The following is a transcript of the conversation between Dr. Alex Hunt and Philipp Meyer:
AH – For Radio Readers Book Club, I’m Alex Hunt, Professor of English at West Texas A&M University in Canyon. Today, I’m speaking with novelist Phillip Meyer. Your most recent novel, The Son, has been called a Texas epic. What moved you to write a novel so engaged with Texas history and identity?
PM – I had a sense that the history of Texas was somehow important to the history of America as a whole. I had a sense that most of what I’d learned about the history of our country whether it was from John Wayne movies when I was a kid or from my politically correct professors in college, later on – you don’t really have to be a genius to smell that there was a lot of “B.S.” in both those versions of history. Because a lot of what we think about as our history is actually just mythology. It is just as made up as the myths of the Greeks and Romans.
There is an American creation myth, you know – the story of where and what we all come from. The basic story is that our brave, white ancestors went West and carved out a life and identity from the vast and unspoiled and unpopulated wilderness. And, for some reason, there are these very bad people called Indians who came out of nowhere to attack us. This version of history sees our ancestors as forces or figures as basically pure goodness who were superhumanly good at everything they tried versus the Indians who were almost pure evil and were basically subhuman. This is the narrative you get with most of your John Wayne and most of your early type western movies.
And then, there is this kind of counter-mythology, kind of counter to that, which says basically the Native Americans were the ones who were morally and philosophically and spiritually superior to the whites. It implies that they’ve never been violent or made to work until the whites showed up. There is this idea that North America is this peaceful place, a kind of Garden of Eden, until the Europeans showed up to ruin it.
Again, in this version of the mythology, the Native Americans were pure good – almost superhumanly good – and the whites are pure evil, basically subhuman. This is the kind of stories that we learn from movies like “Dances with Wolves” and things like that. It is the version of the mythology that came up in the 1970s.
What I began to suspect as I researched and wrote this book is that the truth was entirely different from both of those stories. The truth is that both of those groups of people were fairly similar to each other and that their values were basic human values. The loved and wanted to protect their families. They wanted to protect their way of life. But they were at war. What we’ve got to be clear about here is that this is a war that our European ancestors started. They fought it, pretty brutally, for about 350 years until the last Indians were defeated in 1890 or so.
If you are a person of European descent like myself, our ancestors absolutely did steal every square inch of this state and every square inch of this Continent.
But that wasn’t a new phenomenon, the idea of war for land, of killing your enemies, was not something that Europeans invented and brought to North America. The Native Americans had been doing the same thing to each other for about 15,000 years, since the Ice Age, really. When the European Americans arrived in Texas, one way to think about it is that they were just better armed, a stronger and more numerous tribe. So, again, we have to be clear. Our ancestors absolutely did butcher the Native Americans and we took all their land by force. This has to make us uncomfortable if you think about it. If it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, there is something wrong with us.
