This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on I Heart Radio. And welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Norrie with you, Dr. Daniel H. Wilson with us, Cherokee citizen and a New York Times bestselling author. His book is called Hole in the Sky. He has earned a PhD in robotics from the Carnegie Mellon University as well as a master's degrees in machine and learning and robotics as well. Daniel, welcome back to the program. How have you been? Hey, good. Hey, George, it's great to be back. Had a good year. Look, looking forward to this. There's about what, 450,000 members of the Cherokee tribe? Yeah, that's about right. Based primarily in Oklahoma, I would guess, right? Yeah, that's right. They were force marched out there in the 1800s on what people call the trailer tiers, but forced removal. And it's kind of like a government within a government, isn't it? Yeah, so it's kind of interesting. Oklahoma used to be Indian territory. And then at some point, the five tribes were set up there as sovereign governments. So they kind of exist on top of the jurisdiction of the state and federal government in Oklahoma. So for instance, in the Cherokee nation, where I grew up, which overlaps with North Tulsa, you have Cherokee marshals, you have Cherokee police, hospitals, Cherokee court system. And so you have a Cherokee license plate and a Cherokee license. And they kind of have agreements with all the state of Oklahoma and the Tulsa County to do business there. But it's definitely a unique place and not really what people think of when they think of sort of like a reservation. Oklahoma kind of has its own thing going on there. I think the old television westerns have changed people's perception of what's going on on a reservation tribes place, huh? Yeah, absolutely. There's been a lot of great, a lot of great new shows and things out there, dark winds have enjoyed, outer race. So, and of course, reservation dogs has been great. So yeah, there's been a lot of new science fiction and just regular media that's kind of given people a more accurate perception of what's going on on reservations. Tell us, Daniel, what the reason and rationale is of having a Cherokee reservation. Well, it's a place where the Cherokee people can have, where they can have a sovereign tribal government and be in charge of themselves in their own story. After, so Hold in the Sky, for instance, is about first contact. And after first contact and all the colonization that's happened in North America, this is kind of where everything ended up for the Cherokee and for the other tribes that are in Oklahoma. And so as a result, they're able to do some really great things. I mean, I love hearing the Cherokee newspaper called the Cherokee Phoenix. I live in Portland, Oregon, so I've moved away from Oklahoma, but I go back every year and I love hearing the news because they're doing really great things for their citizens out there. How many different Native American indigenous tribes governments are in this country? Geez, I don't know, hundreds, certainly. Really? Yeah, absolutely. And what's the significance of each and every one of them? I mean, just for sovereignty? Yeah, I mean, it gives the tribe some control over defining what it means to be in the tribe, for instance, with the Cherokee being a citizen is really, that's what matters. They get to decide who is a Cherokee citizen. Actually, recently, the Cherokee were forced marched to Oklahoma, but when they marched, they actually had, they brought slaves because they had come out of the South. And part of the treaty said that these freedmen, these freed slaves were part of the tribe. And so we have African-American members of the Cherokee Nation. And so each nation really gets to make those decisions about itself, about its identity, and about how things are gonna be run. I'm super proud of the Cherokee Nation. And it was a real pleasure to make the setting of this novel out in the Cherokee Nation with Cherokee characters and really get to think about first contact with an alien entity from kind of a native perspective, as well as I've got characters from the government and scientists characters and all that. But it was a really unique perspective, I think, on looking at first contact. Well, when you talk about first contact, of course, on this program, we're talking about extraterrestrials. How about you? Well, I am, you know, for this novel, but it's a pretty loaded term, right? Whenever you're talking about, whenever you're talking to native people, because we've got, you know, we had first contact and we've had, you know, the history of our country, all those things that have happened. And I think that if you read science fiction and you look at all the alien invasion scenarios, it's usually, you know, they show up and they want to take what we've got, right? It's usually pretty, it's a pretty big mess, right? The aliens show up and they wanna extract their resources or enslave us. And, you know, I think that that's pretty understandable that we would have a lot of fiction like that, because if you look at the actual history of our nation, you know, that's what's happened. You know, that's just a sort of a fear projection that what we've, you know, what has happened in our history is gonna happen again to us. And so that's why I really wanted to kind of look at it from a new perspective and imagine it, you know, you know, imagine stepping outside of that and acknowledging that, you know, that we have that history and that we have those fears as a result. Well, with Dr. Daniel H. Wilson, his website is linked up at coastacostam.com and his book is called Hole in the Sky. He's got a PhD in robotics, which we'll talk to him about a little bit later on this program, robotics fascinates me. Daniel, we talk a lot about the Hopi Indian tribe on this program and the incredible things that they've come across where they've talked about ant people and people like that. I think they were visited by ETs. What do you think? I mean, so, you know, I dove into a lot of the Cherokee mythology and cosmology for this novel and I can only really speak for Cherokee, but I think that every culture across the, you know, the world looks up, has looked up into the night sky, looked up into the stars and imagine what's up there and what's coming down. And I think that every culture uses their stories and to make sense of the world. And, you know, it's kind of crazy to see how many similarities there are in the stories. Sure, tribes, you know, in North America, but also cultures everywhere, all over the world and going really far back in time, they've all got stories that are, you know, eerily similar and certainly, you know, fit the modern day descriptions of the stories that we have now, you know, about what we consider aliens. Indian medicine men, shamans have fascinated me since I was a kid. Did your grandfather or his father talk to him about strange things at all? I mean, you know, there's all these rules, you know, like about you don't whistle at night and if you're walking in the woods, you know, there's all these rules about how to walk in the woods without kind of slipping into a different place where you don't belong. And, you know, a lot of those rules, if you feel somebody coming up behind you, you turn around fast without fear. If you find something in the woods, you leave it there, all these little rules, I think, you know, you see them also with Irish folktales and you see them all over. So I heard little rules like that, just little things like that. But honestly, a lot of times people don't want to talk about that stuff because if you do talk about it, you know, you kind of bring it into the world and maybe you don't want to deal with it. Maybe you want to let it be. What would you say, Daniel, might be some of the strangest mythologies of the Cherokee Nation? Yeah, well, I mean, one of my favorites and one thing that partially inspired this novel is the origin story of the Cherokee people, which has to do with the Pleiades constellation, which is also called the Seven Sisters. And this is a constellation is really important to the Mesopotamians and the Babylonians, the Greeks. So it's been important to a lot of different cultures over a vast period of time. It's actually in a different spot in the sky at this point because of precession, you know, Earth wobbles a little bit. It's tilted on its axis and it wobbles and that moves where the stars are at in the sky. And that's how long they've been important. And the Cherokee oral tradition says that a star woman came from the Pleiades constellation and came and brought Cherokee people to Earth and opened up and the people came out of her and her sisters were angry that she had taken the people and so they cast her up into the sky, hid her behind a veil and renamed her to the dark one. And so Cherokee, the oral tradition is that they actually came from a different star system. And I mean, you know, you look at people making sense of the world and telling these oral traditions over hundreds and hundreds of years. And then you look at it from kind of a modern perspective or you look at it from a kid who grew up reading lots of science fiction and man, you know, it just seems like a great story to me. It seems like a familiar story to me and something I really wanted to explore. What is the Cherokee version of a higher power or of a God? Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. There is no sort of single entity. Obviously there's the Indian churches. So there's Christianity, you know, in the, among Cherokee and among natives. But what's real interesting is if you look at a lot of those oral traditions, they change with the introduction of Christianity. Christianity just, I'm speaking in generalities here, but it tends to be more about good and evil and it tends to be more prescriptive as in like, here's the answer, you know? And so if you look at stories from before Christianity, you have characters that people call, these days they call them trickster characters, you know? But like, that's really just a way of saying we don't know if they were good or evil. Sometimes they're good and sometimes they're evil because like the stories were not, they weren't trying to achieve the same thing, you know? And so, you know, you see that actually across a lot of native tribes. One thing I really find interesting is the Lakota, the name for their religion is the great mystery. I mean, they're literally not trying to tell you all the answers, you know? They're not telling you what the, you know, what everything is, they're living with the unknown. You know, the unknown is out there. And I think from a native perspective, a lot of times I feel like, this is just me, but I feel like native people are more comfortable with the unknown and with letting it be, letting it be out there without having to put a name to it, destroy it, understand it, figure it out. You know, it just, it is. And it's a part of our world. And so, you know, I find that to be a really interesting sort of perspective, especially when you're considering first contact. What fascinates me about Native Americans as well is the way they handle their own medicine with the herbs and things like that. How did they know all this? Yeah, you know, I mean, this is something that I wanted to explore because we see so much in science fiction, we see so much Western sort of technology, right? Shiny robots and spaceships and stuff like that. But there is indigenous technology, you know? It exists. There's a lot of knowledge and experience that's gone out into the world that go into those bundles and things like that and all that medicine. And what I find interesting is that sometimes from a Western perspective, that stuff's invisible, right? It's almost like you can't see it. You know, one example that I have, that I've been thinking about is how when settlers showed up on the East Coast, they often described those forests that they interacted with as a garden of Eden, right? They were beautiful. It was a beautiful place. They thought it was wild that these primitive people were so lucky that they got to live, you know, in this garden of Eden. But if you, you know, I love that quote from Arthur C. Clarke, you know, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And those settlers were looking at technology and they thought it was magic. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at 1 a.m. Eastern and go to coast2coastam.com for more. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.
