time and effort spent on in middle school about learning about learning. you know, sort of zits 101, really. [laughter] >> but what i think our children must know about the basic american and world historical stories which means chronology. it means chronology. it means narrative. it means information. it means not assuming that everything reliable can be got from wikipedia. laugh will have >> so i think that's an absolute apprenticeship. and one can fool around fruitfully with cross-disciplinary interests on universities. so i think we're on the same side. >> since you go from caravaggio, you know, to cicero, et cetera, is there anything peculiar about

your approach to history and art that makes you such a fantastic, you know, sparkling with all sorts of things? [laughter] >> i paid her to say that. [laughter] >> awe shucks. [laughter] >> i'll tell you -- what's your name? what's your telephone number? [laughter] >> i'm joking. i'm joking. [laughter] >> i always -- you know, it came from the amassment of riches, and my friend was doing all this kind of weird analysis. it seems to me when i wanted to write this book about, you know, what daily life was like was on holland and this tiny culture being the richest and the most

mighty place in the world for, you know, a brief couple of generations, i thought well, how particularist to do it, it's not just painting but this is a kind of culture that is encouraged on images, on tiles, on wall paper and stamped leather. you cannot do it without actually understanding the purchase and power of images of all kind, not just high art images. and then as the years, you know, went by and i mentioned, of course, i'm very happily taught in harvard. on the one hand, art history couldn't really be taught or consumed all together without understanding the rest of the world that kind of produced. i'm not somebody who believes you simply dissolve picasso or rembrandt or leonardo entirely on they become a function of grain prices or stock exchange. they are what they are but it is very important to understand the

kind of bay of the soil bed which produced these -- this particular work and that particular visual language. equally, it is impossible to do history especially history of the 20th and 21st century. any history since the printed image or any history since bibles began to be i humannated without seeing images as important inrizicly of our text, text is images be you know. that's how we are language animals but we're visual animals too. the two things marry to and what they give birth to is our culture. [inaudible] >> [applause] >> thank you very much for coming. [applause] >> simon schama is an art history and history professor at

columbia university. he's the author of numerous books including "rough crossings" which was the recipient of the national book critic circle award for nonfiction. for more information, visit columbia.edu/cu/arthistory. . >> up next, the story of a jordanian immigrant struggles to form a soccer team from child refugees relocated to a reluctant georgia community. it callous the hostility of the residents who had their city designated of a refuge settlement center in the 1990s. borders bookstore in atlanta is

about 45 minutes. [applause] >> thanks so much. thanks for coming out. i appreciate it. i want to spend just a few minutes talking about how i came to write this book and then about some of the bigger themes that i think are important for understanding why this book about this the town outside of atlanta is relevant to people's lives far beyond just this community. and i should say just for the record, you know, we're just really a few miles away from the setting of this book and i came back from a month-long book tour and i've been all over the country and with every community i went to, someone in the audience raised their hand what happened in clarkston is happening here. and so i learned over and over

again from literally from coast-to-coast, from atlanta to seattle and san francisco and miami and raleigh-durham that what's happening in this little town is highly relevant to communities all over the place because this country is changing. and that's what this book is about. i learned about the story of the fugis while i was here in atlanta just to give a talk about my first book. and afterwards, a couple came up and asked if i had dinner plans and i said no and so we went out to dinner. over a hamburger i was told this -- i met the couple and asked about the gentleman's job. he worked in refuge resettlement and i had a lot of questions what that was. what does a refuge resettlement case worker do every day? what's the first thing you do when you sit down and what's the last thing you do in the afternoon? and i just got over dinner a

quick idea of the incredible challenges that these families face. this particular gentleman was working with families from burndi who had nothing and had to find some way to connect to the world around them despite cultural differences, language differences, or else they faced kind of economic and certainly social stagnation. and in the course of this dinner, this gentleman mentioned that there was a soccer team of refugee kids and he asked me to check them out. it turned out this team was playing the next day at a soccer complex north of atlanta. and so i went to see him play. and when i walked out on the field that day and the first thing i noticed and the first

thing that sticks with me today and something i see during my reporting, the home team, the suburban team, had lots of parents on the sidelines and they had all their gear. they had their folding chairs and their blankets and all their stuff and there was no one on the fugi parents were not. they didn't go to soccer game for families who just arrived. and following three teams, i only saw one parent attend one game. and that's out of, i don't know, probably 30. and that's just indicative of their priorities but on this

particular day, the game started. and there was this ubre soccer dad and didn't give them a lot of room to just just enjoy themselves. he had a vision for how they should play and he was expressing it very loudly and i know there's at least one soccer coach in the audience today and i see him nodding. i think most youth sports parents have an idea what i'm talking about when i talk about that dad or mom or young man who's living vicariously through the kids on the field and kind of going berserk. that's what i was seeing. and the coach of the fugees, this young woman from jordan -- and i'll talk about her in jordan. and she had her cap down over

her eyes and wasn't saying anything. she would give a simple direction from the players and giving them a lot of rooms to be themselves. and at the end of the half, the fugees were up 3-1, which in my experience as a soccer fan, that was excellent, three goals in one-half. you know, i've watched entire soccer matches that ended 0-0, 1-0 and everyone seems to leave happy. she sits her players down and she immediately lays into them. it apparent that the score was totally irrelevant to her assessment of how they were playing. she expected them to pass the ball and keep their eyes down field, to look for opportunities. and then to take advantage of them. so she really was laying into her kids. and in particular she singled

out a young man named christian. and christian -- i come to learn a little bit of his back-story. he was a liberian refuge. -- refugee. he had been on the team and had been kicked off the team for cussing. and then about six weeks before this game i was attending, there had been a fire in his family's apartment in clarkston. and christian had survived by climbing out of the window but he'd actually lost three siblings and a young cousin in this fire. and soon after the fire he started showing up again at practice for the fugees. and luma, the coach called him down and said, look, i'll give you another shot. if you cuss again, you're gone for good. no exceptions. but you're welcome to try out and play with the team. this was his first game back and he had actually scored a goal in the first half. but luma was not happy with his play at all. and she really singled him out

and said, you know, what's wrong with you. you're in the concentrating. you're not taking advantage of the opportunity that are before you. and she really challenged him to step up. and as she was giving this talk, we hear the coach down at the end of the field doing his newt rockney impression and luma seized up and turned to her players with a narrowed gaze. she said this coach down there i want you to keep scoring goals until he sits down and shuts up. and do you understand? and the kids nodded so there i am with my reporters notebook thinking okay. this is not unusual. not exactly what i expected. second half starts the. fugees. they score and they score again and they just keep scoring. and at a certain point -- i think it was 8-2, the coach of the home team sort of takes his

cap off and wipes the sweat off his brow and sits down and zips it. and then the fugees scored again and the final score that day was 9-2. and christian, the young man luma had singled out at half time finished the game with 5 of the 9 goals, scored four goals in the second half. i had showed up for a soccer game and i have no expectation what is going to grab me by the lapels and say, hey, this is your next book. this is what you're going to be doing for the next two years. i've not watched a lot of youth sports since playing them very badly since i was a kid. there's a kid wondering does this go on every youth sport's game this kind of thing? i'm not aware of it. is there this kind of alchemy and magic happening every time kids take the field? and as i was sort of wondering about this and questioning my

own fascination, the referee came over and asked luma if he could address her players. and he was this sort of older, wise gentleman with gray hair and a gray mustache and he looked like a guy who had seen a lot of soccer games. he addressed the kids, listen, i want to commend you on your sportsmanship. the other team got frustrated. they started kicking your shins and ankles and not playing the ball when you got behind and you never retaliated and i really appreciate that. and he said i commend you for your sportsmanship. and as he was just turning to leave, he sort of almost mumbled to himself but clearly everyone is able to hear and he said, and that was the most beautiful half of soccer i've ever seen. so i go back to new york and i'm thinking, that was intense and what -- what happened? how did this woman from jordan end up coaching kids from kids from 13 different countries and

what's going on that they would respond so powerfully to her half time speech and how is she getting so much out of them when she said almost nothing to the during the game. there were a lot of contradictions. i thought maybe had the makings of an article about the team. then i started learning where they were from and that's when things got really interesting because this -- the fugees are from a little town called clarkston, 13 miles east of downtown. it's on 1.1 square miles of georgia clay, 7100 residents and the baptist church was built in clarkston in 1880 and the church sits on the same lot that it occupied back then. and basically for the first 110 years or so of clarkston's existence, nothing really happened.

that concerned or interested the outside world. and one gets the sense that the towns people weren perfectly content with this reality. freight trains rolled through town a dozen times a day, a they did at the turn of the century. and this little town just went about its business and was a very typical american town, particularly, became a typical american town next to a much bigger city. it was a place where people -- they left the city and they went to this little community to sort of escape. and it was in the late 1980s that refugee resettlement agencies decided that clarkston might make a good place to resettle newcomers to this country. why would they get this idea? refugees who come to this country, have no money so they need cheap housing and they only get 90 days of government assistance. so if they don't find cheap

housing they can't stay there. most have never owned or driven a car so they rely entirely on public transportation. because they only get this brief amount of aid, they need jobs. and so they need to be near an economic center that can support low-skilled workers who may not speak english. and clarkston had all of these elements. it had all of these empty apartments that had been sort of abandoned. they were built in the '60s and '70s when the airport here was -- had been built and atlanta was experiencing incredible growth. the people who lived in them had moved farther out to the suburbs and they were sort of in disrepair but they were there still and empty and cheap. clarkston is on the bus grid. it's near the last eastern most stop of the rail system and then it was near atlanta, georgia, a place that needed people to work in the hotels as maids. needed people to work in poultry

processing plants and in light manufacturing jobs. and so the agencies on the hunch that maybe clarkston was kind of the perfect place started putting first refugees from southeast asia then the balkans then eventually various african conflicts. and between the 1990 and 2000, this little town where very little of import had ever occurred transformed into one of the most diverse communities in the south and perhaps the entire country. there are now students from over 50 different countries at clarkston high school. you then have to ask, well, how are we going to make this work? and this question began to dawn on the residents of clarkston with increasing urgency over the years. clarkston, because it was a little bit down on its luck, wasn't the kind of town where people were -- they weren't organized enough to mount a big

oppositional movement to anything. so it wasn't until their town was somewhere between a third to a half refugees that the towns folk finally got together and said, hey, wait a minute, what's happening to our town and by that point there was a tremendous amount of frustration, resentment, anger, and i think you could say fear because particularly for the older residents of the town, they had sat and watched as their community transformed from something they were utterly comfortable with into something that was utterly unfamiliar in just the span of five to seven years. and so it turned out that just a few weeks after this game that i went to, there were hints that this kind of thing was coming to a head in clarkston once again. there had been an episode in 2003 where there was a town meeting and everyone basically got together and yield at each other.

resettlement agencies and the towns folk and it didn't end on a positive note and there wasn't much of an appetite to continue that kind of dialog. and so everyone sort of went back to their corners angry and upset. and then in 2006, not long after i'd seen this game, things started to happen again where this discussion started to take place in public instead of just within the homes and apartments of clarkston. and this was because a soccer team of sudanese young men, members of the lost boys, had started their own program, they called it the lost boys soccer team, and they were playing in the town park. and there's a sign in the town park that says you need permission so they went and asked who they needed to get permission from. someone said well, call this fellow. they called him sure, you can play. so they went to play. and as soon as they got out on the field, the cops showed up and said, get off the field. well, we have permission. they said, sorry.

so they go back to city hall. and go through the same process where they are told they have permission. they go to play and the cops show up and kick them off. wherever they turned they couldn't get any answers so they eventually just concluded that whatever was going on, the basic message was, we don't you people playing soccer here. and so they stopped. well, that field was a field that the fugees were hoping to play on. they had fallen out with their -- the place where they were playing and this was the public field in town and right about the time they were about to start practice and tryouts for a new season the mayor of clarkston told the atlanta journal constitution here which had gotten wind of the controversy, as long as i'm mayor, there will only be baseball down on that field. those fields weren't made for soccer. well, even today if you hop in your car and brave atlanta's rush hour traffic to go to clarkston and you pull up in the parking lot next to this field,

there's a green sign there that says armstead field. and there's -- there are three little drawings down there at the bottom that had clearly -- you can still make them out. they'd been there for decades, probably. there's a little baseball and there's a little football and there's a soccer ball. so, in fact, whoever built that field, actually did intend poem to play soccer there. and it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the mayor's real problem was not with the game of soccer, which was somehow he argued worse for grass than for other games, but with whom was playing soccer. and that's -- for me when i heard that, i thought, okay, this is going to be interesting. i'm from birmingham. i grew up in the south. i had a sense of the southern min mines, the southern outsiders. and i'm assuming the outsider role again parachuting in this little town to try to report on

it. but i had a hunch that this is going to be interesting. and i wasn't disappointed. that's sort of how the story and my reporting started. and i'd just like to talk for a moment about some thematic issues that came out of my reporting and some things that i learned from my reporting. you know, one of the most poignant part of reporting on refugees who have come to this countries, you get a sense of how your country looks through fresh eyes. how your society looks through your fresh eyes. and day after day, somebody would say something or give me some insight that made me reconsider how i lived my life here and we also were going through the motions living our lives and rarely do we stop to consider these -- the mundane aspects of our life, a simple example would be, i would frequently come in from new york and stop at the avis counter at

the airport and drive straight to practice. and then i would spend a few days reporting and maybe go back to new york and after i did this a few minutes, one of the members of the fugees said to me, mr. warren, you must be a very wealthy man. and i said why do you say that? he said well, you have so many cars. and this became an occasion for me to explain, well, you know, in america, there are these companies where you can actually borrow a car and give it back and -- what was interesting about that to one liberian member of the fugees that he now lived in a culture amazingly enough, where a total stranger would not only lend you a car but trusted you to bring it back. that was -- that was the real soccer and i would try to explain well, you know, you give them this piece of plastic with some numbers on it and if you were to take off with the car and crash it, they're going to write a letter to a country and they'll write a letter to

experian and this is absurd, no wonder it's so hard for refugees to figure out our culture. i mean, look at how many layers we've piled on to something as simple, you know, as borrowing a car and the list of consequences can be very long if you screw up. but there were other moments that were more serious and more poignant. i think for me one of the most poignant moments in my reporting was talking to a sudanese refugee about his experience coming to the u.s. he's this very handsome, charismatic, incredibly talented soccer player. he's now on an academic scholarship in north carolina like anyone in college in america, he's got 8,000 facebook friends. so he's doing great and he can comment with a bit of wry detachment what he felt like

when he came to this country. he talked to me, for example, showing up at the atlanta airport and seeing an escalator for the first time and how afraid he was to get on it. 'cause he didn't know what was going to happen to this staircase that looked like teeth of some kind and he laughs about that now but he said to me -- he said, you know, in my country, in sudan, he's from the mountains of sudan, if someone was to come in to a different culture and a different country and get dropped off in our village everyone would want to meet and come this person and they would have hundreds of questions for them and they would want to know everything about the place this person came from. but he said in america, he said i felt hike people were just afraid of me. they didn't want to ask questions. they didn't want anything to do with me. they were intimidated by me. and this was for me a very powerful idea that this young man who had been through so

much, his village had been bombed by the sudanese air force, with these crude bombs dropped out of cargo planes and he flew to egypt and he felt was safe and instead people treat him as though he's someone to be feared. and it was a reminder to me of how important it is to, you know, keep an open mind, to smile, to reach out, say hello to someone who may be different but especially for kids, kids are going to a public school, big schools with lots of kids who already know each other and who are very comfortable in their own skin and comfortable in their setting. and it must be incredibly isolating and intimidating for someone to enter that environment alone and to feel that people are afraid of him just because he didn't speak the language as well as the other kids. so ultimately this is a book people in transition.

and i think that applies to everyone in the book. i should say a few words about luma. luma is from amman, jordan. she went to college in the u.s. went to smith college and after college she told her parents she was going to stay in the u.s. because she thought this was the place that provided her the best opportunity to live life as she wanted, as she saw fit and her parents responded by completely cutting her off financially. they wouldn't talk to her. they would hang up the phone when she called and so luma was after college set adrift herself and eventually made her way done to atlanta mainly because of the weather. she spent a lot of typically in the northeast and didn't like the cold winters and atlanta winter amazingly enough she says a bit like the weather in amman so she came here and she coached soccer at the ymca and

eventually on the way to a middle eastern grocery store to get some of the food that reminder of home, she took a wrong turn and turned into this parking lot of an apartment complex and there were a group of kids outside playing soccer the way she had played the game as a kid and the way she had seen it played as a child. they were barefoot, they were playing on asphalt, they had a ratty soccer ball and they didn't have goals and they were having the time of their lives. and luma went back to this parking lot again later. actually got out of the car and asked if she could join the kids and play. and they said, yes. and this was her first real encounter of the refugees of clarkston. and eventually she got the idea these kids deserved a team of their own. and she decided she would be the one to coach it. so she put fliers around town in various languages and called for tryouts and kids from all around from dozens of different countries, literally, and tried out for her team and many were

surprised to see that the coach of this team was a woman. they came from cultures where women aren't frequently known to coach boys in sports or to coach at all. and there was a moment when luma heard one of the kids, sudanese players, tell his teammates, don't listen to her. she's a girl. she doesn't know what she's talking about. and luma said, come here. she put him in the goal and put the ball in the penalty line and blasted a shot right at him and luma is a very gifted athlete and the kid dove out of the way and she turned around and looked at the rest of the other kids who are now laughing hysterically and said, okay, who's next and nobody was next. and so luma had a lot of small battles to fight just to have her authority respected as a coach. and so you have these three elements. you have the town of clarkston going through incredible change. you have the refugees themselves

who are going through incredible change trying to acclimate to a new culture. and you have luma who has been sort of set adrift by her own family and found herself of all places in the deep south. and taking on the responsibility of this group of refugees and this community who has no end of need and that need began to draw her in. simple things like translating between a teacher and a parent. helping with the power bill or the phone bill on the immigration forms, all the paperwork that we have in our culture that seems very wasteful and perplexing to many of the newcomers here and she felt gratified helping them. so all of these people as i said a moment ago are in transition between one world and the next.

and it's -- what's interesting about that is the choices people had to make in that process. were they going to side with the old world that they came from in some way or were they going to try to forge some new community? and if so, what would that community look like? that was true of luma. it was true of the towns people, the people who had lived in this community for decades and suddenly found themselves facing the unfamiliar and had a choice to retreat or to engage. and i think what's relevant -- the reason this is relevant far beyond clarkston -- in the book i talk about this study by a harvard political scientist named robert putnam. and putnam sent his grad students out and they interviewed 35,000 residents of some of the most diverse communities in america. and when they found was surprising and trouble. they found that people in these

communities watched more hours of television each week than the average american. they were less likely to vote than the average american. they were less likely to volunteer or become part of civic organizations. if you can believe this, they held the media politicians in greater distrust than the rest of america, as if that were possible. but the portrait that they -- that this study painted was of people who in the face of change in their communities had closed the front door. gotten on the sofa, turned on the television set and become angry and resentful at all the levers of power and the organizations out there that they blamed for the change that had upset their levee. -- lives. if you believe the pastor of the clarkston bible church, he says america is changing, get over it. that's what he tells his

parishioners, then this portrait is concerning because if america is changing and that's what we do when we're faced with change and sudden newfound diversity, well, what does that say about our prospect for building a community in the future. clarkston is really interesting because it give us a little glimpse that allows us to see all these issues play out in real time because clarkston is sort of america on fast forward. it went through what the rest of the country is going through slowly but surely in a span of 5 to 7 years. so all the issues are thrown into sharp relief in clarkston. so that's what the book is about. and i think you'll see in the book that there are people who come up with incredible solutions and offer inspiring models for how to deal with the situation and how to connect with others over cultural

barriers and divides and i think you'll see in the book that there are people who retreat and who become fearful and who cut themselves off from the people around them. and you'll see little pockets of the community that suffer when people do that. so ultimately i think it's a very inspirational story because you get to see our capacity of improvising our way out of very complicated social situations when there's a willingness to do so. and so with that, i'd like to take a few questions, if i could. i know sometimes asking the first question can be tough. i see some familiar faces who were at the carter center when we launched the book about a month ago. and it came to this moment and i was kind of anxious, you know, is anyone going to ask a question and this young man bolted past 300 grownups to the microphone and he pulled out a piece of paper and he said, my name is so-and-so.

it was clear he didn't speak english very well but he had everything written out so he didn't make a mistake. my name is so-and-so and i'm from nepal. i live in clarkston and i want to know how can i join the fugees and everyone sort of clapped and luma said, well, you know, we have tryouts and space is limited so you can come try out like everybody else. and he said oh, yeah -- and he pointed to the back of the room, i've got four brothers and they want to play too. so it was a wonderful moment because it just underscored not only the need but the degree to which this refugee soccer team is something that newcomers who come to clarkston and they hear about it and they want to join it. it's the cool thing to do. when i showed up in 2006, the cool thing to do was play in basketball because that's what the american kids do and now because the fugees have done so well on the field and people have heard their story, kids are showing up listening to an old

guy blather about a book just to have an opportunity to play on the team. that's some kind of dedication. with that i challenge someone to be that -- the person to ask that first question. i don't think anyone here could possibly qualify for the fugees so we'll get that out of the way. >> i read the book and enjoyed it a lot for a bunch of reasons. i know you kind of already talked about the beginning like that first shot but is there one player's story that really kind of encompasses you think kind of like is about the fugees and that experience that, you know, every once in a a while you have that moment where -- >> just one particular kid? well, it's hard for me to separate out, you know, one kid from another. i found them all like incredibly generous and -- you know, i was talking to someone upstairs a

moment ago about these little moments when i was let into a world that previously, you know -- the refugee community is quite guarded. they've been through very traumatic experiences and they're not -- they're just not in the frame of mind that allows them to be very trustful of strangers. but i was there for a while. i kept showing up. i was at the games. i would occasionally, you know -- my journalistic objectivity would break down and i would cheer at a goal when i shouldn't. and they understood i was not going anywhere. and i mentioned to one liberian player that i really liked liberian food but it was a little too spicy for me but i knew he cooked and i said i would love to eat your cooking that time and before a game he actually came up to me and said, i'm cooking dinner for you tonight at my apartment. i hope you can make it.

and it was just -- this is a 15-year-old boy inviting me to dinner that he's going to cook and he's so proud not only of his native food but of his ability to cook it and, you know, he was partly showing off and it was one of those very touching things where you think to yourself, wow, really? me? and he's just this remarkable kid who at the team car wash raised funds for the next soccer tournament. he would wash more cars better than anyone else. he's just that guy. he's the guy who works harder than anyone. he's got the best attitude and there's a moment in the book where he had gotten in a fight at school because he was doing rehearsals for the school play and some of the kids started to make fun of him for his accent. and he got upset and there were words back and forth and there was a shoving match and he got suspended. this wasn't like homework i

mean, occasionally he had moments of frustration, but he was -- it really wasn't what he was about and he knew it was wrong and i asked him about it later, and i said, you know, what did you learn from that experience? and what do you do now if someone makes fun of you? and he said well, now if the american kids make fun of me at school for the way i talk, i say to them, you know, don't make fun of me. please tell me how to say it. and to hear a 15-year-old kid negotiating his way through that social situation and basically, you know, putting his anger and frustration and trying to learn -- you know, so hard to learn to say things the right way so that people didn't make fun of him, for me, those kind of moments are incredibly touching and they happen every day in this community. you've got -- there were over 40 kids on the various teams when i was following them and every day somebody is dealing with this issue of how do i fit?

you know, am i american? 'cause this is where i live now? or am i liberian or am i from the congo? and if they go to school, kids make fun of them because they're not from america. and they've got these accents. so untuck their shirts and they put their jeans a little low to look baggie and fit in with the american kids and then they go home and mom and dad says, what are on earth are you dressed like? we don't dress like that where you come from. you need to respect our culture and respect where you came from and by the way do you know what i went through to get you here safely? so they feel they are not liberian or congolese but in the here and now and the people whose approval they want kind of look at them as outsiders. so that struggle was ongoing every day. these kids had trauma in their pasts and occasionally they would open up about that. but it was very much in their pasts. this thing was going on every

single day right -- you know, in real time and sometimes it was wrenching to hear about. and i think one of the things i hope people get from the book -- and i especially hope young readers get a chance to read the book and adults will encourage young people to read the book is you gain a sense of insight into what these kids are going through. and also an insight how the simplest and smallest gestures can mean a world of difference to a kid. you know, complimenting a kid with an accent over his delivery of a soliloquy in a school play may not seem like much but someone who's struggling to fit in every day because of his accent could mean a lot. so that's one of the hopes i have for the book is that the by hearing the kids talk about their experiences themselves, other young people will be able to identify with them and say, gosh, i never realized that's what they were going through. but i could -- i've been there

myself and i'm going to be a little bit nicer to that kid down that hallway who comes from some other country i don't know about. anybody else? >> in general, how successful do you think their refugee program is than anywhere in the u.s. you say in the ninety days it's too short and the ngos kind of take over? >> the question is how does the u.s. refugee resettlement work versus other countries. i'm not an experiment on resettlement. i know from some of the families who have been in other countries or who have families or relatives in other countries, there are other countries that definitely do it differently. i know in, i think, belgium, for example, they tend to -- there are refugee apartment buildings and everyone is struggling with how best to service this community. and what's best for the

refugees? is it best to scatter them around so far from each other but they have no choice but to assimilate? or do you want to put them all together so that you can provide social services to them, you know, they need to be able to get to the rosettlement office and get job help and educational help. that's the way we tend to do it in america. we tend to concentrate people so that they're within walking distance of the local offices for the agencies. but the agencies actually take over for them in america from the moment they land. they greet them at the airport so the government's assistance is financial but the government really hands off the job to the agencies and the agencies have just absurdly few resources to handle what's been given to them in terms of responsibility. coworkers i spoke to dealing with, you know, dozens of families at the same time, some of whom have just gotten here, some of whom may have been 18

months or two years but who are still dealing with a lot of serious issues and the issues change, you know, because a family might get here with a bunch of, you know, kids who are 6, 7, 8 years old well, pretty soon they're kind of preteens and preteens are facing a completely different set of issues. in clarkston one of those issues is the lure of gang activity. and this one of the more bitter paradoxes or ironies for a lot of these families is that they have left war zones and they've come to the u.s., a place where they expect peace and they're very hopeful and they happen to get put in this kind of community where there's a lot of gang activity, where you hear gunshots at night, where there's crime. there's a liberian refugee i write on her book on her first night home from work she took the bus down to the ritz carlton hotel to work as a maid. gets off the bus and she's walking from the bus stop in

clarkston back to her apartment and she's muggediñv a man with an african accent. so here she is in america. she's left all this violence in africa and she's getting mugged by someone who's accent she recognizes. she's thinking, what was all that travel for, you know, if not to get to a safer place? there's a scene in the book where it's halloween and luma puts the kids on the bus and takes them to a really nice neighborhood in atlanta with these beautiful brick houses, with chandeliers and all the parents are out in the yard having cocktails and the kids÷ç the streets are closed to traffic and kids are free to run around and trick or treat around and they are allowed to run around with 50-pound burlap of candy and every kid's dream and i say in the book, a comfortable american might potentially take,

you know -- could afford to take that kind of jaundice view of suburban life and there's been no end of writers who pontificated of the burbs and when you lived in a refugee camp and fled a war zone and the tableau before these kids was exactly what they hoped america would be like for them, for themselves. they expected they'd get a car. they'd get a nice house. that they'd live in a place where kids could run around all the time without worrying about anybody and where you could ring a stranger's doorbell and they would just give you candy, you know, some of the kids i was with that night, it was their first halloween ever and they just could not believe that there was this thing where you could ring the doorbell of a stranger, say a couple of words and they would give you candy. and luma had given the kids, you know, little pep talk about manners, you know, take one piece of candy, say thank you

and this was one young man on the team who was so excited. he's at the back of the line and one by one the fugees take, you know, their one piece of candy out of this big bag of candy and this kid sticks two hands in there and shovels a pound of candy into his bag and the woman at the door says, young man, thank you. and he takes off running. and he was so happy, you know, that this -- this was kind of what they dreamed about and then they got back on the bus and q went back to clarkston where nobody is trick or treating because in clarkston you would not dare ring the doorbell of a stranger at night or at least in the apartment complexes or some of the apartment complexes. i'm sure there are a few corners of clarkston where they trick or treat but certainly not where these kids come from. maybe one more question. >> talk about the impact of your reporting with the "times" and also in the book with the kids as well. >> the question was, can i talk

about the impact of the stories i did in the "new york times" and the book itself on the kids. and i think, you know, it's interesting. i think -- that sort of thing is so removed from their daily life. they're not reading the "new york times" every day and they are not listening to npr, not probably watching c-span unless, you know, all the other channels are out. and so a lot of the media stuff seems very remote to them. they're more likely to hear -- i've heard from a lot of kids, oh, my teacher read your article. or my teacher did -- you know, said this or read -- you know, read about your book so they hear about it that way and then maybe other kids will say, my mom said they saw your coach on cnn or on tv. so it seems sort of far away and i don't think it really impacts their daily life and they've got all these struggles that are right before them every single

day. so i think, you know -- again, to kind of upper middle class american -- a budget of media tension would probably be a very exciting maybe even temporarily& life-changing experience, you know, you go get a publicist and that kind of thing. but for most of these kids, it's just -- they don't quite understand why there are all these grownups around with these big sticks with things on their shoulders. you know, that's my sense. i think i'm right about that. i think, you know, one thing that has changed is just a profoil of the fugees because they've been there now for severald years and some of the young kids on the team, they've stayed with the program and they've gotten older and the reputation of the program has grown locally. that has nothing to do with the media coverage at all. it's just a factor of the profile of the program, the way it's run.

they've got this bus now with a huge fugee logo and they are no longer on this nondescript short whi87ñ buses that every ymca shuttles kids in. they think that was pretty cool. i was at a tournament in savannah with the fugees with a kid came up and asked one of the players of the younger team for his autograph. he said could you autograph my duffel bag and he was, you know, using that on his teammates for like days, you know, that they had -- they hadn't been asked for his autographs but he had. so anybody else? so thank you so much for coming out. i really appreciate it. and i'm happy to sign any books and answer any questions you might have and i hope you enjoy the book. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> warren st. john is a "new york times" reporter and author of "rammer gentlemaner yellow hammer" for more information on the author andg the soccer tim you can go to outcasts united.com. >> worry here at the oregon council for social studies conference speaking with robert miller, author of "native america, discovered and ]ed, thomas jefferson, lewis & clark and manifest did he sayity." you talk about the doctrine of discovery. why don't you tell us about that? >> the doctrine of discovery is a legal principle that describes how europeans came to this continent and claimed the lands from the native people. the doctrine was literally developed by the church and

portgal and spain and they used this legal principle to claim lands in africa, asia and, of course, in the americas. the classic painting or the classic example of explorers coming ashore and sticking their flag and their cross in the soil, usually the caption for that in various paintings is that they were thanking god for a safe voyage across the ocean. well, that might be true. but europeans were also engaged in a legal procedure when they were putting their flags and crosses in the soil, they literally they were claiming the land for their own king and their own country. >> does the doctrine of discovery still impact any government decisions today? >> absolutely. the united states' supreme court adopted this doctrine of discovery in an 1823 supreme court case called johnson v. macintosh and they decided to adopt this european law on how

they would divide up and claim the world. as part of american law, we adopted that in this case, johnson v. macintosh to decide what rights tribes held in their own lands. and even though that's an 1823 supreme court case and even though the doctrine of discovery itself is 500 years old, that is still the law in america today for indian tribes and for some indian people. the lands that tribes own, for example, the united states is considered to be the legal owner of those lands, reservation, et cetera and the tribe is called the beneficial owner. and so this doctrine of discovery still applies in indian country today. and, in fact, guess what russia did on august the 2nd, 2007. it, of course, planted a flag 2 miles below the surface of the artic ocean. plainly russia is using this charade, if we want to call it that, as a claim for the resources that russia claims is there or that we all know is there, excuse me, 10 million tons of oil and gas.

>> in the forward to your book written by elizabeth first she writes that history is an illusive and misleading discipline and it's practically impossible to find unbiased history and that's why this book is so important. how is your book different from other history books on this subject. >> well, i am a native person. i'm a citizen of the eastern shawnee tribe of oklahoma and i teach indian law over 15 years and i look at events through a different eye than someone else. i'm a lawyer and a law professor and i see events that happen in american history through their legal meaning. so the doctrine is something i'm very familiar with so when my tribe appointed me to be involved in the lewis & clark bicentennial, i thought i would write the doctrine of discovery. what did thomas jefferson think about it. what did lewis & clark do to

look at the doctrine when they were literally claiming the lands for the united states. so history -- it is important who writes history because we wonder why minorities and females, for example, and, of course, indian people are left out of history. well, that's because a whole lot of european males wrote the history books and then, of course, here in america again, it depends on who writes the history as to what they might emphasize or what they think is most important. one reviewer of my book said that it was a revisionist history but he said revisionism in the best way possible. because it gave a new slant on american history on thomas jefferson's ideas about the louisiana purchase and about the lewis and clark expedition and then about manifest destiny itself. so what i hope my book does is approaches history from a different slant and give us another view point, one that has been mostly ignored. >> what do you think the u.s.

government needs to do today to right some of their earlier wrongs? >> the doctrine of discovery has been american law for over 500 years. in the conclusion of my book, i really don't have some fabulous suggestion on what we can do about the doctrine of discovery today. but i do give a couple of simple suggestion that is maybe congress could appoint a blue ribbon commission that tribes are involved in or maybe some congressional committee could examine the remnants of the doctrine of discovery that are still part of american indian law today. why are we still using this eurocentric, ethnocentric religiously inspired law to limit the rights of indian tribes and indian people in their own properties? today, so what we can do, it can't be something too radical because we don't like to change property law too radically and it has been the property law in the western world for the past 5 or 600 years. >> and you write in the end of your book that you're confident

there's more evidence that the government uses doctrine of discovery. since you've finished writing you find more evidence. so where do you go from here? are you still conducting research on this? >> yes. in fact, i just signed a contract to write another book with australian woman and a first nations woman who's a professor in canada and the four of us are going to write a book about how england used the doctrine of discovery in our four countries. what sort of prompted us to do this is that our four countries are the only four in the entire united nations who voted against the declaration on the rights of indigenous people in september of 2007. we found it very unique that only four nations in the united nations voted against the rights of indigenous people. and so we talked about what do those four nations have in common?

well, obviously, it's english colonization using these doctrine of discovery principles against the native people. so that's my next project in the further research in the doctrine of discovery. >> we've been speaking with robert miller, author of "native america, discovered and conquered: thomas jefferson, lewis & clark and manifest destiny." thank you. ..