The first written record of contact between any American Indians in Texas and Europeans occurred in 1528 when survivors of a shipwrecked Spanish expedition landed near what is now Galveston. French and Spanish expeditions attempted in the 1600s and 1700s to establish forts and missions in the Karankawas’ territory, with little success.

Myths about the Karankawas date to these first failed conquerors, says Seiter, who has read the correspondence from Spanish explorers and missionaries to the Spanish government depicting the Karankawas as demons.

“They created propaganda to justify their failed attacks,” Dr. Tim Seiter says.

By the 1820s, however, disease, pressures from other Indian groups, and a changing environment reduced the once 8,000-strong Karankawa population to about 500. Frequent attacks from Anglo-Americans and Tejanos drove the Karankawas from the coast and deeper south into the Rio Grande Valley until 1858, when a Tejano force massacred what was thought to be the last of the Karankawas.

But it wasn’t the end, Seiter says. “By that time, many Karankawas had moved south to Mexico, joined other tribes, or were forcibly assimilated into white society. Women and the children were usually the ones that survived.”

About the Speaker: As a fourth-grader growing up near Houston, SMU history graduate student Tim Seiter became fascinated by the Karankawas, a coastal Indian tribe unique to Texas. No wonder. His Texas history textbook described the Karankawas as long-extinct 7-foot cannibals who gobbled like turkeys. Years later, as a budding historian, Seiter discovered that much of what he had learned as a 10-year-old was myth, passed on and documented for more than a hundred years. Today, together with Karankawa descendants, he is working to correct their historic record. Alex Perez, a Karankawa descendent and author of a book that captures the Karankawan language, has given Seiter a name in the tribe’s native language that translates to, “Friend Giving Back.”

PAST GUEST SPEAKERS

October: Guest Speaker Dr. Brian Riedel

 “Whose Montrose?: a Neighborhood History”

Elite suburb, “gayborhood,” crime-ridden urban core, cultural mecca, gentrified contradiction – Montrose has been all these things and more. In this talk, Brian Riedel of Rice University will discuss the history of this iconic Houston neighborhood and its place in the city’s imagination of itself.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

A native of North Carolina, Brian Riedel has called Houston home since 1997.  In his role as Associate Director for the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University, he connects community conversations and academic resources through teaching, research, and public events.  He is currently completing a book manuscript, 'Sex, Race, and the City: New Histories of Houston,' a history of the city that centers its sexual and racial past.  Outside these pursuits, he enjoys spending time with his husband and their two dogs.  You can learn more about him at https://profiles.rice.edu/faculty/brian-riedel.

September: Guest Speaker Dr. Jesse Esparza

In 1929, a Latino community in the borderlands city of Del Rio, Texas, established the first and perhaps only autonomous Mexican American school district in Texas history. How it did so—against a background of institutional racism, poverty, and segregation—is the story Jesús Jesse Esparza tells in Raza Schools, a history of the rise and fall of the San Felipe Independent School District from the end of World War I through the post–civil rights era. The residents of San Felipe, whose roots Esparza traces back to the nineteenth century, faced a Jim Crow society in which deep-seated discrimination extended to education, making biased curriculum, inferior facilities, and prejudiced teachers the norm. Raza Schools highlights how the people of San Felipe harnessed the mechanisms and structures of this discriminatory system to create their own educational institutions, using the courts whenever necessary to protect their autonomy. For forty-two years, the Latino community funded, maintained, and managed its own school system—until 1971, when in an attempt to address school segregation, the federal government forced the San Felipe Independent School District to consolidate with a larger neighboring, mostly white school district. Esparza describes the ensuing clashes—over curriculum, school governance, teachers’ positions, and funding—that challenged Latino autonomy. While focusing on the relationships between Latinos and whites who shared a segregated city, his work also explores the experience of African Americans who lived in Del Rio and attended schools in both districts as a segregated population. Telling the complex story of how territorial pride, race and racism, politics, economic pressures, local control, and the federal government collided in Del Rio, Raza Schools recovers a lost chapter in the history of educational civil rights—and in doing so, offers a more nuanced understanding of race relations, educational politics, and school activism in the US-Mexico borderlands.

About the Speaker

Dr. Jesús Jesse Esparza is an Associate Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of History at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. His area of expertise is on the history of Latinos in the United States, emphasizing civil rights activism. Dr. Esparza’s manuscript, Raza Schools: The Fight for Latino Educational Autonomy in a West Texas Borderlands Town, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press as part of the New Directions in Tejano History series. It received two book awards: the 2024 Outstanding Book Award by the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education and the 2024 Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award by the National Association of Chicana and Chicanos Studies. Dr. Esparza teaches Mexican American, Texas, and Civil Rights history. He received his B.A. and a master’s degree from Southwest Texas State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston.

August: Guest Speaker Dr. Debbie Z. Harwell

Houston – A Second Choice City

Texans are a proud lot, and Houston is no exception. Jesse Jones even remarked in a 1954 letter, as Houston achieved a population of one million people, “Looking at the map, the United States rests of Texas and Texas rests on Houston.”

But not everyone has seen it that way. Looking back at some of the city’s significant turning points, Houston was not the first choice of location. From the city’s founding in 1836 to getting the Houston Ship Channel, the 1928 Democratic Convention, and NASA, Houston was an also-ran, but its city leaders had the last laugh.

 About the Speaker

Debbie Harwell received her doctorate in U.S. history from the University of Houston where, since 2009, she has served as the managing editor/editor of Houston History magazine, published by the UH Center for Public History. A native Houstonian, she incorporates personal knowledge with historical research in teaching, writing for the magazine, and training the staff.

Since 2012, Harwell has taught a Houston history and public history methods classes in the Honors College and History, learning to research, conduct oral histories, and write for a public audience. In addition to her work at Houston History, Harwell’s book, Wednesdays in Mississippi: Proper Ladies Working for Radical Change, Freedom Summer 1964, won the 2015 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for the best book in southern women’s history. She currently serves on the Harris County Historical Commission.

July: Guest Speaker Tom Moser

Tom was born and raised in Houston.  He began his career 50 plus year career in the aerospace industry at NASA, where he participated in every U.S.  human space flight program from Mercury to the Space Station.  He served as the Chief Engineer at the Johnson Space Center and as senior manager in the Apollo, Space Shuttle and Space Station Programs in Houston and Washington, D.C. When he retired to Kerrville in 1997, he immediately failed retirement when he became the Executive Director of the Texas Aerospace Commission for Governor George W. Bush.  He established commercial Spaceports in Texas.  Space-X is operating at the south Texas Spaceport. He failed retirement again, when he was elected Kerr County Commissioner for three terms. He has been interested in the Truth regarding “Global Warming” and CO2 for over 30 years.  As such he founded the “Right Climate Stuff” 12 years ago.  An organization of retired NASA colleagues and other scientists with the objective of disseminating the Truth regarding Climate Change. Tom has multiple engineering degrees and studies from the University of Texas, University of Pennsylvania and Rice University.  He is a distinguished graduate of the UT College of Engineering and a Fellow of National and International Aerospace organizations. He and his wife, Ginnie, have four children and ten grandchildren.

June: Guest Speaker Dr. Ronald Goodwin

Please join us for Black History and Texas History with author Dr. Ronald Goodwin on Thursday, June 20, at Noon. Dr. Ronald Goodwin from Prairie View A&M University will discuss the collection of slave narratives in Texas during the preservation efforts of the New Deal in the 1930s. This lecture will be held the day after Juneteenth as it builds compassion and understanding of what people who were enslaved endured.

About the Author and Speaker: Dr. Goodwin has lectured at The Heritage Society and is a distinguished Co-Chair of the Levi Jordan Plantation Advisory Committee for the Texas Historical Commission, 2020-present. He is the General Editor, PVAMU Book Series, Texas A&M University Press, 2019-present. He has taught coursed in US History Survey, African American History, Urban History, American Chattel Slavery, Military History, Contemporary US History, and Early National US History.

Bring your own lunch or order lunch from Potbelly’s when you purchase your ticket online (please order lunch by June 18).