The sad part is that some people don't even have an idea of what it's like. Nor would they because they are subsumed with white guilt. Like this hyperliberal teacher who pisses on American history.
The "different point of view" is not without its own shortcomings. But Jules Crittendon has a better piece over at his blog. (Heaven help us if we Boston newspaper readers ever lose him!)LONG BEACH, California (AP) -- Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them.
The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.
Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.
He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.
Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But "what I am trying to portray is a different point of view."
Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme.
"I think that is very sad," said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization. "He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving."
Even American Indians are divided on how to approach a holiday that some believe symbolizes the start of a hostile takeover of their lands.
Chuck Narcho, a member of the Maricopa and Tohono O'odham tribes who works as a substitute teacher in Los Angeles, said younger children should not be burdened with all the gory details of American history.
"If you are going to teach, you need to keep it positive," he said. "They can learn about the truths when they grow up. Caring, sharing and giving -- that is what was originally intended."
Adam McMullin, a member of the Seminole tribe of Oklahoma and a spokesman for the National Congress of American Indians, said schoolchildren should get an accurate historical account.
"You can't just throw an Indian costume on a child," he said. "That stuff is not taken lightly. That's where educators need to be very careful."
Becky Wyatt, a teacher at Kettering Elementary School in Long Beach, decided to alter the costumes for the annual Thanksgiving play a few years ago after local Indians spoke out against students wearing feathers, which are sacred in their culture. Now children wear simple headbands.
Some people like to see the Indians as a peace-loving, yet warrior-chic people who lived in wise harmony with nature and each other. But they had been doing the same thing to each other ever since, archaeological finds such as Kennewick man now suggest, they crossed from Asia and overwhelmed the physically distinct Eurasian aboriginal inhabitants of North America about 7,000 B.C.
Iroquois, Sioux, Navajo, Comanche, Aztecs, Incas, death cult societies of the pre-Columbian southwest, all warred on their neighbors and if they were strong enough, attempted to subjugate them. Often with unspeakable savagery, on a par with any Catho vs. Prot 30 Years War atrocities. This is because we are human, and this is what humans do. As Jared Diamond has posited in his book, "Guns, Germs and Steel," the significant difference from one group of humans to another, the reason why we're speaking English here and not Wampanoag in England, has largely been one of resources and opportunity. For reasons too numerous to mention here, our boats were bigger than their canoes. Our guns were better than their bows and arrows. Our diseases were worse than theirs were.
It is only within the last few centuries, primarily and ironically enough within the bloody, widely disparaged crucible of ideals that is America, that we have slowly and painfully tried to break with that past and become a higher people. We've tried to become a people that, growing out of ancient hatreds in Europe and violence here in America, have absorbed elements of all those histories and become something distinct from them. A people who acknowledge the misdeeds of the past and try to correct them. A people dedicated to universal justice and prosperity and always striving for them. A people moving forward.
Within that context, victimhood is a trap, every bit as vile and destructive as the trap of subjugating others that we now reject. They are traps that ensnare us in the terrible past. Whatever we might have come from, we are the survivors now, who hopefully have moved beyond that. And for that, today, we should be thankful.
No comments:
Post a Comment