Re-viewing

Remember seeing the picture of two profiles that could morph into a picture of a vase if you just looked a little differently? Or the one of the old woman and young woman, merged into one ... until you identify each of them individually? If you've run into these, maybe in Intro Psych, you may have heard them described as examples of reversible figure-ground relationships—what you see, what is figure and what is ground, can shift when you change your focus to a different bit of the picture or change your orientation relative to it. The picture doesn’t change. Your perspective does. You do.

       

                

So, here's my own recent encounter with a reversible figure/ground moment: 

Walking happily along a favorite trail I spotted this stump with a huge hole straight through it, so cleanly through that you could see the contours of the field behind it. I saw it from a distance, and was stopped in my tracks by the improbable perfection of this hole.

So I moved closer, wanting to see how it was done, this huge, precise hole …

and then closer yet ...

Not a hole at all, but the blunt end of a sawed-off branch, pointing straight at me. I've seen this stump a few times since. Each time, I'm first struck by the surprising hole, clean through. Only when I get closer, shift my perspective, do I remember that it's something else entirely.

Recently, I’ve had some of these moments on a totally different plane—not so much perceptual as conceptual and emotional shifts, in my experiences related to difference, oppression, diversity, and privilege.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to see the movie "I Am not Your Negro." The movie traces the experience of  James Baldwin, the noted African American author, speaker, and sometimes activist, as he decides to re-enter the fray—the Civil Rights movement—abandoning for a time his self-exile/ex-pat status in Paris (and sometime Turkey), where he went to escape the racism of his birth nation. I knew of Baldwin's work before, both because of its significance as literature and because of its meaning to the African American and LGBT communities.  But to be honest, I've never read  his work, not even the novel that I know gave voice to many queer folks' experience, Giovanni's Room. 

Joshua Dysart, in an IMDb review, writes of this movie, “a large part of this film consists of clips from Hollywood's rough history of reducing or falsifying the black American experience, often with Baldwin's own criticisms laid on top of them, weighing the clips down, eviscerating them. There are hard juxtapositions here as well, such as the innocence of Doris Day pressed up against the reality of lynched black men and women swaying in trees. By contextualizing these images in new and fresh ways the film is able to paint an impressionistic portrait of American denial.”

American denial. The shoe fits. I used to love Doris Day (and Sidney Poitier, the “good” Black whose acceptance proved we weren’t racist). I used to not think about—not even know about—lynchings.

The film, Dysart continues, “also ties itself to the moment. Images of Ferguson, photographs of unarmed black children left dead in the streets by police, video of Rodney King being brutalized beyond any justification, all of it means that Baldwin's words ring timeless, his call to action not remotely diffused by our distance from him and his time.”

If you have seen the film, you’re likely with me at this point, recalling those scenes and the awful discomfort they stirred. The self-righteous outrage, of course, but also the memory of when these things happened, and how I, personally, watched from afar, horrified in principle, but not moving. American denial.

Among the most compelling moments in the film came during interviews by then-famous talk-show host Dick Cavett. At one point, Cavett invites Baldwin to sort of absolve the US of the continuing sins of racism, appealing to a common argument: Sure there's still work to be done, but we've come a long way, right? Baldwin refuses the bait, noting instead how far we have not come, how much American society/culture continues to use Black people as an object of projection: whatever is bad among us, we attribute to Black people. Cavett is  caught noticeably off guard by this response, frozen except for his eyes, which glance nervously around like he's looking for help—or an exit. It's here that Baldwin utters the line that rang in my head as the credits rolled: “What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a n****r in the first place. Because I'm not a n****er. I'm a man, but if you think I'm a n****r, it means you need it. . . . If I'm not a n****r here and you invented him — you, the white people, invented him — then you've got to find out why…"

When I heard it, my breathing stopped the way my steps did when I saw the sawed-off branch that had seemed so clearly a hole, clean through. Racism isn’t just an absence—of understanding, of empathy—It’s not just a hole. It’s the sawed-off stump of our own need for something, someone to contain all of the things we fear, all of the things we hate in ourselves. And I’m talking here not just about individuals—those other “others” whom I can dislike and disown because they have bigoted ideas. I’m talking about each of us, and all of us as a collective. A society that has invented, in Baldwin’s words, others to hold our own disowned shadows—the Red heathens, the Yellow demons, the Black n****rs, the Brown “rapists and murderers.”

Heavy, huh? No wonder Cavett was stunned into (at least temporary) silence. So was I. As we were driving home, talking about the film, my partner said that Baldwin was her first anti-racism teacher. I can see why. I've added Giovanni’s Room to my iPad library so I can catch up with the 1950s on my next trip, just 60 years late.

Shortly after that, we attended an event at History Colorado, organized by the Japanese American Citizens League. The occasion was the 75th annual Day of Remembrance commemorating Executive Order  #9066, issued on February 19, 1942, just weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, launching the US into WWII. Order 9066 opened the way for a program of mass eviction that would eventually see about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—at least 70,000 of them US citizens—moved from their homes, their jobs and businesses, and their lives along the west coast and imprisoned in concentration camps elsewhere in the US. The ostensible rationale was, of course, that they might prove a danger to the war effort, since any Japanese attack would likely come from the west. Disregarded in this rationale was the fact that only a small proportion of Japanese residents of Hawaii—fewer than 2000 of the 150,000+ living there at the time—were similarly incarcerated, despite Pearl Harbor. Not to mention that infants and people with 1/16 Japanese ancestry were included (remember the “one drop” rule for who was considered Black?). In reality, no person of Japanese ancestry was ever convicted of espionage, treason, or sabotage during the war.

The camps were scattered around the West, mostly in desert or cold mountainous regions. One, called Amache, was in Colorado, in the south eastern plains, near the town of Granada. Not far from Sand Creek, the site of one of post-Civil War America's most horrific massacres of indigenous people (about which I’ve written here before). The Colorado connection tugs at me. It reminds me of this state’s checkered past in matters of racism—the Indian Wars and Sand Creek in the late 1800s, the dominance of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado politics during the 1920s, Amache in the mid-1940s. It belies my idyllic image of this gorgeous, complicated state, seen in my early years through the eyes of a child born and raised here, sheltered and privileged, oblivious to it all.

The Day of Remembrance, like “I’m not your Negro,” was full of moments of insight and disarming new awareness. A few of these stand out in retrospect. One was when the organizers were making introductions. After recognizing a few dignitaries, they asked, “If anyone here is a survivor of the camps, would you please raise your hand?” Maybe 20 hands went up—I can’t be sure, because my eyes filled with tears. Here, right here in this room, I thought, are people who were forced to leave everything behind—everything, that is, but one suitcase—and climb on buses to nowhere. They survived, and here they are, sitting scattered among us. Still here, still in America. After all that. Later, after the keynote speaker (who was very interesting in a detached, academic sort of way; not exactly what I was wanting at that point), they opened the floor to people’s stories.

Not surprisingly, I guess, there were many stories of the racism that preceded the war—taunting, harassment, overt discrimination in employment and housing, inability to own land, limitations on educational opportunities and professions open to people of Asian descent. So reminiscent of more familiar tales of racism in my own lifetime—especially directed at African Americans—recently 'managed’ by non-discrimination laws and increased social censure for such attitudes and behaviors. Until, that is, the presidential campaign that made it all OK again.

Then there was the story of a man whose family had lived in Peru. The US government went to Peru to pick them up, and transferred them to a camp in Texas (where, incidentally, there were also German and Italian detainees). And the now-90-year-old woman who recalled the kindness of friends and allies who had made it possible for her to go to college. And the woman, an ally, who helped her friend, a Japanese American, whose recently deceased mother had been in the camps, to take care of her mom’s possessions after mom’s death. They found money hidden all around the house and multiple bank accounts, each with a substantial amount of money. Breadcrumbs pointing to lingering fear of being taken away. Again. Though it had been 70 years.

There was no dearth of explicit parallels drawn between those years and today—particularly for people of color, especially immigrants. The threat of profiling, the possibility (however remote it may seem) of similar Executive Orders, similar restrictions, evictions, even camps. The fear of the police, who are helpers to the privileged, but sources of danger to the targeted. And American denial writ large. 

The museum has an excellent online exhibit about Order 9066 and the Japanese Internment. I recommend the whole thing, but especially check out the propaganda video on “Japanese relocation,” obviously designed to convince Americans (non-Japanese, non-German, non-Italian, non-Jewish, etc. Americans) that not only were these camps a good idea, but the people being moved to them were delighted to go. It’s chilling. American denial.

But importantly, another, very different part of this experience was my awareness that this huge room was full to overflowing, and some large proportion of people there were not apparently of Japanese descent. Allies. The room was not sprinkled, but splotched with allies. One of the best moments in the Women’s March—and, by the way, one of the most empowering moments in my partner’s video about responding to this political moment—was the recognition that many, many people really do believe we’re all in this together. 

This morning, I heard a radio show in which one of the guests, who is Jewish, pointed to the oft-repeated caution in the Jewish community: never again. And that means, he said, never again. We must stand up right from the beginning so that what happened in Germany can never happen again, to anyone. I saw a sign in photos from one of the Women’s Marches—in D.C., I think. It evoked the famous Martin Niemoller quote, written after the Holocaust:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

but this sign had a contemporary twist:

First they came for the Muslims

and we said, not this time, f***ers!

It was really heartening to see that, almost 4 months after the election, 6 weeks since the inauguration, it is still possible to fill a large room with people who are genuinely interested in and standing with marginalized groups of which they are not a member. 

That, my friends, fills me with hope. Which is hugely different from the emptiness I would feel, the despair at history repeating itself, if I didn’t notice this joyful part.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Thanksgiving, again

It comes around every year. Our annual thanks-giving day. And, as I’ve written here before—last year and the year before that—each  year, I find it troubling. That’s true again this year, with my dis-ease heightened by my recent immersion in the story of Sand Creek—also a topic of earlier posts here, and of an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times and an article in the current issue of Smithsonian.

For those of you who haven’t been following this blog over the course of my recurrent musings about Thanksgiving, here’s a short synopsis. When we were living in Massachusetts several years ago, we attended the counter-thanksgiving ceremony at Plymouth, MA, which was organized by descendants of the native peoples who lived in that area when the Pilgrims arrived. Their take on that first fall harvest feast and what it portended for the future was—predictably—very different from the schoolroom stories I learned. If the European settlers at that the feast could have looked into the future, they may have seen the glorious future of a great nation. From the Indians’ perspective, though, that feast was followed by the devastation of their way of life, the loss of their land, language, and culture—and the predictable consequences: poverty, disempowerment, and dysfunction in their fragmented and diminished communities. And still, despite all this, they survive.

At some level, I had known this, but I hadn’t given it much thought, joining in the annual tradition of an autumn celebration dedicated to giving thanks and imagining that we celebrated the bounty of the harvest, the cooperation of communities that might instead have been hostile, and the launch of a new nation. Giving thanks is good, I thought—why not have a day dedicated to that activity? I never thought much about the fact that by choosing this day and wrapping the event in this legend, we were commemorating genocide.

I suspect this is not unlike the experience of many people.

The first really serious challenge to this complacency was the counter-thanksgiving ceremony at Plymouth. Then came the deeply experiential workshop we attended at the Quaker meetinghouse last year, which I also described here, when the brutal reality of the white march across the continent became crystal clear to me. And then came my education about Sand Creek.

Over the course of the past few weeks, following in the wake of our bus trip to Sand Creek, I’ve spent time with the Sand Creek story in a range of venues. I’ve been reading a book about Sand Creek, A Misplaced Massacre, which is written from a critical perspective that shines revealing light on the complex governmental machinations and personal ambition that fueled Sand Creek and other anti-Indian actions of the late 1800s. I’ve also attended a spate of events that addressed this massacre. This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the Sand Creek massacre on November 29 and 30, 1864, so the Boulder History Museum has sponsored a series of commemorative events. The first was a museum forum featuring an interview with former Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who sponsored the legislation that led to the designation of the Sand Creek Massacre Historical Site. Then came a video of the play “Rocks, Karma, Arrows, Part II,” which examines Boulder’s legacy of racism and exclusion (with particular focus on the Indians), followed by a documentary about that play that included some really smart talking heads offering pithy analyses of these historical events. And the last was a “history on the screen” event that featured a talk by the man in charge of the Sand Creek Massacre site, followed by a screening of “Little Big Man,” the 1975 movie starring Dustin Hoffman as a white man raised by Indians who witnesses the growing efforts to eradicate and dispossess the Plains Indians--including Sand Creek.

Each of these events has added a layer of nuance to the story and to my grasp of the chasm between the legend I learned as a child of the origin and growth of this country and the reality of the genocide that is this nation’s origin-al sin. One of the messages I took away this time, a point made on at least two of these occasions, was this: History is open-ended. History continues. This story is still being written, but now, by us. The implicit challenge: what will we write? How do we change the terrible trajectory of this tale so that the experiences of the indigenous peoples of this continent don’t continue to be silenced.

After attending the Plymouth, MA counter-thanksgiving ceremony, we made a commitment that we wouldn’t do Thanksgiving again without honoring this legacy—a commitment I reiterated here two years ago. (Blogging about it on a regular basis seems to be one of the ways I do this.) This year, a perfect opportunity arose. When we were invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a friend, we asked to include a piece that would honor the true meaning of the day, and she willingly agreed. So yesterday, we began the afternoon gathering of friends with a ceremony that recounted the real history of the relationship between European colonizers and indigenous peoples and ended with reflections on commitments we all could make to moving history forward in a more honest way. We included music—some of it raw and painful (Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “My Country Tis of Thy People You’re Dying”) and some chosen to create a calm space for meditation (pieces by American Indian musicians Calvin J. Standing Bear and James Torres). Afterward, we shared good, thoughtful, open conversation, a fine meal, and serious belly laughs over a word game turned silly by our delight in the camaraderie—and maybe by the release of tension after a difficult, starkly realistic opening to this complicated day.

As we were leaving, one friend thanked us for the ceremony and offered an observation, taken from her work elsewhere, on the contrast between the intensity of the days beginning and the lightheartedness of its end: “We can only work as deep as we can laugh.” 

We can't act as though this part of history didn't occur or doesn't matter. But honoring it needn't leave us morose and perpetually somber, which helps nothing at all. History is open-ended. It's still happening. Only now, we’re responsible for where it goes. We need to act, act as if it matters. Because it does. And then, we can laugh as deep as we work.    

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

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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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