Intrigue abounds as we learn how 16th century Italian courts schemed and fought to maintain their power, as we read about in Maggie O'Farrell's latest historical novel, The Marriage Portrait. In the swirl of wars and murder, we talk about how women in different courts distinguished themselves and the roles they played. We also talk about some of the finer things in Renaissance life, such as art, music, and fashion. Our guide in this immersion is Dr. Deanna Shemek, a University of California-Irvine professor and Italian expert who specializes in Italian literature, Italian and European history, women and gender studies, and Renaissance and early modern studies. We learn a lot and share some laughs, too!
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The Marriage Portrait, a riveting historical fiction novel, plunges us into the 16th-century world of Lucrezia de’ Medici whose parents have forced her to wed Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara. He has taken her to his isolated hunting lodge and she becomes aware of the fact that he means to murder her there. As the novel skips around in chronology we learn about Lucrezia’s conception, birth, and childhood that brought her to this moment. She is a sensitive, artistic, and misunderstood youngest daughter. We hang on by our fingernails to see how her story ends.
Today we interview Joe Starita about his book, I Am A Man. The narrative non-fiction book describes the real life story of Ponca Chief Standing Bear. He was a man who just wanted to live peaceably, with his tribe, on their ancestral homeland that was deeded to them by the U.S. government in a treaty. However, government mistakes, prejudice, and people following orders from their superiors led to the Ponca being stripped of their Nebraska homeland in 1877, many deaths on their journey to a reservation in Oklahoma, and eventually Chief Standing Bear’s suit against the federal government, the first time a Native American had been allowed to testify in a US courtroom. And he won. Join us to learn more about this remarkable, heartbreaking, and inspiring man.
I Am a Man by Joe Starita documents the heartbreaking exile of Chief Standing Bear from his homeland to his journey to establishing the personhood of Native Americans in US courts. Chief Standing Bear promised his dying teenage son that he would bury him in the ancestral graveyard back along the Niobrara River in northeast Nebraska. On his journey home with his son’s body, he was jailed for leaving the Oklahoma reservation and for visiting his friends and relatives on the Omaha reservation. The US Army intended to force him to return to Oklahoma. However, a newspaperman and two attorneys in Omaha
helped him file a suit against the US government. He ended up being the first Native person to testify in a US court and his case established that Native persons have the same rights as the nation’s White and Black citizens, which was not clear in the muddle of the way Native Americans were treated. His most famous lines are from his testimony in court about his personhood. He stood and held out his hand and said: “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same God made us both.”
Dr. Margaret Jacobs joins us on the front porch to investigate how the US has forcibly removed children from their parents, a policy expanded in Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts. In Our Missing Hearts, a Choctaw grandmother reminds Noah’s mom that taking children away from their parents is not unprecedented in US history and she alludes to indigenous child removal, as well as the separation of children from their parents who have illegally crossed the country’s southern border. In this episode, we learn about the reality of these past policies and also Indigenous and Non-indigenous people working together to forge a reconciliation over these past wrongs.
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