Guest post: Belatedly hearing the voices
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Connections found.
“The idea that history stands still is nonsense because you keep finding new things.”
It’s not just a matter of things being “found” or “discovered.” It’s that new information is being disclosed or officially acknowledged, instead of being hidden, or swept under the rug. It completes the story, telling it more fully and honestly.
On this side of the Atlantic, the official acknowledgement of the foundations of Canada and the United States in genocide, and the disposession of the Original inhabitants, along with the importation of kidnapped, enslaved Africans, is a work in progress.* It’s not that this was ever really secret (certainly not to those on the receiving end of colonial power), but these aspects of the founding mythos of the political administrative units concerned have been purposefully left out, ignored, or glossed over. That the perspective of peoples whose perception of and part in “official” histories differs from, or contradicts these mythologies, is a sign of hope. We are now, belatedly, hearing the voices of people who were forced to pay the price for power and luxuries that they were not permitted to share. This includes not only the examination of historical injustices, but their continuation into the present. It’s not just “history.” Too often the idea of “moving forward” from the past is just a euphemism for ignoring, or running away from it.
I’ve just started reading the book Unreconciled by Jesse Wente, a combination of personal memoire set within a broader picture of the experiences of Indigenous Peoples within Colonial Canada. I’ve already been given one head-slapping reality-check moment from the inner flap of the dust jacket: “Wente argues that ‘reconciliation’ is a flawed concept: peace between First Nations and the state of Canada can’t be recovered through reconciliation because no such relationship ever existed.” Holy shit. I’d never thought of it like this. Of course, I’ve never had to. Now that is White privilege (unironic, without scare quotes) in (in)action. More of the same, please, Mr. Wente.
This more complete disclosure is akin to the relatively recent requirement to provide ingredient lists and nutritional analyses on food products, or the enumeration of the totality of a medication’s actions, including so-called “side effects”, which are simply inconvenient, unwanted, yet inevitable consequences of its use. Perhaps, more importantly it is like an attempt to find out a patient’s complete medical history before committing to a course of treatment for present ailments. Accurate, honest information is more likely to result in an effective outcome. Of course, the first step is admitting you have a problem.
*Not to mention the historical, and ongoing, exploitation and destruction of other living beings and biomes, redefined as “resources,” in the name of “development.”
There are a great many issues that can never be fixed when it comes to indigenous poeple in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Obviously the bells can’t be unrung, no matter how many land trust are bought up and donated to tribal governments. The economies of the people before us have been disrupted, and they long ago began adapting to the new ways.
But what we can do is learn and understand who they were and who they are. The idea that indigenous people were savages that we civilized is not only patronizing, it is wrong. There were some advanced civilzations that waxed and waned over the millenia, doing science in their ways that is just as effective in discovering natural truths as those ways developed by the Royal Society and the French academies of the enlightentment.
There was a recent brouhaha over a New Zealand academic who was brought up on ethics charges, but also had criticized the science standards of New Zealand education because they included Maori cultural inputs in science. The standards have been in place since at least 1993, but they have been newly decried as “wokism gone made” to make sure that Maori “ways of knowing” are included. You can probably guess who complained about it without checking the actual standards. I checked them out and they are actually pretty good and are not equivalent to creationism.
So, we need to know who the indigenous people are, what they had made, and acknowledge their contributions to our societies without assuming they were functionally savages until we came along and led them to civilization (by kidnapping their children.) We can never reconcile, true, but we can move forward with them as participants. We need to acknowledge what he have done to their people, and we can’t just look back and say it was ancient history.
There are pipelines that are being laid in their lands (so-called reservations) that can destroy their water supply, Uranium mines on land that we ceded to them in Treaties, people protest when the decision to honor fishing rights in a treaty signed by the government are going to “hurt the tourism industry.” We can stop this stuff from going on, even if we can’t go back and return the Great Plains to the bison herds that roamed for days.
If we don’t teach a history that includes places such as Cahokia, that Mexican indios developed corn from teosinte, and that the Maori knew their fungal networks long before the British came along, then people will continue to think that Injuns are lucky we saved them from their savagery and that we were justified in slaughtering those who got in the way. They will think of those children buried without markers in the Residential Schools as collateral damage for property. They will continue to think of the Water Protectors as superstitious selfish cretins who deserve the firehoses in the winter or 25 years in prison for trying to stop the pipeline in North Dakota.
We need to admit our own savagery towards the people who came first (“hohogum” in the Pima native language) before we can civilize ourselves.
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