History lessons

You’ve probably heard about the brouhaha that raged around a school district near Denver recently. In case you didn’t, here are the Cliff Notes. A newly elected conservative majority on the Jefferson County school board floated a plan to “revisit” the AP history curriculum, their aim being, specifically, “to promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.” Along the way, they wanted to ensure that teachers don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” In short, they proposed a return to the dead-white-men, American exceptionalism, might-makes-right, sit-still-and-memorize-glorious-heroes version of history. You know, the sanitized version where disenfranchised groups are invisible at best, villainized at worst, and our leaders always got it right.

The immediate result was some relatively calm protests in the form of “sick-outs” by teachers that closed a few schools. But then the students got wind of it, and their demonstrations lasted for days stretching into weeks.  Their protests were undoubtedly fueled in part by the thrill of adolescent rebellion and a chance for a sunny day out of the classroom and into the news. But they were also enacting super-healthy and age-old resistance by youth to being told what they won’t be allowed to know or do. Fittingly, among the signs they waved were ones saying things like “This is what Democracy looks like!” and “Don’t censor my education.” 

I thought of that story as I was riding along in a bus last weekend, gazing out the window at the passing eastern Colorado prairie, thinking about what this land must have been like before we arrived—“we” being the intruders from the East, the folks with pale skin, nasty diseases, and seemingly bottomless greed for gold, land, and dominion. “Manifest Destiny” on steroids. 

I was looking at the scenery in this way for a reason: we were traveling with a contingent from the Boulder History Museum to a historic site that commemorates the Sand Creek Massacre—the only National Park dedicated to an atrocity committed by the US government against people it was sworn to protect. I’ve wanted to visit the site since I learned about it a year or two ago. We had considered visiting for Thanksgiving this year in homage to the “other side” of the Thanksgiving story. But the museum trip offered an opportunity to let someone else do the driving and also learn a ton in the process. It was a lovely drive, the short-grass prairie rolling by, alternating with green fields (alfalfa?) and tiny towns standing beside the railroad tracks and at the feet of grain elevators. Americana in the low autumn sun.

So, I was reflecting on this landscape and the prairie stories that have been silenced in standard histories. I thought of a long-time favorite book called Pioneer Women that I read many years ago (when I was way into women’s history)—an eye-opening journey through the little-known experiences of women settlers, the “other side” of the often glorified story of the “winning of the west.” That, in turn, reminded me of a blog I wrote recently about slaves in the Civil War, especially about a particular woman slave, and how unaware we are of their side of that story—though most of us learned plenty about the “other side,” i.e., the military, governmental, largely White side of that war. 

All of these trains of thought came together in this notion of what we do and don’t know, what we did and didn’t learn—or in the case of Jeffco schools, what will and won’t be allowed in school children’s history lessons. Another excursion into the necessity of a more inclusive “new history.” Which I also wrote about here before. I was approaching Sand Creek in this way, wanting to know more about what happened there, and especially wanting to know the “other side.” My previous experiences looking at history through new eyes had been enlightening and mind altering. That’s the sort of knowledge I wanted to take from Sand Creek. And I did. It was an excellent day—informative, troubling, exhausting, and excellent. 

I don’t want to dwell here on the details of the massacre; you can read about it here and more here. But a brief overview seems necessary for the rest of this to make sense. So … In November of 1864, exactly 150 years ago next month, as the Civil War raged in the east, the Colorado Territory was in the midst of its own escalating struggle. Gold had been found in the area, and settlers from the east poured in—and then decided to stay. They blithely occupied land that belonged—by treaty with the US government—to the Plains Indians. Some of the Native Americans wanted to expel the settlers; others saw their numbers and concluded that resistance was futile. They hoped for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. A large number of that latter group—several hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians led by elders sometimes called “peace chiefs”—gathered at a village in what is now eastern Colorado, assured that they would be protected there by Union soldiers. The lead chief flew an American flag and a white truce flag from his lodge.

At dawn on the morning of November 29—it will be the day after Thanksgiving this year—a large contingent of Union soldiers, led by Col John Chivington (ironically, a former Methodist minister) descended on the camp. Many of them were members of an untrained “100-day army” recruited specifically to kill Indians, who, in an echo of the enmity of the Civil War, were sometimes called “red rebels.” Throughout the day, the soldiers killed and plundered, chasing down fleeing people on horseback, firing howitzers at groups of women and children cowering in sand banks, beating, torturing, and mutilating. The carnage continued until they ran out of ammunition. About 200 Indians were killed, two-thirds of them women, children, and elderly people. Another 200 were wounded or maimed. The next day, the soldiers returned to claim the leftover spoils of the massacre—moccasins, headdresses, clothing, horses, body parts to display as trophies back home.

In the following days, the “battle” was celebrated in some quarters—including in the newspapers and on the streets of Denver. Before long, though, the government acknowledged that it had been a massacre—but did nothing to redress the losses. Sand Creek became a rallying cry for Indians across the plains, many of whom waged an ultimately futile battle to save their land and their way of life. More and more lands were taken to support the arriving masses, and the Indians were shunted into smaller and smaller territories, sent away from their traditional homelands to places that no settlers wanted.

I’ve long known something of how awful Europeans were to the indigenous people—here and elsewhere. And lately, I’ve learned more and more about how that genocidal push played out here, in my home state. In fact, I wrote about this topic in a blog last year. Still, this place on this day touched me in a new way. Maybe it was the beautiful sunny, windy day that so evoked those earlier times and the freedom of the prairie. Maybe it was the sense, as I approached the memorial hill that overlooks the massacre site, that we visitors were not alone there. That the spirit of the people who camped there that morning is still around. 

I’m certain that it was, in part, the ranger who walked us around the site, whose deep appreciation for these people and their history was palpable as he told us stories about them, about the descendants of survivors, and about how the park services has worked to respect this site and their story. I had a hint of that sort of respect when we attended a lecture about the site earlier in the week. At that presentation and later at the site, I heard about how closely the tribes have worked with the Park Service in developing this place. So closely that the elders were called in to oversee the post-hole digging process when they put in a new fence. Why? Because the massacre site extends over many square miles, and the people who were killed—hundreds of them—were never buried, so human remains are still being found. That respect has served the project well. Recently, the tribes decided that they no longer needed to return every year for a prayer vigil because the site is now well honored and well protected. 

But there was another dimension, too, as the story became more complex—and therefore more realistic. Not another good side vs. bad side tale, only with the sides reversed, but a story of human frailty and human compassion on both sides. Among the stories the ranger told was of soldiers who were dumbfounded and then outraged by the attack, soldiers who refused to participate, soldiers who were emotionally damaged by what they witnessed. Two of these men wrote about their experiences, and their letters, full of detail and anguish, are also part of the interpretive material at the site. The Indians revere these men as allies who understood the grotesque outrage of this attack. One of these men, Silas S. Soule, testified before an army commission investigating the massacre. He was subsequently shot in the streets of Denver. Although his murderer was known, he was never charged.

This sort of story was also part of the “new history” I learned that day. The first departure from the standard, sanitized version of Colorado History that I learned as a child was this awful event, undertaken in the name of … what? Power? Status? Proof of superiority? But more surprising to me and just as crucial to “getting” what really happened here was the second departure from a simplistic version of the tale. These are the stories I don't hear if I hastily, even self-righteously portray this event as nothing but a victory of evil over good. There’s another layer. Here, in the midst of this horror were soldiers, men whom we could easily equate with evil—but who refused to exercise their might, who risked (and lost) their careers and their lives by saying "No." Allies, to be sure. Even on what this ranger calls the “killing fields,” there were allies. And the tribes honor them, too.

And then, to return to the more obvious story—though one that was absent in the history I learned as a child—there are the stories of the generations-old pain, the lingering costs to descendants of the Cheyenne and Arapaho who were here. The story of the social worker who couldn’t understand the profound sorrow of the Native American peoples she was working with, didn’t know why they kept referring to “Sand Creek”—some event she assumed had happened in the recent past. Learning about Sand Creek, she understood. Add to the lives of the people who died here and those who suffered physical or psychic wounds on those awful days, add to those days the generations who followed, 150 years now living with the painful stories of an event that has only very recently even been known to most people outside the tribes, much less acknowledged. And yet, the Indians have maintained the wherewithal to organize an annual healing run from Denver, to oversee post-hole digging as necessary, and to shepherd the site that will finally acknowledge what happened here through the slow-moving bureaucracy that is the US Park Service.

I left Sand Creek feeling both exhausted and enlightened. All evening, I thought about what I’d seen and learned and about that sense of the people’s presence. I awoke with them on my mind the next day, and they keep returning. I’ll go back to Sand Creek. There’s more to know about what happened there, in all its complexity, and more to learn from the good people who are preserving that knowledge.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

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Mandela, reconciliation, and reparation

Yesterday, I listened to some of the coverage of the memorial/celebration service for Nelson Mandela.* From all reports, it was a moving event, with an extraordinary outpouring of grief and gratitude for this singular man. One person described him as “our moral compass.” She was referring specifically to South Africa and the deeply disappointing political landscape there in recent years, so stark against Mandela’s clarity and compassion. But she could have been referring to the world. Her words captured what I wanted to say when I first learned of his death: South Africa and the world – we all lost our moral compass.

It was with this sense of loss at Mandela’s death that I went to three events this weekend that reminded me of how easily we do that, lose our moral way. How easily we—especially those of us who are generally comfortable in the world where we live—get caught up in our own lives, forgetting that our comfort often comes not from following our “moral compass” but from ignoring the hints that we’re off course.

The first event was on Friday night, the day after Mandela’s death. It was a workshop organized by the Boulder Meeting of Friends (Quakers), and it focused on the history of Europeans’ treatment of America’s native peoples. The workshop was perfectly crafted to merge a great deal of information with a very moving bit of participant involvement. Briefly, we were all asked to stand—about 30-35 of us—on blankets spread out on the floor, pretty much filling the room. Then narrators told the history of native peoples in America, with different voices representing Indians, Europeans, government entities, and the historian. As the story progressed, groups of participants were told that they represented Indians who had died during different historical periods—from illnesses brought by the Europeans, in massacres, walking the Trail of Tears—and those people left the blankets to sit around the room. Slowly, as our numbers dwindled, the blankets were folded inward around our feet, shrinking the “land” where we stood even as the population shrank. Finally, by the end of the exercise, only five of us were left standing, and we occupied just a small patch in the middle of the room. Like the others, I stood silent, a bit stunned by what had just happened.

The informational part of the workshop focused on two doctrines: the “Doctrine of Discovery,” an actual declaration issued and then reiterated by various European leaders, secular and religious, declaring that Europeans had the right, even the obligation, to claim all lands they visited and to enslave or eliminate all the peoples they found there. The other document was the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—an internationally agreed upon document that recognizes the human rights of indigenous people everywhere and directs nations to honor them. I was dismayed to learn that the U.S. has refused to sign on to this doctrine.

It’s not hard to figure out that our nation was created by the general willingness of the colonists and then the “settlers” to abide by the Doctrine of Discovery. Now, I’ll grant people of the 15^th, 16^th, 17^th, 18^th centuries … maybe even the 19^th century … the historical and cultural context that would make such behavior seem self-evidently “right.” But we are now in the 21^st century, and we should know better. Why, oh why, I asked myself, have we not signed the U.N. Declaration that would have to some degree made amends for that earlier, unconscionable decree? Then I read the U.N. Declaration, and I knew why. Let me quote two short sections:

Article 10. Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, the option of return. … States shall provide redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution, developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples.

Article 28. Indigenous peoples have the right to redress, by means that may include restitution, or, when this is not possible, just, fair, and equitable compensation for the lands, territories, and resources which they have traditionally occupied or used and which have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used, or damaged without their free, prior and informed consent.

Of course we haven’t signed this declaration! To do so would mean we are willing to provide “redress, by means that may include restitution … or just, fair, and equitable compensation” for all the land that the Indians occupied and we took. All the blankets we stood on Friday night.

I was still thinking about this when I went on Saturday to a half-day “CU on the Weekend” class on how unconscious attitudes influence health care. More specifically, we learned about health care disparities (which, interestingly, are called “health care injustices” elsewhere in the world) and the mechanisms underlying them. Which is to say we learned why it is that people of color (poor people, queer people, old people, women … pick a marginalized group) get poorer health care and have poorer outcomes even when all the variables that should affect health care are identical.

The professor’s proposition was that this occurs because of the unconscious attitudes we all carry around with us. She was talking about implicit attitudes, which I’ve mentioned here before. Basically, even if no one intends to treat marginalized groups differently, we are all influenced, in ways we don’t even recognize, by attitudes we’ve absorbed over a lifetime and don’t even realize we have. That goes for health care professionals as well as for the rest of us. It’s also true for patients, who approach health care with their own unconscious biases. And it’s true in virtually every situation we face, to one degree or another. I won’t even try to summarize three hours in two paragraphs. So let me just set this aside for a minute and mention another event that will help bring this all together.

Saturday evening, after this health care lecture, I saw the film “12 Years a Slave.” If anyone out there hasn’t seen it, do. As you all surely know, this film is based on a true story of an African American man who had been a free man and was then kidnapped and sold into slavery. The film is gripping and disturbing, all the more so for the fact that it’s a true story. So many of the horrors of slavery that we’ve heard about are lived out in this story. Watching it, I found myself wanting it to be fiction because it’s just too awful to imagine that people were actually subjected to this sort of treatment. And with no recourse. Absolutely none.

The echoes of that treatment live on in all of us, in those implicit attitudes that we have inhaled with the racism that still floats around in our world. In the attitudes that make for health care disparities and that invite the selective forgetting that lets us think genocide and slavery are history and have no relevance to today. That allow us to refuse, as a nation, to sign the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Over the years, demands for reparations for the mistreatment of African Americans and of Indians have come and gone in this country. Reparation would be one way to fulfill the dictates of the U.N. document … but we haven’t signed it, so we’re not obliged to adhere to it. Besides, when we consider the magnitude of the moral failings to be addressed, it’s easy to see why movements for redress meet with resistance. Partly because it’s hard to imagine how we could ever compensate either group for what this nation has taken from them. And partly because, we insist, that’s history and we weren’t personally involved, so it’s not our responsibility.

And this brings me back, full circle, to Mandela, our moral compass. It will be a great tragedy if, having lost him as a living model of the power of forgiveness, we also lose him as a moral guide, our north star. When Mandela became the first president of his new nation, he could so easily have used his position to punish those who had persecuted him and his people. But he didn’t. He chose truth and reconciliation over vengeance. That choice represented true north, and he never wavered from it, although he could have, he had the power to do so. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought exactly what the name stated: open acknowledgement of the wrongs that had been committed and sincere efforts to forge ties between people who had been at virtual war for centuries.  

This, it seems to me, is our task vis-à-vis Indians, African Americans, and all the other groups that any of us continues to marginalize and disregard. We have to—individually and collectively—confront our failure to stay on course, to find a moral path. We have to do our part, individually and collectively, to find ways to acknowledge and then work to reconcile the differences that have kept us so apart. This isn’t an easy proposition, at least not for me. But when I was standing on that blanket, I knew I was being called out. And when I heard the lecture and saw the film, I knew I was in the dock again. Much as I might wish to think of myself as having mastered these issues, I know I’m not done with my work. Not by a long shot.

The morning after Mandela died, I considered posting a blog, but changed my mind. It seemed like everything had already been said. Besides, I couldn’t find words for what I was feeling. In the process of writing it, though, I was reflecting on how Mandela represented something about who we could aspire to be as human beings. I was reminded of a quotation from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address. It seemed to capture who Mandela was in the world. And it also reminds me of my continuing task, highlighted by the weekend’s activities.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. – Abraham Lincoln, 1861

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* Initially, I used the name "Madiba" interchangeably with Mandela. I like that name. It's actually Mandela's clan name, and it's used as a term of respect and affection. But after doing a bit of reading around about it, I realized that my using it would be a form of appropriation ("I like that name. I think I'll just take it for my own use"), implying a close connection with Mandela that I did not in fact have. So, I chose not to use it. In the process, I was reminded again of how easily I can assume that I have a "right" to the cultural artifacts, names among them, of other peoples. Privilege can catch us anywhere if we're not looking. 

Hiding Places

A conversation with friends the other day got me thinking about things we hide away. Some are treasures, things of value that we hide to protect them. And then there are things we hide away because we don’t want to think about them. Things that shatter our simple worldviews, that make us uncomfortable, that scare us.

We were talking about books and movies that offer especially thought-provoking insights into lives that are so different from our own that we get surprised by them. One woman had just seen a movie, “The Book Thief,” about a German family who hid Jews during the Holocaust. We talked about the odd realization that we never much thought about there being “good” Germans during WWII. Of course there were, we all knew, once we thought about it. But their lives are so hidden, buried under the reams and reels of stories about the “bad” ones.

That discussion brought to mind an older movie, “Sarah’s Key,” which told the story of a Jewish family in France who were rounded up by French collaborators and sent to concentration camps. The whole family, that is, except for one small boy, whom his sister, Sarah, hid in a closet, locking the door. She told him to keep silent until she came to let him out. She thought she’d be right back—the police hadn’t been taking girls and women. Instead, it was years before she returned. Her brother had followed her admonition to stay there and stay still. The French family who took over the apartment noticed the smell, but couldn’t locate it. She knew where to look, in his hiding place.

Our conversation about these two movies—one about Germans hiding Jews in the basement, the other about Jews hiding a child from his countrymen, both about lives largely hidden from our own awareness—were threaded through with this theme of hiding. It was this theme that brought to mind a pair of short books I read a few years ago that have clung to my consciousness ever since: The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsaka. The first is about things left behind—like the Buddha hidden in the attic—when Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and sent off to detention camps during WWII. The second is about the places we hid those people, out of sight, and the invisible lives they led. I love this author’s writing style, which is unique and totally engrossing—you really have to read it to see what I mean. But more relevant to this discussion is her skill at laying out these devastating events for us to see without lecturing, without even commenting on the unspeakably cruel acts of our government against its own citizens. Just showing it, word by word and step by step.

Thinking about this later also reminded me of a play we saw recently, “Do You Know Who I Am?” This play was crafted from simple first-person accounts of “dreamers,” undocumented youths who are trying to make lives for themselves in this country. They’re daring to come out of hiding, to be public about their status in order to tell people—or rather, show people—who they are. There they were on the stage, proud, nervous kids (OK, maybe young adults, but to me they seem like kids) asking the audience, “Do you know who I am?” Good question.

Our discussion set me to reflecting on things that are hidden and how carefully—if unintentionally—we keep them that way. How often do we really think about Germans who risked their lives to save Jews, about French officials who collaborated with the Nazis, about the immense sorrow of Japanese Americans being marched away from their lives to remote camps, about undocumented kids who are our children’s and grandchildren’s friends, about the fact that we are walking on land stolen from the Indians? We all “know” that these stories exist, but we have the luxury of hiding them away when we want to. So the antidote is probably choosing not to hide them, at least from ourselves.

“Do You Know Who I Am?” was a production of Motus Theater, who also did a very powerful play last year called “Rocks, Karma, Arrows” (which I wrote about here). Our conversation the other day turned to that play and to the mistreatment of Indians—including massacres of whole communities by the US Army—and thence to Thanksgiving. I wrote last year about how uncomfortable I am about Thanksgiving. Basically, I find it really hard to celebrate genocide. I know that there are responses to that claim, but I just don’t find them persuasive, so I’m always a bit “off” on Thanksgiving.

The other day, as we were talking about some of these stories, my partner and I hatched a plan for next year at Thanksgiving. One of the most reprehensible massacres of Indians (if such things can be placed in a hierarchy of awfulness) occurred at Sand Creek in southern Colorado—the site is now a national historic site. It turns out that one of the Japanese internment camps, Amache, was in Colorado, very close to Sand Creek.

When we lived in New England, we used to go to the counter-Thanksgiving held by local Indian tribes at Plymouth Rock, the land of the “Pilgrims' pride.” That’s too far away now, so we decided to make our own counter-Thanksgiving by visiting Sand Creek and Amache, bearing witness to the stories that we don’t honor with holidays. Trying to avoid hiding them away. Again.

Zombies, Roy Rogers, and the Old West

I’ve been humbled since my last post. Dragged back from my nostalgia and reverie about “the West as I knew it” to the West of today. I was ushered back as Patty Limerick’s class discussed the reading I quoted last time. The one by Dick Lamm about the death of the West. Inviting us to think critically about that sort of nostalgia (“elegy,” she called it), Patty pointed out that the West has not, in fact, died. “Who are we,” she asked, “Zombies?” And as for White settlers being likened to latter-day Indians, she pointed out not only that genocide is not comparable to the loss of farmland (which, thankfully, I had also noted) but also that the Indians are not gone. How dare we, she implied, invisibilize them further by declaring them extinct? Ditto ranchers.

Thus was I reawakened to the world of revisionist history. I had succumbed to the romantic idealization of the “true West,” the “old West,” which is based on what Limerick is fond of calling “the myth of the West”—the great frontier and the grand adventure that ended … when? The story line centering on the “death of the West,” she noted, began back in the 1830s—almost 200 years ago—when the fur trappers declared that the West was lost, dead, because settlers were moving into the frontier. Then, it “died” again when cattle ranchers took over the West from the farmers. And again when industrialization took over the towns and turned them into cities, took over the wagon trails and replaced them with railroads and then highways. Again when the search for energy began to consume the desert canyons and mountaintops.

It’s all part of the so-called settler society. It’s always been layered, one group following upon another, each thinking that their experience was the true West and that it was lost to invasion by the next. My personal experience with this progression centers around Moab, Utah, in the 1970s and 80s, when you could hear the resentment of local “natives”—descendants of farmers and miners—as they railed against the hikers and environmentalists … and then more recently as those very hikers and environmentalists rail against the mountain bikers and t-shirt shops.

Well, unless we’re Zombies, this is the West. For now. Enter Patty Limerick’s Roy Rogers Hypothesis: “Western reality and the myth of the West are entirely intertwined. You cannot understand one without the other.”

Back to my comeuppance. The irony of my (uncritical) embrace of Lamm’s nostalgic, romantic, elegiac view of the West is not that it was “wrong.” It’s that I know better than to think that it’s right. The sort of “deconstruction” that this class encourages—the practice of looking for what’s missing, who’s telling the story, who benefits from this view over other views, what’s hidden behind the obvious story line—is exactly what I did in my own field before I retired. But lo and behold, when it came to a topic this close to my heart (and so distant, apparently, from my scholarly instincts), I forgot to do it.

The requirement that I find enough psychological distance from this topic to consider it more critically changed my whole relationship to this class. Now I’m really a student again.

Thanksgiving: Turkeys, treaties, and truth

I’m writing from a coffee shop in Hollywood, Maryland. (Really. Or maybe this is across the town line into California, MD. Really.) My partner and I are midway in a “road trip,” bookended by two professional gigs. It’s a couple of days after Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a deeply meaningful holiday in this country. Depending on your perspective, it may be the most wonderful of holidays or the most fraught. It may be “loaded” with warm memories of family gatherings and lovely fall days (or with fantasies of those things). Or it may be loaded with uncomfortable memories and uncomfortable interactions. For me, it’s loaded with complicated feelings and troubling historical and political meanings.

I recall hearing someone say that Thanksgiving is the most wonderful holiday because it’s not tied to any particular religious beliefs. It’s inclusive, they said, it’s celebrated by all of us, collectively. Here’s where the complications start. “All of us” presumes that we see ourselves as Americans (because no other nation is celebrating our Thanksgiving) … er, rather, as a United States-ians (because other countries in the Americas don’t celebrate Thanksgiving with us). So it’s not totally inclusive, but it’s at least inclusive of those of us who identify as US-ian. Well, unless we’re the original inhabitants of the land we now claim as US-ians. If you are among those people whose ancestors were actually here prior to the European invasion, this “holiday” may be a day of mourning.

Last time, I wrote about the then-upcoming “Sweet Land - Choices of Dignity” concert/event, which was performed by Sound Circle, Resonance, and others last week to celebrate the end of the election and the promise of four more years of (generally) progressive leadership. That, and to challenge us to make choices of dignity, to claim our own responsibility for the direction of our communities, large and small. During that performance (which I hope many of you heard), Sound Circle did a rendition of the old patriotic favorite, “America.” Kirsten Wilson, the “vision holder” for OneAction, One Boulder, had reframed the familiar song in minor but profound ways. (Recall that the project One Action, One Boulder undertook was to encourage conversations about and reflection on racism in our own communities). With Thanksgiving approaching, this change in particular caught my attention: The usual lyrics:

“Oh beautiful, for Pilgrims’ dreams

That see beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam

Undimmed by human tears.

… became …

Oh beautiful, for Pilgrims’ … [pause]

for Indians … [pause]

for genocide …

Some years ago, when we were living in Massachusetts, my partner and I spent two Thanksgiving days in Plymouth, MA, land of the “Pilgrims’ pride.” We spent those days participating in the counter-Thanksgiving conducted by local descendents of the Indian tribes who lived in this area in the 1600s. The tribes who were there when the Pilgrims moved in, claimed the land, killed rebellious Indians, displayed the head of one recalcitrant chief on a post in the center of town, and left it there for years as a reminder. We both had qualms about the meaning of Thanksgiving before, but after this experience, the holiday could mean only one thing: a celebration of genocide. In Caesar’s words, we (and “we” has to include us, as beneficiaries of this genocide) came, we saw, we conquered. And then we moved across the continent, seeing, conquering, claiming land that was not ours, eliminating the uncooperative native peoples along the way and assimilating the rest to our “superior” way of life.

Among the “One Action, One Boulder” events I attended during the year was a performance of “Rocks,Karma, Arrows,” a performance piece that sketched the history of the relationship between Boulder-area tribes and the settlers arriving in Colorado. I carried a number of messages away from that event, but the one that keeps coming to mind is this: “We are walking on stolen land.” A treaty with the United States gave the land where Boulder sits—in fact, the land all along the front range and well into the mountains—to the Northern Arapahoe in perpetuity. That means forever. That treaty was never renegotiated. But it was violated over and over by the “settlers” and their armies … by our government. That means that every day, I walk on, hold (illegal) claim to property on, enjoy the beauty of, and damage at will land that is not mine.

I mention this partly because of the obvious link to the Thanksgiving story. On this day dedicated to giving thanks, we celebrate a legendary event that amounted to the launching party for a campaign of continent-wide genocide. And I benefit from that every day. No, I wasn’t personally there. I didn’t kill any Indians or personally push them from their land. But I am responsible for recognizing that I benefit from that campaign. And when I allow myself to realize that, celebrating it feels so painfully inappropriate.

The other reason I mention this is that I just had an up-close-and-personal reminder of how easily I judge other people’s failure to acknowledge the privilege they gain from the oppression of others—even as I so easily forget my own. This past week, we were on a college campus in the South. The hotel where we stayed is built and decorated to evoke the old South—southern hospitality, southern elegance. But as we walked around, I couldn’t help but be reminded of southern plantations—the “big house” with its columns, porches, and elegant furnishings. It’s a lovely scene—until you consider the whiffs of slavery and unquestioned racism, the people who lived in the slave quarters just down the hill from the big house. Later, we walked around campus, learning bits of history from our friend and guide. Many of the buildings were very old, pre-civil war structures—which means that they were most likely the handiwork of slaves. I couldn’t help but ask, silently, to myself, “Have you never thought about who built these buildings?”

I was aware that this (rather judgmental) response came partly from an earlier visit to a campus in the south where we were told that the buildings were indeed constructed by slaves. In that case, the stewards of that campus had embarked on a project to make amends for that egregious mistreatment of other human beings. But I saw none of that in the people we met on this college campus. In fact, my attempts to raise this issue—noting how uncomfortable the “southern charm” made me feel—evoked no response from people I met, except, perhaps, a slightly uncomfortable change of topic. I was feeling pretty righteous about this (“Don’t they see their responsibility to address this?”), when my partner reminded me that Kirsten Wilson and One Action, One Boulder spent an entire year trying to get folks to see the same dynamic of avoidance and denial in our own back yard. … “I am walking on land that belongs to someone else.”

We are all responsible for recognizing and acknowledging our own privilege, recognizing ways in which we have—literally and figuratively—stolen our well-being from others. The point is not that we should feel guilty about this, but that we are responsible for what we do about it. Simply celebrating “Thanksgiving” without reflecting on, talking about, questioning the meaning of the holiday now seems irresponsible to me.

And yet, two days ago, I sat down to “Thanksgiving” dinner among people with whom I did not have this conversation. Nothing in the day or in the conversation even hinted at the holiday’s origin. Indeed, these folks, like many other people I know, would likely argue that the point of Thanksgiving is really to bring family together. They might also say that the point of the day is to remind us to be grateful for our many blessings. Still, “Thanksgiving” as we know it is built on a legend. In retrospect, it’s clear that the legend made super-human heroes of people most US-ians have historically identified with—European “settlers.” And it made sub-human demons of the people who have historically been unlike most of us—indigenous people of color, American Indians.

If we want a thanksgiving holiday that celebrates community and gratitude, then let’s do that, instead of deluding ourselves into thinking that these things capture the real meaning of our current “Thanksgiving” holiday. For me personally, the “Sweet Land” concert was as fine a celebration of community as I can imagine. I left it feeling uplifted, connected to community, and challenged to make choices of dignity.

And in that spirit, my partner and I have agreed that we won’t spend future Thanksgiving days in celebration (or avoidance) of the holiday’s legendary origins. Instead, we’ll find ways to explore the historical meaning of the day and honor the people at whose expense we enjoy such great privilege. Here are some of the ideas we’ve discussed: We can make a donation to the Native American Rights Fund, which does great work on behalf of American Indians (including work on those violated treaties). We can spend time with friends watching and discussing the video version of “Rocks, Karma, Arrows.” We can join with friends in a common reading and then share a meal discussing what we’ve read. And we can make a commitment to speak up, whenever possible, when we hear the legend with its distortion of what actually happened in New England in the early 1620s … and beyond.



 

Thoughts from the think tank

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself immersed in a virtual progressive think tank. Well, not exactly. In a think tank, you’re supposed to contribute something novel to the tank. Mostly, I’ve just been soaking up other people’s ideas and letting them swirl around in my brain. I guess that makes me a think tank lurker. This may seem like a bit of a rant. But there you have it: my lurking mind in overdrive.

Most recently, I spent several days at the national conference of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, which, happily, met in Denver this year. My partner and I refer this group as “the radical sociologists.” My kind of people! I attended a bunch of sessions that renewed my hope that progressivism lives on in up-and-coming scholars and that academics can also be activists (and be proud of it … at least in this circle of like-minded academics). Among other topics, I dipped into discussions of the meaning of the concept of “social problems,” the subtle meanings conveyed by chat room conversations among butch- and femme-identified queer folks, the meaning of community recovery following a deadly mudslide in the Philippines, and changing meanings of “acceptance” of LGBTQ folks in religious settings (the last was our own work, presented by a couple of students we’ve been working with). A meaning-full several days, for sure.

The conference found me already in a reflective mood about things sociological, since I had spent considerable time over recent weeks hanging out with such topics here in Boulder. The focus of this year’s “One Book, One Boulder” program is Chief Niwot, also known as Chief Left Hand. The book, Chief Left Hand, is a biography of this Arapaho peace chief and the story of white people’s theft of Indian land in Colorado. In recent weeks, I attended two events in the “One Book, One Boulder” program series, and also visited the Boulder History Museum’s exhibit on the same topic. My first foray into this program a few weeks ago was the multi-media performance, “Rocks, Karma, Arrows.” I left that performance slightly stunned. I’ve known about how badly white “settlers” (a.k.a., invaders) treated the Indians living on the continent as we claimed (a.k.a., stole) more and more land and resources. But the explicit deception and cruelty of that period of history was sort of pinned to a bulletin board in my brain. During this performance, it was pulled down and examined in detail and with an immediacy I’ve rarely experienced.

Then, with that performance as a backdrop, I saw two segments of the film “Race: The Power of an Illusion.” This movie details how “race” became an identity category, which it hadn’t been one before we invented it (“constructed it,” as the scholars say). And then, how the stereotypes and degradations visited on non-white people were systematically shifted from one group to another as we (white folks) decided we wanted the land, the cheap labor, and/or the resources of yet another group. First, we wanted free labor from African slaves, so we created, step by step, a story that made them not just different in skin color but also deficient in mental and moral status. Using the wonders of newly emerging science, we even created (and I do mean created) biological proof of their inferiority. Then, the very same arguments were used to prove that other groups—Indians and women, Eastern European, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants, among others—were inferior. Funny … these arguments were pulled out just when each of these groups had something whites wanted or risked taking something only white men had.

Maybe the most powerful point in this movie for me was this suggestion: White people could have just acknowledged that we wanted free labor from African slaves and their descendants (or land from the Indians and cheap labor from other groups) and that we had the power to demand it. But we had this problem: the Declaration of Independence says, “all men are created equal.” Now, obviously, this excludes women (one of the battles of the 20^th century), but it should include all these non-white men. So, the trick was to justify their unequal treatment. To do that, we created a story about these groups, one that made them less than fully human. That way, they were not really included in “all men,” so we weren't required to treat them as equals.

It’s an amazing paradox. If we didn’t have this wonderful doctrine, "... all men are created equal," we wouldn’t have had to invent these stories of inferiority to cover up our sins against the founding documents. 

But given our supposed allegiance to this doctrine, we had to somehow paper over two conflicting realities: (1) we believe in equality and (2) our actions are rife with inequality. We pulled this off by simply declaring some people less than fully human.

     

And now, we live with the awful legacy of that process: even when the overt racism/sexism/classism waned (e.g., after slaves were freed, when the Indians were granted sovereignty in their “own” lands, when women got the vote, when labor unions gained equal treatment), those old stories about sub-humanity remained. We could free the slaves, but we still “knew” that they were inherently inferior to white people. We could give women the vote, but we still “knew” that they were inferior to men. The task we’re left with now is to figure out how to erase those old stories when the culture is steeped in them, and we’ve all taken them in with the air we breathe since childhood.

After all this, a visit to the Chief Left Hand exhibit at the Boulder History Museum closed the circle. It reminded me of the deep Colorado connection to this story of race. The the ease with which we've denied the humanity of whole groups of humans—and of their leaders, even those who, like Left Hand, craved, worked for, pleaded for peace. We’re walking on the land we stole from them as if it were our own.

This immersion in the reminder that racism isn’t “long ago and far away” but right here, in my town, in my time—in my self—was unsettling. But it was also energizing, a reminder of my own work yet to be done. Folks who live near Boulder still have a chance to join in this remarkable learning process. The museum exhibit is still open, the book is still available, and more “One Boulder” events are coming up.

Check them out here and jump on in. This think tank can always use more folks who believe in community activism—or simply in personal growth.