Indians in the Cupboard

Juli is learning about the discovery of the New World in her Social Studies class. I wonder if her teacher finds the subject as super awkward as I do. It’s one thing to talk about Columbus and Jamestown to a bunch of kids of European descent. It’s another thing entirely when the student’s ancestors were much more directly and negatively affected by these events.

Juli’s great-great-great-grandmother would never have referred to the New World at all; she would have simply called it “the World.” Her people had been living here for a really long time! This continent is only “new” in the sense that no one in Europe knew about it for a really long time until some yutz called Chris stumbled upon it and immediately pronounced it to be India. Lo siento, dude, you were all kinds of wrong there.

For a homework assignment, Juli had to make a poster advertising the New World. Part of the assignment was to include reasons why people would want to come here. In talking through it with me, she rattled off things like “the people are nice, the land is beautiful” and without any hint of irony or bitterness, she added “you can rule over stuff.”

Yeesh.

What a horrible, horrible, historically accurate thing to say!

Europeans came to these shores and absolutely dominated the indigenous peoples. The scars of the Spanish conquista are evident even in today’s vernacular. Calling someone indio, or Indian, is an insult. It means uneducated, naïve, unwilling to try new things, or downright stupid. Centuries of oppression and abuse from the white ruling class created a false image of the darker-skinned native races as lesser and shameful.

The scars of the English invasion on the East Coast are far harder to see, mostly because nearly all the natives are dead. Actually, the reason the land now known as the United States was so easy to colonize is because a few decades earlier, diseases brought by the Spanish had decimated the population of North America in apocalyptic wasteland proportions. The English just waltzed in and finished off the survivors. Ok, the French helped too, but they preferred to focus on the booze and the women, ‘cause they were, ya know, French.

So Europeans enslaved, murdered, forcibly converted, and destroyed the cultures of millions of people on top of all the millions they accidently killed with their nasty germs. But yay America!

See what I mean about awkward?

My guess is the whole mass death part will be entirely left out of 5^th grade Social Studies class. That is really unfortunate because without it the story is a lie; propaganda with the historical accuracy of a Disney film. I’m in no way saying that the re-discovery of America was an entirely bad thing – particularly for me – but every time we teach the partial happy-sunshine version of history, we rob all the people who came down on the losing side of their voice. When we do that, the biggest crime of the whole affair is that Europeans lived for thousands of years without chocolate.

Juli was pretty aghast to learn that.