One of the problems with being a retired history teacher is that you never get tired of thinking about it. Beyond that, the way you taught it. Did you get it right?
I doubt that any history teacher, past or present, will tell you that they got it right or even thoroughly covered in their instruction about the Native Americans; certainly, not in their textbooks. They will probably say or imply strongly that coverage of our history simply included too much to be sufficiently thorough about it. With everything else we needed to deal with, they'll say, we just plain ran out of time.
But that, by itself, is also insufficient. When people say they ran out of time to do anything--read a book, write the novel they were meaning to, cleaning the garage, taking that magical vacation they dreamed about--they mean, too, that it never did quite come to the top of their priority list. It's hard to face it: Not having time to do something means you didn't care enough about it.
We didn't care enough, don't care enough, about teaching our kids what whites did to the Natives. It would make the 1619 Project look like Dr. Seuss. Our genocide of these peoples was thorough, focused, and everlasting. It began before Black slavery came to these shores. It had to if white Europeans were to establish enough of a civilization in order for a solid caste system to emerge. It might add meaning and depth to the word "tragedy" if we would ever come to understand just what we did to human beings from whom we could have learned much, but didn't. Instead, we killed them in battle, intentionally made them perish from diseases, and/or dispersed them to places where we could easily cease caring about them other than trying to turn them "white".
Name the Native nation: It was done to them. Our geography of destruction is fixed in our minds as, mostly, being in the Great Plains; our minds automatically go there because there is the place where the teaching of it, sincere but poorly inclusive, took place. Most of the time, with white European ancestors teaching it (including me), we waited until after the Civil War to encapsulate and emphasize what was to be the final domination and corralling of Natives: the broken promises, the devastation of neglect, the presumptions of inadequacy to conceal overt racism. But it began as part of our beginnings, along the East Coast, and continued to California and the Pacific.
The number of these nations is overwhelming, too. Each has its own story of flourishing interrupted by white seeking land and fortune. That's part of the issue: we were too good at our efforts to wipe out whole civilizations. To cover the contributions of these peoples would take courses devoted to them alone, documentation that supports them, writers who have come and gone and those wishing to buttress what they have found.
The Natives did not build libraries, at least not equal to the ones we rely on to house and grow knowledge. They did not leave enough evidence behind. But then, they didn't think they had to. Their lives were too simple for whites, bent on technological and industrial improvement and expansion, to fathom.
It was one of those places in our inquiry in which we were all too eager to dismiss Natives as lacking in evidence of intellectual development. We concluded that they could live anywhere, so anywhere is where we dumped them. We missed out on, and cannot embrace now, their wisdom about nature and why it is so important to keep track of our use of it.
Catching up with that vacuum will take more lifetimes than you and I have. Yet, there are those attempting it. In the New York Review of Books the other day, an article reviewed three more tries at encompassing the utter destruction of what Natives might have meant to us besides being peoples in the way. One of these was a book by Ned Blackhawk, a Shoshone, called The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. In it, he says simply and decisively: "focus upon Native American history must be an essential practice of American historical inquiry."
What he asks for is as much a revolution as the discovery of electricity: a sea-change in emphasis and development. He wants historians to go back to the beginnings of white dominance in North America and call it for what it is: Imperialism. Nobody ever thinks of what we did to the Natives as imperial, but it doesn't take long at all to find that at the bottom of our efforts. We give them deserved credit for continuing to exist amidst all that we have wrecked around us, but the thread of that depraved positioning was lost early. The efforts to recover it were never seriously lasting. We've hopscotched our way toward Native historical development, just another way of short-sheeting them.
When I taught and came to the end of the frontier and its final slaughters, I confronted my students with this question: Which is the greater tragedy, the treatment of the Blacks or that of the Natives? It made them stop and think a minute. We've put serious study and caring into the effects of Black slavery, and with obvious good reason, but our abuse of the Natives is still an afterthought. Not until we have come to grips with that can we advance our culture to a place where we can be proud of it. Not until we think of the word "inclusivity" to subsume Natives, too, will we find peace among ourselves.
Our present government has no thought of that. Instead, it has apparently taken away any notice about Ira Hayes, the Native soldier who was one of those raising the flag over Iwo Jima. That our present government wishes to take away any thought of him and his contributions to our history indicates that we can easily lose track of that essence of humanity--and sustain racism as a twisted reality. That, too, would be a very big, ongoing mistake.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
