very much trying to center itself in Native motivations and not as a reactionary thing. How do you understand that? What's that like as a scholar?

Wayne Lee (29:52.363)
Yeah, it's not easy. And I think it's increasingly incumbent upon scholars, and let's be clear, I'm just a regular old Anglo-white guy, to be as sensitive as possible to the fact that

these are not vanished people. These are people with descendants and claims to sovereignty in the present and political concerns in the present. And I've actually was asked at one point to testify before North Carolina State Commission on Native Americans on behalf of the Tuscaroras who were making a case, the North Carolina Tuscaroras who were making a case for their, you know.

their continued existence as a separate nation in North Carolina since the 18th century, etc. And these are important issues, and they're controversial issues sometimes even amongst Native nations, because there are now casinos at issue. And one group has a right to a casino and another group doesn't, and so they have their own contestation going on. So you wander into these waters with care.

Wayne Lee (31:02.879)
What I've tried to do is neither emphasize violence nor peacefulness. I don't want to, I use a neologism, a made-up word, new ageify the Indians. I don't want to create a false, pacified, peaceful, in tune with nature, doesn't kill until the Europeans show up. Scalping is a European invention. These are all just wrong.

And nor do I want to try to emphasize somehow that they're especially violent or that their forms of violence are worse than anybody else's. Quite literally, when I was, I mentioned TAing for Peter Woods Native American History course as a graduate student, quite literally in my recitation section, I had students who were on both sides of that divide. You know, it still were some who were still partaking in that old notion of the red savage.

and some who were fully new ageified had fully new ageified the Indians into just about environmentalism. And so from the very beginning I felt like I had to find this middle path. And for me the middle path in one sense is simple, that they're humans. And they're humans living in a society of societies.

That is to say they live in a society, but that society is then placed in a landscape of competing societies. And competition is not necessarily conflict, but it can be. Conflict is a choice that a society in competition with others can make. And that's a story that is as old as humans, and that as a world military historian, I thought that was the skill set that I was in part bringing to bear on this question, is because I've looked at...

the Sumerians and the Egyptians and the creation of those states. And I've actually dug archaeological sites from the Copper Age and the Neolithic. And I've indulged in, in part, because I was working with anthropologists and anthropological theory, and don't get me wrong, the anthropologists don't all agree with each other. In fact, they're much worse about this disagreements than historians are. But I've spent, well, my students are now laughing because. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (33:10.839)
Well, their citation system is awful. That's another podcast, but go on.

Wayne Lee (33:19.679)
And so I thought that was the thing that I could bring to this situation that some other scholars might not have as ready access to. Because the normal process for a scholar who's interested in Native American history is to go into graduate school and have a topic. It's a narrow topic. And typically in Native American studies, that means a people. I'm going to do my study of the Choctaws. Well, wait a minute, somebody's already written a book about Choctaws. What part of the Choctaws?

Well, I'm going to do the chalk... I'm making all this up by the way. I'm not thinking of any particular scholar. But I'm going to do the chalk dots between 1800 and 1840, or between 1600 and 1750. And so we slice and dice appropriately, because this is how history is done. You must do the focused, tight studies. But then we need to stand on each other's shoulders, I believe, and create the synthesis. And this book is very much an attempt to create a synthesis of a lot of these experiences. The other fundamental underlying assumption here...

that I have found to be true around the world is that societies that are regularly in conflict with each other homogenize the style of their conflicts. That is to say, the cockpit of Europe, if you imagine Northwest Europe and say the early modern period, they are all fighting in more or less the same way. And in part, they're fighting in more or less the same way because they're fighting each other and they sort of trend towards each other. Same thing for warring states, China.

Same thing for warring states 16th century Italy, same thing for 17th century warring 16th century warring states Japan, that multiple societies, not one or two but many, fighting each other all the time, more or less all the time, I don't mean constantly but regularly, homogenize the way that they fight. And so that's why we see a homogenization in Eastern North America, because I have homogenization is it is like a second order level.

effect, first order level effect is geography, climate, subsistence. You can't fight in a way that doesn't suit your geography, climate, or subsistence. But beyond that, you can fight in lots of different ways, but then they'll tend to homogenize towards what your opponents are also doing. And so I could bring that to bear on trying to create a synthesis with absolutely dependent on all those other studies, just the Choctaws or just the Catabas or just the Iroquois. But

Wayne Lee (35:45.603)
then synthesizing that together and seeing the patterns that they share, and they share them for historical reasons, not just accidents.

Jason Herbert (35:53.718)
I wanted to ask you, you know, I'm gonna dare to like slowly work our way into this film today. Maybe eventually, I don't know. But, you know, what we see in the film, which is Last of the Mohicans, for those of you who are out there, we see warfare in this film as exclusively masculine on the part of Indigenous people. In fact, we only see, if I recall correctly, we only see

Wayne Lee (35:58.287)
to the movie, right?

Jason Herbert (36:21.654)
women fighting, I believe it's Madeline Stowe when she's got the gun and she shoots a guy who's running at her or something like that. Did you see in your research and in writing this book, is indigenous warfare in the Eastern Woodlands, is it exclusively masculine? Are the women fighting? Are they contributing to the military effort, if I may? What's going on with this?

Wayne Lee (36:44.012)
Yeah.

Wayne Lee (36:49.307)
Women are very rarely involved in violent combat. We have one interesting story of women who were in the logistics train using violence during a battle during the Seven Years War when the battle lines were breaking apart. And so there were men coming, you know, there were soldiers and warriors coming through the camp. But we don't, to my knowledge in Eastern Woodlands,

We don't see women wielding weapons in combat. You do see women participating in various other ways. They'll participate very strongly in the decisions to go to war, and very strongly in the treatment of prisoners that arrive at the home village. They are full participants in torture and in decisions to adopt or not.

They are also, and I explored this a fair bit in the book, but I still don't think that I have the definitive answer. They are also definitely playing a logistical role at least at the outset of a campaign, where if a troop of men is heading out over land, not just getting in a boat and running down river immediately, but if they start out over land, women will accompany them at least for a while, carrying food.

Very often, I shouldn't say that, I mean, it's not even necessarily a pattern, but it does happen and it happens a lot. I'm not even sure it's the majority of the time, but it does happen. We even get this really fascinating story, I think it was from the Natchez, of the...

Women, the men are dressed up in all their finery and they're marching out of the village and they get to the outskirts of the village out into the woods and then they take off all their finery. The women come out there and meet them and take all their finery back. And so that the men march away wearing only what they really, really need. And the women have brought them their supplies that they need to carry because they didn't want to carry the food and stuff while they were marching. You know, sort of like a...

Wayne Lee (38:54.623)
European parade almost, or almost exactly like a European parade. So there's also, it's very clear from, let me back up, there's a very important parallel between hunting and going to war in terms of how you organize yourself. And it's very clear that women are expected to dress the meat in a hunting expedition. Women are expected to come along. They're expected to often go to where the carcass is.

Jason Herbert (38:56.439)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (39:24.631)
wherever it was killed, and then bring it back to the camp. So the women are carrying the deer back to the camp, and then they dress the skins and meat. We occasionally see hints of that on war parties, but most of the time on a proper war party, what we see is men carrying and dressing the meat. And so the implicit assumption is that women are no longer present.

So but it's I think there's room for more discussion on this on the role of women in logistics

Jason Herbert (40:04.718)
Tredging even farther into this film now, this movie opens up, we're into the Seven Years War. And this is for me, I think, to me as a scholar of early, of not only native North America and the environment, but just of the colonial era, I am fascinated with Seven Years War. To me, it is the most fascinating conflict in North America. Someone maybe you could open up for our audience who maybe isn't as familiar with the Seven Years War as other eras, maybe talk a little bit about.

What the heck is going on? This film opens up and I want to say it's what? 1757. What is going on in what is present day upstate New York?

Wayne Lee (40:43.623)
Oh my.

Jason Herbert (40:46.818)
I'm throwing everything at you right now.

Wayne Lee (40:48.867)
There's a lot of things going on. And some of it just begins with geography, right? So that all the French colonies are strung out, all the Northern French colonies are strung out along the St. Lawrence Seaway, basically. Which of course opens into the North Atlantic and is a major navigable path for moving everything. And if you think about that as the horizontal bar of a T,

Jason Herbert (41:00.279)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (41:16.823)
The vertical bar of the T is the Hudson River Lake Champlain axis that goes all the way to New York City, the colony in New York City. And so there is a dagger pointed into the heart of the French colonies that is the Hudson River Lake Champlain axis. And the reason that this matters, this T matters, is because that's water transport. It's far easier in North America to move large numbers of people, much less of cannon.

if you can do so on water. So controlling waterways is essential to the history of the war. And there are a bunch of other waterways I'm leaving out, but those are the two big ones. And so the fighting around Fort William Henry is essentially.

won in a series of fights over attempts to fortify those waterways. And ultimately, the most fortified spot on all of those waterways is going to be Quebec City. So that the British are trying to get to that fort on that waterway. And the French are trying to push, before the war even starts, the French are trying to push forts south to give themselves strategic depth.

This is the European version of strategic depth. You push fortifications out towards your enemy so that they have to crawl their way forward through that in-depth fortification system. And that's true in Europe and it's also true for the French thinking in North America.

Wayne Lee (43:02.223)
payment. And so the fort becomes a node in a diplomatic network that mobilizes native military power as much as it is a place that an English army would have to lay siege to. It's important in both ways. It gives the French strategic depth going backwards in a fortification sense, and it gives them manpower, depth, and coverage because Native American mobility is so much greater in that countryside. And so the English...

Jason Herbert (43:14.39)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (43:31.063)
war effort is how to break through that strategic depth. And the French war effort is trying to shore it up. And the reason the French, the English are on the offensive is because they outnumbered the French enormously in terms of white population. And so the French are naturally on the defensive. And so that's sort of the bigger strategic context in terms of geography and force. The political context in terms of

the war, why the war in North America would spread to a war in Europe, that's a much longer story. But of course, we should back up all the way to 1754 and acknowledge that the war gets started because as the French are creating that, trying to create that strategic depth down into the Ohio country, the Virginians are trying to do land speculation into the same country. And so ultimately, it's all about the control of what was originally Indian land.

And famously, the British commander in chief, Braddock, when he comes over in 1755, when the British get brought into this war, and he's on his way to his defeat at Monongahela, and he is asked by his Indian ally what he intends to do with this land. When they defeat the French, he says, Braddock says, it's going to go to the English. And his Indian ally says, wait a minute. What do you mean?

Is there no place for Indians in this future? And Bragg says, no. And that has a distinctly dampening effect on the ardor of their Indian allies, many of whom probably started walking away at this point. But Indians are also smart strategic players, so as the war starts to turn around after 1758, many of them will gravitate back to the British side because they can see which way the wind is blowing. And...

the British have effectively blockaded the entrance to the St. Lawrence, and French diplomatic gifts and military equipment that would normally flow into the St. Lawrence and then out to the Native Americans have dried up by 1758. And so that that's the other reason Native Americans either dropping out of the French side or even actively joining the English side towards the end of the...

Jason Herbert (45:36.814)
Mm-mm.

Jason Herbert (45:46.242)
You know, we often see this war called the French and Indian War, this conflict, which obviously speaks to the massive level of participation and involvement on the part of indigenous peoples in this conflict in North America. And I'm kind of wondering what your sources or what the sources kind of talk about as far as were the English and French surprised at indigenous warfighting? Was this something?

completely different to them, coming from say maybe a traditional European style of fighting back in Europe. What is like the European reaction? We talk about, so much of the historiography and indigenous history is like rooted in indigenous reactions to Europeans. I'm wondering, what's the European reaction to indigenous war fighting and skill level when they get on to the battlefield?

Wayne Lee (46:42.463)
Well, it varies. Obviously, everything varies. So, you know, historians always say it varies. But by this point, it's the middle of the 18th century. So the colonists have, almost all of the colonists have several generations of experience fighting Indian and Native Americans. And so they're perfectly familiar with the techniques and the threat. Any given individual might not be, but you know, speaking as a population, they know what the deal is.

Jason Herbert (46:47.95)
Hehehe

Jason Herbert (47:04.63)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (47:12.151)
They also know where their vulnerable points are. And so that's how they'll build block houses near where their settlements are, various sorts of localized strategies and self-defense. The British Army, on the other hand, which comes over in force for this war, really for the first time, it's been in and out of the colonies in dribs and drabs, but this is the first time you have the British Army present on the continent in force. And...

Braddock's regiments for the 1755 campaign, they're all recruited mostly in Ireland. They don't have a clue. And my colleague David Preston's book on this is sort of the sine qua non on this subject now. But one of the things that we talked about, because we actually wrote something together after that book, is the strangeness of this environment for British soldiery. Not necessarily for British generals who were paying attention.

During the earlier Imperial Wars or for the colonial population who sort of had lived with us But the British individual private soldiers in particular their first real encounter with Native Americans Especially Native Americans shooting at them goes really poorly And part of the reason it's going poorly is because it's all very strange that the sounds are different The smells are different the movement of people through the woods is different. Everything about it is alien

Jason Herbert (48:22.958)
I'm going to go to bed.

Wayne Lee (48:37.059)
for those soldiers. And as the war, of course, goes on, that will be increasingly less alien because the soldiers will become veterans of this environment, the ones who survived the first time, the first encounters. And it's also, there is a myth that Braddock, marching through, building his road on his way to the French Fort Duquesne at what's now Pittsburgh, doesn't understand how to avoid ambushes and that he's.

He's got no column security, no flank security. And in fact, he does. He's got fairly sophisticated flank security set up, given his environment, and given the speed at which they were moving, which is slow, because they were building a road along the way. But what he is lacking is because he's really irritated his Indian allies. So he doesn't have any long distance intelligence. He's not getting any information fed to him from beyond the range of his flanking parties, for the most part. He does get a couple of reports in.

But in some cases he doesn't believe them and in other cases they're just not, they don't change his mind. He thinks he can handle it. Let's be clear too, that particular expedition, where it's still in 1755, we haven't gotten to the movie in 1757, but that particular expedition, Braddock's orders included not only marching to Fort Duquesne and taking the French fort at Fort Duquesne, but then turning right and going all the way to Niagara. That was the kind of strategic myopia.

Jason Herbert (49:47.458)
Hahaha.

Wayne Lee (50:02.755)
that the British planners back in Britain had in terms of like the alien environment, they didn't have a clue what that meant to move that far through the wilderness at the end of whatever logistical trail, I can't even imagine what they were thinking, that they would get to Duquesne and then turn right and go to Niagara. It was just nuts.

Jason Herbert (50:20.834)
No, and it seems like it's a real underestimation of their opposition. I think it was well known, anyone who studies this, and certainly the British were certainly well aware that the French did not have that many people in numbers in North America, but French allies were significantly more. And like you said earlier, due in large part to...

a much better relationship with indigenous communities than the English did, you know, into the 1750s. I guess maybe we should talk about this famous scene. I want to get into it. The famous scene that I think about this film is obviously the water, no, I'm not talking about the waterfall scene right now. It's obviously, I used to talk, I made a joke about that scene the other day.

Wayne Lee (50:51.279)
That's right.

Wayne Lee (51:08.566)
I hate that scene.

Jason Herbert (51:14.494)
when we were all going to leave Twitter, I was like, just stay alive. I will find you no matter what occurs. But let's talk. No, no, I love him in Lincoln and Gangs of New York. He said he's he'll be OK, I think. Let's talk about this exit from Fort William Henry. This is the big you know, when I came to you, saying, hey, you want to do you want to come on the pot? I'm thinking about this exact scene. I'm thinking you probably were, too.

Wayne Lee (51:18.318)
Yeah.

That's not Daniel Day-Lewis's best moment.

Wayne Lee (51:45.451)
Yeah, it's amazing. It's so beautifully done, in terms of filming. I don't mean beautifully done in the history, but the filming of it is just gorgeous. Supposedly, I watched a YouTube video about the making of this film some while back. It was really interesting. Supposedly, the director did a helicopter tour of the mountains looking for some place really remote where he wouldn't ever have to worry about electrical wires being in the background or anything at all.

where they could just come in, clear some forest and build a fort and then run the whole scene right there. And supposedly this place still sort of semi exists as a ruin. I need to figure out where this is. But they...

I'm trying to figure out whether to start with the history or start with the movie. But the way the movie shows it, I actually often show the canoning, the canonating of the fort in a military history class. Because it's actually really good representation of what an 18th century siege would look like. Because you have the French on the outside who are firing their cannons at the British inside the walls. And the French fire is designed to do two things. It's designed to batter at the walls.

Jason Herbert (52:41.674)
Mm.

Wayne Lee (52:59.399)
and to keep the English cannons heads down to make them fire less effectively. And the English cannons are designed, what they're trying to do is keep the French trench works from getting closer. And the French trench works are trying to get closer because when they can get closer, that means their cannon will be closer and then it will breach the walls more quickly. So there's actually a scene in the movie where you can see the English cannon commander inside the garrison point looking.

Jason Herbert (53:13.719)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (53:29.471)
in the dark with a illumination round in the air and he's looking when the illumination round goes off and he sees the white shirts of the French infantry digging the trenches so that's where the guys with the shovels are that's his target it's actually shooting at the guys with the shovels and so he directs the cannon and he shoots a shot and he you know some of the all cannon fired in 18th century movies are apparently explode and create fountains of dirt that's another story because they don't do that

Jason Herbert (53:54.83)
I'm going to go to bed.

Wayne Lee (53:59.675)
but you see bodies flying. And then the French counter fire. They fire that, they see the flash of that English cannon, and then they counter fire at that battery and knock it out. And that's the game of attrition that an 18th century siege is. Can I take out all of the defending cannons before they can slow down my trenches enough to prevent me from getting up to close enough with my cannons to put a breach in the wall that will then assault? And the rules of the 18th century siege

Jason Herbert (54:09.259)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (54:28.747)
meant that when the breach in the wall was created, and that's exactly what happened in actual history and what they show in the movie. There's a breach, they don't show us the breach. What they say is when the French mortars, I think Daniel Day-Lewis says this to Madeleine Stowe, he says, when the French mortars are firing into the fort, that's when they're gonna start to negotiate. And what happened in the 18th century was when there was a breach that was capable of being assaulted, the attacker would send in the offer of terms.

Jason Herbert (54:48.856)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (54:59.439)
And the defender would make a decision at that point, do I think I'm going to get relief? And that's exactly what they're talking about in that scene where Montcalm and Monroe are negotiating. They're out in front of the field. They got their flags with them and they're bowing and taking off their hats. And Monroe says, Webb is on the way. So I'm going to keep holding out. And Montcalm says, no, here's the message that I intercepted. He says he's not coming.

And so that's a real decision point. And some of it's all theater. Because it's real in the sense that Monroe's like, okay, now I know he's not coming. I have to make a decision. So he's gonna pretend at least to say, oh, I'm gonna fight to the last man. But what that means when you say, I'm gonna fight to the last man, is that you're gonna defend that breach. And if the soldiers have to attack through that breach, they are very irritated. And the rules were,

If soldiers were forced to attack through a breach, which was an incredibly dangerous thing to do. In fact, the group of men selected for that task was called the Forlorn Hope.

Jason Herbert (56:02.759)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (56:08.829)
Oof.

Wayne Lee (56:10.591)
So it was like, go around the camp. Do you want to be on the Forlorn Hope? No, you really don't want to be on the Forlorn Hope. That actually comes from the Dutch, because the Dutch were the first ones to create the term Forlorn. I forget what the second word in Dutch is. But the Forlorn Hope would assault the breach. Most of them are going to die. But the survivors and their followers who get through and into the fort...

Jason Herbert (56:13.982)
No, not at all.

Wayne Lee (56:34.763)
are basically given carte blanche to commit whatever sort of act they want to commit in bigger cities for three days. So three days of rape, pillage and murder. And everyone's conscience on that was clear, because the defenders were given an opportunity to surrender. There was a practicable breach that they decided to defend anyway, and so it's their fault. What happens next when we assault the breach?

Jason Herbert (57:02.446)
It's on you, right?

Wayne Lee (57:03.615)
And so that's what that whole scene is beautifully about, is this dance, this negotiation. How do we avoid this scenario where the soldiers come through the breach? Because by the 18th century, the etiquette had really clarified, and you didn't get that many assaults into a breach like that. The 17th century is quite common. In the 18th century, it was more common to come up with the surrender terms. And in the real world, in this history, at the Surrender Forum in Henry, they agreed to let the English march out.

to not fight again on their honor for 18 months in that war. And Moncom references this in the movie when he's talking to West Dudi's character, Magwa, and he says, I'm afraid we're going to end up fighting these same guys again. And we don't know that Moncom encouraged the Indians to launch their attack on the retreating column. He probably did not, I think. But we don't know. But.

We do know from other sieges that Native Americans thought this was bull, that this whole issue of this whole thing of letting prisoners walk out of the fort broke every one of their expectations about war. They didn't get to take anybody prisoner this way, they didn't get to take any plunder this way, and they said we're gonna have to fight these people again. And they accused English more than once of conducting a sham fight.

that they had drawn them into his allies and now it's a sham, what is this? And so what happened when the Indians were told by the French in history, not in the movie, that the English were gonna be allowed to march away with their weapons but no ammunition, which was a part of the surrender terms, because you could negotiate to keep your ammunition or at least one round, and they did not get that. And so...

Jason Herbert (58:47.607)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (58:57.943)
When the Indians found that out, what they did in the real world was they took all the British troops out of the fort, and they put them in an entrenched camp outside the fort overnight. And so the Indians immediately went into the fort and started plundering it. And in the fort were some of the still of the more wounded British soldiers who were not ambulatory, and they ended up being killed that night or that evening. And then overnight,

The Indians find out again that the next morning the British are going to march out under French guard, guard against the Indians. And they surround the fort and keep them from leaving in the night. And then they so they leave during the day. But again, the Indians, unlike in the movie where they set up this little ambush over this long extended column moving through the woods, all the Indians really wanted was some prisoners and some stuff. They weren't there to kill everyone.

It was not necessarily a revenge mission, although again, individuals in the group might have had a revenge mission. Most of them were there at the behest of the French and were gaining plunder for their nation and trade advantages with the French, etc. And so they, when they attack the English column, a lot of it is them running up to people and stripping them of their coats and of their rifle or of whatever pack they're carrying and they're taking stuff from them. And sometimes they're taking the people.

And they end up with several hundred prisoners, men and women. Um, and they, in this case, being many different nations of Indians, there's a whole bunch of different nations who are involved in this. Um, and then they all go home to their very many different nations, which is the point they don't all go in a body to one place, they're like basically split up and going all the different ways they're going to go because now they got what they wanted, they've got plunder, they got prisoners, this is the thing. We won, we won the victory. We're done.

Jason Herbert (01:00:41.431)
Mmm. Right.

Wayne Lee (01:00:52.771)
And William, not William, Ian Steele, who has done the best study of this siege, the book called, Petrails, sort of breaks down all the myths about how many Englishmen were killed in the so-called massacre. And again, it did violate European norms of war. It did not violate any Native American norm of war. There were probably, he estimates, maybe 130 to 150 people killed out of thousands of prisoners.

Jason Herbert (01:01:01.751)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:01:21.059)
there are thousands of surrendered troops and their camp followers. So very, very small percentage. And again, not to undermine.

what horrible thing might have happened to anybody on that particular day, on that particular field. You never want to downplay an individual experience of trauma, but the myth was that several thousand English soldiers were killed in a massacre, defenseless. And that's simply not the case. And also crucial to understand the movie, Monroe is not killed in that moment. He dies later.

Jason Herbert (01:01:47.533)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (01:01:56.942)
Well, there's also always the terminology I've always found, especially in Florida, we see Dades massacre, an indigenous victory over a Euro-American opponent is a massacre versus the battle for the longest time. We would see Custer's battle or things like that. It went on. Yeah, Custer's massacre, right? But then we would see the battle against the...

Wayne Lee (01:02:04.739)
Right?

Wayne Lee (01:02:15.363)
Exactly right.

No, it's Custer's Mascar. It's the Mascarp Custer.

Jason Herbert (01:02:26.698)
you know, when the Europeans or the Americans, you know, defeated someone, someone else on battle, the way, the way that the history was written, you know, the, the usage of these terms was, uh, often misleading, but one sided and designed to tell its own story. Um, you know, as well. Um, you were gleeful about doing this particular film, at least that's what the email came across as cause you're like, can we do last of the weekends? Um, what do you like about this movie? I mean, cause I, I do, you know,

Wayne Lee (01:02:41.487)
That's right.

Wayne Lee (01:02:49.437)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Herbert (01:02:55.274)
Obviously, the coming out of that battle scene is a bit different from the historical reality. I still very much enjoy that scene because for a few different reasons, and I do want to come back to this idea of what guns do in Native North America as well. But what do you like out of this movie? When you think back on this movie, what does this movie do? Yeah.

Wayne Lee (01:03:12.687)
Sure.

Well, the music is amazing. The setting is amazing. The we are in grad school. We joked after we all saw this as a group as I mentioned earlier, we called it the beautiful people movie because the people are beautiful in the movie. Yeah, there's some things they really do right. I just described how much I like the siege scene and the surrender discussions. And the one of the really fun and

Jason Herbert (01:03:27.533)
Mm-hmm. Helps in Hollywood, I think.

Jason Herbert (01:03:37.291)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:03:45.631)
I think accurate scenes is the way they show when Hawkeye and Chinkachkuk and his brother go to, Hawkeye's brother go to the frontier cabin, the Andersons I think, can't remember. Yeah and they're all, all the white guys are there, there's Native Americans there and they all start playing lacrosse together, you know the ball game. That's sort of what

Jason Herbert (01:03:58.131)
Mm-hmm, early in the film, yeah.

Wayne Lee (01:04:10.063)
Richard White calls the middle ground, that the integration of culture on the edges of the frontier where they're not necessarily all enemies all the time. And I think it's important that we remember that there's, you know, many, many years of peace and friendly interaction amongst different Native nations and different white settlers. It's not a constant state of warfare and conflict. There is very much warfare and conflict, but it's not constant in that their relationships and that are created in

friendships and marriages and the whole nine yards and cultures that are blending. And so in a movie, how do you say all that? Well, you haven't played lacrosse together. You know, you give this little moment where you see people playing together to remind you that it's not all constant violence. Then of course, they flipped the script and that cabin is burned out by a French allied Indian war party later in the movie and you see the dead family, including children and women. And so that

the movie then gives you the flip side, which is the presence of violence and war and what that does to families and to relations and to friends and why people therefore might have a revenge motive because there's no one else to take revenge for them. So that part of it works really well. And they also play more or less accurately around with the idea of the role of grief and torture in Native American society. When Magwa brings

Madeline Stowe and the British Army officer as captives back to the Huron camp which would not have been a Huron camp. They weren't there. Not that close. But at any rate, the whole discussion with the Huron chief about how things have changed and what is it what is the function of these prisoners and nowadays we can sell them back.

Jason Herbert (01:05:40.447)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:06:02.403)
to the English, which was not a native tradition, but the idea of selling a prisoner back is one of the ways that the war styles had evolved in response to that opportunity that, when they once they realized how much the Europeans really would pay to get captives back, how desperate they were to get them back, they realized, wait, this is the way we can get things from them. So that becomes a part of the motives for taking prisoner in the 18th century. So that scene actually, there's pieces of that work really well. And it's

Jason Herbert (01:06:09.656)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:06:32.043)
It's an active movie. It moves quickly most of the time. There's all sorts of fun things going on. There's also some ridiculous stuff going on. But there's a lot of... It's just fun to watch.

Jason Herbert (01:06:43.03)
Well, let's talk about the ridiculous stuff because I want to hear about that plus the waterfall What's if someone's coming back to watch this film, which I absolutely love like I can watch Michael Mann It's probably my favorite director. Anyway, I Can watch this movie a lot but for those people who were kind of coming to it or we're having able to see this film Maybe with a critical lens What's a little silly about last no he can't?

Wayne Lee (01:07:06.155)
Well, the first and most important thing to recognize, not even that it's silly, but it's importantly wrong, is the title which we're beholden to because it comes from James Fenimore Cooper's novel, The Last of the Mohicans. And the Mohicans are still with us. They're not lasted at that time. And of course people think, who don't know anything about it, they think the last of the Mohicans is Hawkeye.

Hawkeye is a white adoptee. He's not the last Mohegan. He's referring in this case to his adoptive father, Chinggachkuk. And after the brothers killed, so that means that Chinggachkuk is quote, the last Mohegan. And that was fulfilling a 19th century fantasy of the disappearing Indian. And it's really, really unfortunate that the movie, again, because it can't avoid its own title, has to...

Jason Herbert (01:07:50.955)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:08:04.823)
reinforce and reify that myth of the disappearing Indians. Somehow these people are just going away now and have gone away. That's the most important wrongness about the movie. Some of the silliness is essentially, a lot of it's with Magwa because he is also a caricature of the Indian who's solely motivated by personal revenge.

Jason Herbert (01:08:14.498)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:08:35.171)
but somehow has managed to mobilize all of these other Indians to do what he wants them to do. But all he wants to do is to kill Monroe and kill Monroe's children in front of him. None of that squares with any of our understanding of Native American ethics of warfare and revenge. They had very powerful revenge motive, and they would use extreme levels of violence in a communal way to...

a swage grief and to end their sense of need for sense of revenge, but not in the way that we see Magwa doing it in the film. It's interesting to the, I mean, the other silly part is the girl commits suicide jumping off the cliff at the end. That's not impossible, but for the most part, when we see white...

captives being taken by Indian war parties, most of them just march fast. I mean, they just go along with it. They have an impulse to live. And by the 18th century, they may even realize that they're probably gonna be treated pretty well once the march is over, because of the impulse to sell captives back. That doesn't always happen to be the case. Sometimes, especially if you're an adult male, you might get chosen for torture. And that's not a good thing.

Jason Herbert (01:09:56.556)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:09:58.659)
But lots of adult males, some of our best captivity narratives, come from adult men in the 18th century who are adopted. And as I discuss in the book, very often they're given feminine roles. They become logistics people. They have to go pick up the carcass, they have to carry the deer, they have to stay at home when the men go and hunt, or go to war. They essentially adopt a feminine role, but they're eating as much or as well as everybody else in the group is eating.

They basically live the same life as their adoptive or their holding families' lives. They're living the same life. That's not the implication we get from the capture of Madeleine Stowe and her sister. There, you don't seem to sense that they're gonna end up as adoptees living the same life. Maybe a little bit, when Mogg was like trying to convince her not to commit suicide, there was sort of an implied

I mean, if you're reading into this, you're saying, hey, you know, you don't need to do this. It's going to be fine. You know, we're not going to, but he's just sitting there looking very stern. And it was like just wiggling his hand and saying, don't do that. You know, which actually looks pretty threatening. It was like.

Jason Herbert (01:11:00.428)
Yeah.

Jason Herbert (01:11:09.798)
He's a little bewildered that her sister had just thrown herself off of the cliff. And he's like, why would you do that? That wasn't in the cards for you. And you're absolutely right. Like come with me, I'm going to trade you, you know, but you're going to be otherwise probably married off or at some, you know, adopt, ritually adopted and married off at some point in life. But you're not going to be killed, which is a bit weird because you do get the sense that he, that he had intended for them to be tortured.

Wayne Lee (01:11:20.568)
Right.

Wayne Lee (01:11:25.453)
Right.

Jason Herbert (01:11:39.378)
earlier in the film when they had first stopped off at the first year on Campsite. No? Please.

Wayne Lee (01:11:45.159)
I don't know if that's true. I mean, again, I'm reading all sorts of stuff into it. He wanted to torture them and kill them in front of Monroe. But once Monroe was dead, and the women were then captured later, then Magwa has possible other motives. What I found interesting about the scene was the fact that the chief could say to him, this captive, you're gonna do this, this captive, you're gonna have to let go.

Jason Herbert (01:11:52.557)
Yes.

Jason Herbert (01:12:12.718)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:12:14.551)
and this captive we're going to torture to death. And I like that because that's actually kind of the sort of thing that happened. People, captives were given different roles. And the bad thing about that scene is that women, Juran, should have been playing a role in that decision making.

Jason Herbert (01:12:31.178)
Right. You know, you only have so much time to make the film, right? But that those decisions would have been made in council or with the deliberation of the clan elders or women of the community who largely held sway over decision-making processes.

Wayne Lee (01:12:45.294)
Yep.

Wayne Lee (01:12:51.499)
Right? And it might have taken some days.

Jason Herbert (01:12:55.638)
but we don't have that kind of runtime. So you understand why, you've gotta make narrative decisions on these choices for these films.

Wayne Lee (01:13:04.363)
Yeah, and that's why you can go ahead and enjoy the movie. You just have to tell yourself that, okay, I can now use this in the classroom and use it to explain how this might've gone, but you also can enjoy it as a movie knowing that they have narrative limits. Although I think there are boundaries. If people cross certain boundaries, I think you should call them out. There are times when movie makers do things that are just egregiously wrong and you should call them out for it, but in general, you can go with the flow.

Jason Herbert (01:13:17.998)
Alright.

Jason Herbert (01:13:32.598)
such as the waterfall scene. What's your beef with waterfall? Ha ha ha.

Wayne Lee (01:13:35.063)
Well, no, that's just silliness. I mean, when was the last time you saw a guy walk? I've walked behind waterfalls. I mean, I know waterfalls like that. The odds of you getting a lit torch underneath one, very low, very, very low. And then jumping out randomly from inside the waterfall into the pool below without actually killing yourself by landing on rocks, odds low, very low.

Jason Herbert (01:13:47.281)
Hehehehe

Jason Herbert (01:13:50.689)
I could have read it.

Jason Herbert (01:13:54.906)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (01:14:01.75)
Very, very, very low.

Wayne Lee (01:14:03.055)
If you've ever seen any mountain river, the lods are low. So yeah, there's just a whole bunch of just silliness at that scene.

Jason Herbert (01:14:07.258)
Yes, it's...

Jason Herbert (01:14:14.43)
I was in like a seven years, I was in a Western North Carolina earlier in North Georgia earlier this year and I swim. I was in the Chattahoochee national forest. And there were, if you've been, you know, been there, there's tons and tons of, uh, of waterfalls and pools and they are rocky and filled with trees and branches and death for you. If you are.

Wayne Lee (01:14:33.471)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (01:14:40.494)
foolish enough. Listen, if West Nudie's got it in for me, I'm probably going to take my chances with the river. But you know, I get it. You know, I meant to circle back because I want to talk about two last things before I talked about your reception to the film, which is, and I meant to talk about this earlier, but what does guns do? What do guns do for Native people? Because you talked earlier, a little bit earlier about how warfare, you know, going back to this Pat Malone thesis in Skull King, A Way of War.

about how warfare was kind of equaled out before guns arrive. And David Silverman writes this book, Thunderstix, which talks a lot, recently talks a lot about the arrival of firearms into Indian country. What do guns do for warfare in native North America, or at least in the East?

Wayne Lee (01:15:30.431)
Yeah, sure.

Wayne Lee (01:15:37.411)
So one of the things that I kind of had a, when you're a researcher and a scholar, sometimes you have these epiphanies. And it occurred to, you know, I've been reading the debate about why the Indians would shift to guns or not, why would they, since their bows could fire faster, just as far, far more accurately, et cetera, et cetera. And I always struggled with those arguments. I partly bought into them, but I also always struggled with them because in the documents,

Indians want gunpowder so bad they can, they're screaming for it. And later on, as I've started reading documents, they're also dying for gunsmiths, which is another one of the problems with Malone's argument because he talks about how the Pequots had their own, we have examples of repaired guns, archeological examples. Sure, but not in the metal. I mean, they're repairing the stocks.

There's a little bit of screws little screws that are being fixed or repaired but I mean nothing major that's made out of metal and And the documents are also equally clear that every single Indian group is negotiating with Europeans wants gunsmiths that will live with them Resident gunsmiths, I mean that's one of the things they want and so there's clearly a tremendous desire for guns gunpowder gunsmiths and Why if their bows are

Jason Herbert (01:16:49.014)
Absolutely.

Wayne Lee (01:17:02.879)
faster, more accurate, lighter, we can make our own, right? So there must be a really compelling reason. And it occurred to me that the epiphany I had at a certain point was that, you know, that compelling reason has to apply to both hunting and war, right? These are dual-purpose weapons, whether it's a bow or the gun, it's dual-purpose. It needs to fulfill both functions. And so the answers are biological and related.

Jason Herbert (01:17:07.694)
You can make your own right.

Jason Herbert (01:17:24.95)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:17:32.427)
Because if you hit a deer with a sharpened stone arrowhead, what happens is the arrowhead cuts its way through the flesh. And if it goes into the organs, it kills the deer in relatively short order. If it goes into bone, it stops, it might even snap the tip, and the deer runs away. And it might eventually die, but you're gonna be chasing it for days.

And that's even true with a lot of organ hits. You're not gonna get, unless you get into the heart or into the lungs, the deer is gonna run a long distance. If you do either of those things with a musket ball, if a musket ball hits bone, it shatters the bone and drops the deer like a stone, because most of it is legs. So if you just dropped one of its legs, it's gonna drop like a stone. Same with an organ hit, you get the big...

the entry wound and a much larger exit wound, the blood is going to bleed out so much faster than if it's just gotten a slicing hit from an arrow. And if you're shooting at small game, you use shot, not ball. You put in a whole bunch of little BBs into your muzzle loading musket, which doesn't have rifling in it. And we don't have a lot of evidence for Indians using rifled rifles until late in the 18th

Hawkeye is exceptional in this case, he's using a rifle. Everybody else is using a musket. But you can shoot at birds, you can shoot at rabbits, you can shoot at all sorts of small game, much more effectively with a load of shot than you can with an arrow. I mean, the level of skill involved in shooting an arrow at a small moving target is far more than you wanna talk about. I mean, that's a lifetime's worth of skill to be able to do that. And if I can just take a musket and shoot a bunch of ball out the end, I'm gonna much prefer to.

and in the hunting environment and in the wartime environment that is dependent or preferring ambush and surprise, in black powder weaponry your best and most reliable shot is your first one. Because it's the one you loaded very carefully, no one was shooting at you, you had time on your hands, you've got the powder in there, you've got it wadded properly, you've got it tamped down properly, and when you shoot that one, that first shot...

Wayne Lee (01:20:00.375)
That's your best shot. And if you're hunting, that makes sense. And if you're doing an ambush, also makes sense. And it's when you start having to reload in a hurry when people are shooting at you, that things go to hell with muskets that might be better with a bow. But that first shot is going to be so much more effective than a first bow shot. And you're an ambusher anyway, and you're very dependent on that first shot

that a gun is going to give you that kind of advantage. And again, the advantage is so significant in terms of lethality that becomes, the switch becomes relatively quick. Now, let me be clear, there's a couple of stages in this because the earliest guns that you need to encounter are matchlocks and they're not ignited by it like what we see in last linkage, which is the flint lock, the snapping flint against steel. It's a lit match that's being dipped into the priming pan. And that lit match,

stinks to high heaven. No deer worth its salt is going to be anywhere near anybody who's got a burning match. And any ambush that you try to execute at night is going to be lit up by burning matches. And so the Indians are not at all really interested in matchlocks. But when flintlocks come around and they're already present in the Jamestown colony, we have the inventories from the Jamestown colonies and many of the earlier guns were snap hounses, which are the earlier version of a flintlock.

So it doesn't take long before the Indians can point at the Flint locks. Those we're interested in. The match lock, not so much. Uh, and so there is, it takes time for that technological availability of that technology to become widespread for Indian preferences to become well known. But eventually, you know, you get a whole industry called the trade musket industry. They make trade muskets to fit.

Jason Herbert (01:21:46.518)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:21:55.859)
preferences of Indians and Silverman talks a little bit about this in his book where he shows the latch the lock plate the which is the plate on the backside of a musket from where the lock is mounted that it screws into and the lock plates are decorated in a way that Indians prefer because that's who you're trying to sell them to you want to get more skins for the musket you give away so you make the musket the way they want it and you supply them with shot and ball the way they want it and the ratios they want it

Jason Herbert (01:22:24.846)
Sure, I mean... The- the- Okay.

Wayne Lee (01:22:24.959)
So yeah, it changes things. And this is the part that Malone gets right. Malone is partly right here. He's not fully wrong about this, because what he says is this greater lethality of muskets leads to the end of the open battle and the increase in, he doesn't even say increase though. He says, it's all ambush now. And what I say is, okay, you're partly right. Ambush was incredibly important before gunpowder, and it's incredibly important after gunpowder.

Open battle was probably just a face saving device before gunpowder and is now too risky to do that even for saving face most of the time. So you do see the disappearance of the open battle but it's in part because it was never that important and it's really risky now and he's right about that.

Jason Herbert (01:23:17.686)
You talk about a lot in the book about different, uh, different communities, different indigenous groups. We don't see a lot of films about indigenous warfare, specifically a lot is in the 18th century at all. I mean, we did just see, uh, prey come out, but I don't think alien, alien bounty hunter commandos are in the book. I didn't see them in the footnotes. Um, are there, are there eras in times or places when you were reading and writing where you're like,

Wayne Lee (01:23:33.934)
Right?

Wayne Lee (01:23:40.739)
Ha ha.

Jason Herbert (01:23:47.51)
wow, I would love to see this on film. This is an amazing set of circumstances or people or conflict, or personalities that you thought, wow, we should see this on screen or people need to know more about this.

Wayne Lee (01:24:01.387)
Yeah, you know, there's surprisingly not much attempt to do Rogers Rangers. There's some really old movies, I think, from the 50s that played around with that. And Rogers Rangers, of course, is a white unit, but they're basically using Native American tactics. And there were other ranger units in New England at the time that were very heavily Native American.

Jason Herbert (01:24:12.554)
Mm.

Wayne Lee (01:24:33.095)
in white clothes, in white uniforms, in white organized units, but they were nevertheless, they were settlement Indians who recruited themselves into colonial militia outfit or colonial ranger outfits. There's so many. I mean, this is the thing. You could do a movie about the Pequot War. You could do a movie about the Tuscarora War, which is in the book because the final siege in the Iroca is

Jason Herbert (01:24:56.718)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:25:01.975)
pure drama. I mean, it's just an incredible story. And we've even got the, as I show in the book, we even have the diagram of how the siege progressed. And you've even got the story of, you could even narrate, you could write a script for how the Tuscaroras, as I argue they did, assessed the success or failure of their fortification program. Like this is

the first time we tried this fort, it didn't quite work. So let's improve this piece of it. And then, oh, it worked really, really well. So now with the next fort we build, let's do some more of that and even more, and we'll put our population inside the fort because I think they'll be safer there than they will be out in the swamps. And that turns out to be a disaster. So I mean, I think there's drama in that story. Where we have seen it is in The New World, which was just a terribly boring film. I was so disappointed.

Jason Herbert (01:25:43.826)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (01:25:56.416)
Awful. Terrible.

Wayne Lee (01:25:58.099)
And Black Robe is amazing. I know you just did an episode on that recently, but it doesn't really have, only has that one sort of ambush scene where the Iroquois hit the.

Jason Herbert (01:26:01.058)
Yeah.

Jason Herbert (01:26:06.42)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:26:09.911)
the mission folk on their way to the mission. But yeah, there's just not...

Jason Herbert (01:26:19.06)
I've Lo-

Wayne Lee (01:26:19.234)
I would like to see them try harder. I wonder sometimes it's just because of the woods are in...

Jason Herbert (01:26:25.011)
Well, it's different, right? Good.

Wayne Lee (01:26:25.199)
Ooh, and we could do, we could do Monongahela. We could do Braddock's Defeat. That would be, cause that has Washington in it, right? That would, you would think that would have the script waiting for it.

Jason Herbert (01:26:29.875)
Yeah, you could do products to feed.

That's a different version of Washington too, right? That is a very young 22 year old judge. He's younger than that. He's 20ish, because he's 22 at Fort Necessity, right?

Wayne Lee (01:26:41.795)
Yeah.

Wayne Lee (01:26:45.551)
Uh, by the time of Monongahela, I think he's 22 or 23. I think he's like 20 or 21 when he first goes out to Duquesne.

Jason Herbert (01:26:51.199)
Yeah, okay.

Jason Herbert (01:26:55.434)
Okay. I've longed to see Pontiac, something on him. And...

Wayne Lee (01:27:02.239)
Yeah, and the initial strikes against the British Forts at the opening of Pontiac's War, when they play the ball game and they throw the lacrosse ball inside the fort and they rush in there to get it, that would be a great piece of film.

Jason Herbert (01:27:07.756)
Mmm.

Jason Herbert (01:27:11.886)
Man, it's such a, yeah. I actually know there's a book actually by one of your colleagues at Carol, Forgotten Allies, which I thought would make a hell of a story. And yeah, and I'm dying for something on Tecumseh because it seemed to be at the time, my undergraduate and master's advisor, Robert Owens, used to just used to talk about how.

Wayne Lee (01:27:23.819)
Right, yeah. Joe Gladhar.

Jason Herbert (01:27:40.302)
People would wax poetically about Tecumseh. He's so good on horseback. He's such a handsome man. I mean, people were really taken with this guy. I think so. Three books that you find.

influential on your work for people who want to go on.

Wayne Lee (01:27:59.951)
Oh, right. One of the most important, in terms of shaping the overall project was Stephen LeBlanc's book called Constant Battles. LeBlanc is actually an archaeologist of the American Southwest, Native Americans in the American Southwest. But he argues for the constancy of human, he's an anthropologist, but he argues for the constancy of human conflict in the past. And one of the, so that's an underlying foundation, but one of the key things that he pointed out that

Jason Herbert (01:28:14.53)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:28:29.271)
became something I started looking for was the idea of buffer zones. And we talk, I talk in the book about buffer zones and how they function between competing Native American societies and what happens in the buffer zone. And then especially in North America, if you're, if no one is hunting the buffer zone, that's where the deer go. And so the buffer zone becomes really valuable. And so then it becomes a point of contention and it will move over time, depending on how.

Jason Herbert (01:28:49.963)
Mm.

Wayne Lee (01:28:59.171)
people's move and populations move. So that was a really important book. And I have to be honest, of course, Malone's book is important in the sense that it made me wanna fix things. And again, it's not entirely wrong, it's partly how he's been used. To be clear, Malone, when he wrote the book, was not doing what I was doing, which was trying to write a synthesis of North America, Eastern North America, for 300 years. He was trying to describe Southern New England for a very specific period of time. So he had limited goals.

and limited conclusions that everyone else universalized. Everyone who read it universalized it and made it. The Skull King Way war was the way Indians did it all over North America. And that's just not the case. I mean, again, this is my part of my argument. That was not true, but it was an important stimulus. Thunderstix came out after some significant chunks of this, my book were published. And so Silverman is using.

arguments that I was making 10 years ago in Thundersticks. And so Thundersticks didn't really influence me very much. It sort of confirmed some of the stuff that I was doing. It made me more confident that I could put this information out there, and not just in article form, but in book form. Um, but the, the other book and I'm, is probably, uh, Ian Steele's Warpath, which does just a, it's very Anglo centric.

Jason Herbert (01:30:14.004)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:30:27.171)
while attempting to tell a story of Native American warfare. So it narrates one war after another that's created by colonization. And so therefore what it doesn't do, that I try to do in the book, is narrate wars that Indians have with each other. And I think the key theoretical reason that that's important is because I think the wars Indians had with each other, of course, have a deeper past, way pre-colonial, and it's those wars that set their pattern.

Remember I said the homogenization of styles? So that was created by centuries of war with each other. And when Europeans show up, they still have to war with each other. And so they're constantly renegotiating those patterns because the Europeans are there and the Europeans not only bring steel and gunpowder and guns, but they also bring cows and pigs and chickens, which change your logistics.

Jason Herbert (01:31:00.136)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:31:24.431)
And so they're adapting to the European stuff that they brought and the European threats that they that exist But they're also having to continue to wrestle with each other. I mean wrestle violently with each other. And so those patterns Persist in ways and I don't think Steel's book is great. I love loved reading it But it ends up ignoring or not ignoring but passing over all the ways in which Indians continue to fight each other And focuses on the Indian Wars with the colonists

Jason Herbert (01:31:48.887)
Mm-hmm.

Wayne Lee (01:31:52.139)
And that's part of what I wanted to get past. And so it's not necessarily just a negative influence, but it does have that effect, or did have that effect for me.

Jason Herbert (01:32:02.362)
I feel like I could have this conversation with you for another three hours, because there's like a billion questions I want to do, but I don't think I'm allowed to. So let me ask you one final question here about Last of the Mohicans. Is Last of the Mohicans a history movie?

Wayne Lee (01:32:18.263)
Well, I don't know what a history movie means. It's a movie about a historical event, and therefore it's a history movie. And therefore we as historians who teach can use it. Because if it's an inaccurate movie, we can use it. If it's an accurate movie, we can use it. If it's sometimes accurate, sometimes inaccurate, we can use it because students love movies. And so they are tools that we can use in the classroom.

Jason Herbert (01:32:20.771)
That's up to you to decide.

Wayne Lee (01:32:46.295)
The trick we have as teachers, of course, is how do we get them to watch two hours of a movie and then just have time to discuss it? This is the syllabus problem with using movies, but they're still usable. And so I have a pretty expansive definition of movies that I'll call history movies. If a movie is truly atrocious, I mean, if it's doing violence to the past, then I have a different attitude towards it. But this one isn't doing that.

Jason Herbert (01:33:19.086)
Well, that's awesome, man. Wayne, I am so thankful to you for taking the time to talk to me about this movie, your book, all this other scholarship that we've had a chance to talk about today. Where can people find you beyond the realm of this podcast?

Wayne Lee (01:33:34.451)
Oh well, I'm on Twitter, I don't call it X, at milhist underscore Lee, at milhist underscore Lee. And I have my UNC website, which then links to my personal website, which has my publications and CV. And a lot of my non books are available on academia.edu in PDF form. So if you can look for me on academia.edu, which again, I link to from my UNC website.

Jason Herbert (01:33:38.751)
No, nobody calls it.

Jason Herbert (01:34:03.758)
Awesome. Man, thank you so very much for being here. I appreciate you taking the time. I know we're in different time zones. So thank you again so very much.

Wayne Lee (01:34:11.383)
Yep, I appreciate it. It was fun.

Jason Herbert (01:34:13.462)
All right, let me hit pause here.