Like many professors, I have learned a lot this past Pandemic Spring teaching at my small, under-funded, public liberal arts college in Western New York State. Most of all, I have learned much about the strength and resilience of my battered students. I have been amazed by their ability to complete their work in the face of significant disruptions in their lives and, in a few cases, horrifying stories of personal tragedy and grief. I have had students email me their papers from their cars, sitting outside a McDonald’s with its free wi-fi.
I have also learned that so many “thought leaders” and “change agents” writing about the future of higher education seem to have very little sense of what it is that we college professors do in the classroom. Many of them seem to write from the Ivy League. They appear to have no familiarity with the sorts of colleges and universities most American college students attend.
Whether we are talking about Purdue President Mitch Daniels’ suggestion that professors wall themselves off from their classes with a prophylactic plexiglass shield, or others’ suggestions that our Zoom lectures can be packaged, marketed, and reused to create economies of scale in academia, the fact of the matter is that few of us lecture any longer. The “sage on the stage” model is old and less effective than other methods in reaching today’s students. This is not a lament about “kids these days.” It is, rather, exciting, a development that brings a vibrancy to the classroom that makes the learning experience more rewarding and impactful for all.
Mitch Daniels has proposed placing professors behind plastic, plexiglass shields.
We are neither talking heads nor orators bound to a lectern. Our classes are not one-way streets, with faculty speaking and students listening. We move around the room. Our students do, too. In my history and humanities courses, I try to talk with, rather than at, students. True, some instructors lecture very effectively and engagingly with their students, but too often this mode of instruction renders students passive. They absorb “course content” which is often supplemented by massive, expensive textbooks (True Story: No college professor reads a textbook for enjoyment or out of interest, yet too many of us expect our students to do so). Students in these courses take notes, periodically regurgitate what they think is important, but otherwise play little active role in their own education. It is rote and it is terribly dull, but a lot of people think it is what we do.
It is not. College classrooms look much different today than they did when I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s.
We know it is better to have students learn by doing. Students in the liberal arts and humanities learn by asking questions, and by listening, conversing, and engaging in discussion and debate. They collect evidence, read critically, and analyze. We work hard to create critical thinkers and writers. In my classes, we discuss the sources to assess their strengths and weaknesses, their biases and prejudices, and to see what sorts of information this source might yield. We urge students to consider their own preconceptions that might color how they interpret the past. And together we engage in urgent Socratic dialogue which exposes the weaknesses in our reasoning and forces us to confront long-held assumptions. Or job is to help students learn, and that is something so much more than merely distributing to them over video selected course content.
The content of our courses, after all, can change dramatically over time. History is not a static collection of names, dates, and places. Rather, it is the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions and cultures. History is not a science, but it is a discipline, as we set out to answer the questions that present themselves to us in a deliberate, systematic, and rigorous manner. The questions we seek to answer can change with the world around us. Not only does new scholarship force us to rethink old assumptions, but the world itself insistently raises questions about the way things are and the way things ought to be.
There are of course many different ways to teach effectively. Different academic disciplines lend themselves better to some teaching methodologies than to others. But we must dispense with the outdated notion that college professors provide rote course content by lecturing in ways that can be packaged and replicated semester after semester. So much student learning takes place in libraries and in the archives, in faculty offices and in the hallways outside the room before and after class. Students learn through internships and through working closely with faculty mentors on research projects.
There has been so much loss over the course of the past three months. The inconvenience and financial blows colleges and universities are experiencing may pale in comparison to the needless suffering of so many families across the country. If, however, higher education is deemed in need of reform, I would urge these advocates to reflect upon the best learning experiences they had themselves in college. It likely was not something that took place as they sat in a massive lecture hall, or watched a video, or labored through a chunky textbook. To help higher education, let’s look towards adequately funding public colleges and universities, reversing the long-standing trend towards a highly continent teaching faculty. It is a smart, long-term, investment. Let’s equip faculty to provide students with the resources to provide students with the high-impact learning experiences that can awaken in them a new sense of the possible and that can change their lives.
During his visit to Arizona at the beginning of May, President Donald Trump took some time out to comment on his administration’s efforts to help the state’s large Native American population combat the Coronavirus pandemic and, as he put it, to bring attention to “the unprecedented actions my administration has taken to support our treasured Native American communities.” The President said that his administration has improved “the lives of Native American families and tribes more than any administration has done by far.”
That is quite a claim, and it’s not supported by the evidence.
Trump touted the eight billion dollars Congress appropriated to assist American Indian nations, which he claimed, “is the largest single investment in Indian Country in our history.” The President announced as well that the Navajo Nation will receive an additional $600 million in assistance. “That’s a lot,” he said. Trump then asked, according to the White House transcript of the meeting, “Should I renegotiate that? Can we renegotiate that? (Laughter).” “Only if you go up,” said Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer.
Lizer can be forgiven for not laughing. As of May 28th, the Navajo Nation had suffered more than 5000 active cases of COVID-19, and 167 deaths, and the third-highest per capita rate of infection in the Country.
“Since I took office,” Trump continued, “my administration has also worked to repatriate precious Native American artifacts, to protect children in the care of the Indian Health Service, and to make eagle remains more easily accessible for cultural and religious purposes, and to highlight the contributions of Native American veterans throughout the history of our nation.” None of the items on this list are unprecedented, and all are required by laws that predated Trump’s election in 2016.
Make no mistake, Trump’s presidency has been mostly bad for Native Americans. His racist name-calling directed at Elizabeth Warren reinforced damaging stereotypes about Native American identity. Within days of taking office, he authorized completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline and ignored the protestors at Standing Rock, and rolled back protections on sacred sites like the Bears Ears National Monument. His fetish for Andrew Jackson has bothered those who know anything at all about that president’s record concerning Native America, and Trump’s budgets have imposed cuts on the Indian Health Service at a time when additional funding was badly needed. In fact, the $800 billion in funding has been tied up in court as tribes have clashed with the nation on who should receive the payments. He has ignored the problem of police violence towards Native Americans. The President has been more talk than action, and those actions are usually bad.
With one exception.
In November of 2019, the President signed an Executive Order establishing a task force “on Missing and Murdered American Indian and Alaska Natives,” charged with consulting tribal governments “on the scope and nature of the issues” related to missing and murdered women and girls, developing “model protocols and procedures to apply to new and unsolved cases of missing or murdered persons in American Indian and Alaska Native communities,” as well as the “establishment of a multi-disciplinary, multi-jurisdictional team” including representatives from tribal law enforcement agencies and the federal Departments of Justice and Interior.
Dubbed “Operation Lady Justice,” the task force held consultation/listening sessions in January and February of this year but had to shelve the rest of its schedule, which was to have run through the end of July, because of the coronavirus pandemic.
This is a serious problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control found that 49 percent of Native American women have experienced sexual violence. The Department of Justice reported that 34.1 percent of Native American women will be raped during their lifetime, more than for any other ethnic or racial grouping. As President Trump indicated when he signed the Executive order, “the statistics are sobering and heartbreaking.” He said that “more than 5,000 Native American women and girls were reported missing,” and though the majority return home or are found, “too many are still missing and their whereabouts are unknown—and they usually don’t find them.”
It was this task force about which he spoke during his visit to Arizona. He issued a proclamation making May 5th “Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.”
Many of these missing women have been caught in a web of human trafficking, the exact breadth of the problem unknown. It is a problem of great magnitude but hazy borders. In this sense, the President’s effort to bring additional attention to this issue is welcome. More resources are needed. Nearly half of tribal law enforcement agencies who responded to a Government Accountability Office called for the information reported that they believe human trafficking is occurring on tribal lands within their jurisdictions. The President can educate Americans about the problem of missing and murdered women and girls.
These are crimes on the margins. Native communities are poor. They are isolated. The Supreme Court has made the prosecution of non-Indians by tribal law enforcement officers difficult where it is not impossible. Native American history is a story of tragedy, violence, crime, theft, and plunder. It is, at other times, a story of blundering goodwill. Even those who want to do right often do damage. But the harm is not inevitable, and nations, like individuals, have choices. In this one instance, the President and his handlers have made the right one. The Task Force is still on schedule to report to the President sometime after the election. Let’s hope, whatever the outcome in November, that this important first step is not one wasted.
Four years ago I delivered the Opening Convocation address at SUNY-Geneseo, when you began your college careers as first-year students. This spring, with no pomp but plenty of circumstance, you will graduate, and begin to make your way in a world that looks very different than it did just eight weeks ago. Sitting at home, learning new ways to teach, and listening to the challenges you all have faced as your college careers wind to a close, it seems like a good time to revisit what I said to you back in the fall of 2016. So much has changed. I receive emails from students: one, who sits in her car in a McDonald’s parking lot and another, outside his old high school, to get access to the Wi-Fi they do not reliably have at home. Another cares for his parents, infected with the Coronavirus, looking after them as he tries to do his school work. He emailed and said he is sick now, too. Students who have lost family members and friends to this terrible disease, or fallen ill themselves. Students trying to find workspace in crowded houses, or who worry about the financial toll this crisis has taken on their families. I spend much of my time thinking about my students. I worry about you. Like a lot of people, I suppose, I get antsy and frustrated, and miss life before the pandemic.
During the time our campus has been closed, I have walked a lot. I teach Native American history, and live in a region with a rich history. Geneseo, the small town where I teach in western New York, shows up in the historical documents long before Rochester where I live existed, long before Monroe or Livingston counties, long before there was much of anything European established in what became the broader upstate region. It lays in the heart of the ancestral homeland of the Senecas, the keepers of the western door of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois longhouse. Seneca soldiers and diplomats who lived in this Genesee valley played a role in the history of two empires, the French and the English, in the Iroquois League and Confederacy, and in the history of the native confederations that threatened the existence of the British Empire in America and then the young United States in the 1790s. They continued to live in this valley, at least some of them, even after Major-General John Sullivan led Continental forces through the Finger Lakes in 1779, burning crops and villages, and scorching the earth, as he went. They were here in the 1790s and into the 1800s, before they moved to Allegany and Cattaraugus and Grand River in Canada. I have walked the hills around Ganondagan, and Totiakton, trying to breathe in some of the history in which I live. It is simple and inexpensive therapy.
Stories from the past. I have told so many of these to those of you who have enrolled in my classes: about Mary Jemison, the white woman of the Genesee. She lived for a time as a captive, and adoptee, a refugee, and a Seneca homesteader down the road from the college in what became Letchworth State Park, where you can see a statue of her and a replica cabin. There are some documents with her mark on them in the county courthouse at the end of Main Street, a short walk from my office, where she deeded Seneca lands she claimed to white men associated with the Ogden Land Company, among whom numbered one of Geneseo’s founding fathers. Her Seneca sons, who died violently, two of the three at the hands of their brothers, victims of the alcohol that could cut jagged holes in the fabric of Native American life. There are New York State historical markers all over this county. Biased, to be sure, but all telling historical stories about this part of New York State.
For nearly two decades, I have told stories like these to students at my college. I have taught a lot of students over the years, and told a lot of stories. I am interested in the past, and its connections to the present. How things came to be. Continuity and Change measured across time and space in peoples, institutions and cultures. But all of that is just a way of saying that I am a guy that makes my living by asking and answering questions. And I love the questions—the search for evidence, the complexity and the lack sometimes of definitive answers, and the stories—the stories are at the heart of all that we historians do as teachers and writers.
Your last year in college is ending so differently from what you may have hoped or imagined, as you begin to write the next chapters in your own stories, of continuity and change, of being and becoming. You have become over the past four years more competent and more capable. You have developed your native generosity and compassion. Some of you are ready to take on any challenge, and some of you are frightened, worried and uncertain, sometimes for reasons that go deep into your family’s past, layers upon layers of stories you have to disentangle in order to understand yourselves. Some of you do not know what your story is going to look like, or how to begin writing it. We can hardly fault you for your feelings of existential dread, that the world’s a mess, and that the adults in the room have little to offer. Yet whatever you are feeling, I believe deeply that you can do so much to make this world—our world—a better place. You may be our best hope.
Four years ago I tried to convince you of the importance of cultivating intellectual fearlessness, the courage not to shy away from those things that seem to you–to all of us—to be extremely difficult. To master basic skills, of course. To be honest, curious, inquisitive, and relentless to be sure, but most of all, in terms of the questions you ask, the evidence you consider, the ideas you engage with, and the theses you advance, to be as fearless as you can be. Now, in this new world, so different from even the recent past, more than ever.
I teach at a liberal arts college. We wear that label proudly at Geneseo, and I think many of our students do, too. But that is a difficult thing. You have been asked for years, “What are you going to do with that degree?” Sometimes those questions can come from innocent curiosity, like, really, what are you going to do with that degree. But these questions can also come with a barbed tip, too, in the sense that the liberal arts and humanities are thought by some people to have limited value because, unlike the STEM fields and business, the liberal arts are too often thought of as adding little of value. You do not have to travel far to hear the pursuits to which you have dedicated much of the last four years denigrated by self-proclaimed “thought leaders” and “change agents” who have so much less to offer than they believe.
And that is too bad, for the study of these fields adds a lot. They give us the cultural capital necessary to participate in a democratic society in a meaningful and constructive way. But thinking in terms of nuances, complexities, ambiguities, shades of grey; being one of the people who embraces the big questions, pursues the answers over the long haul, who appreciates the value of open debate and discussion, who endeavors to find truth, and digs like a badger for answers—people like that can find these times we live in rough sledding. People who ask fundamental questions about why things are the way that they are and how they ought to be—they can be perceived as threatening to those in power, and they may often feel like they are bashing their heads against a wall.
You now live in a world, after all, that my generation and my elders have helped to create for you where too many people confuse their feelings and their fears for facts, where being smart and engaged and critical and willing to ask questions can make one an object of scorn. You live in a world as well where complexity is so often dismissed, where big and difficult answers to the big questions are avoided, that asking these sorts of questions can take a certain amount of courage.
In 2020 you look out on an America where you will see too many people who simply do not invest their time and energy to ask questions and stay informed. When we have a President who consistently says things that are not true, and a press that is more concerned with ratings and clicks than in pursuing difficult stories, we arrive at that dire point where the use of “alternative facts” can really be a thing we talk about with straight faces. We, the adults in the room, collectively have modeled some very, very, poor behavior. We reason sloppily or lazily; we are dishonest, or cynical; too many of us are cowards and grotesquely ill-informed.
We live in and have helped to create a world where—when we stand up in the face of the problems before us and ask, “Why?” and when we insist on a reasoned and relevant response to that simple question—it’s like an act of subversion, and subversive acts, even the smallest ones, require a degree of courage, of fearlessness.
We are also complacent in the face of inequality and injustice. Meanwhile you have seen continued gun-craziness, racism, rising anti-Semitism, fear. You see many Americans choosing to live in fear: of immigrants and Islamist extremists–but a plastic surgeon botching your operation is more likely to kill you in the United States than a terrorist. Peanuts kill more Americans than terrorists, as John Oliver pointed out. Armed dingbats arrive at Michigan’s capitol building, armed to the teeth, protesting the suggestion that they stay home to slow the spread of a pandemic that has killed so many. They are afraid, and they are not thinking deeply. People around the globe and in this country—some of them, anyways—seem to have more confidence in fear and anger and hate than in their opposites. With malice towards many, and charity for few; with little interest in heeding the call of the Old Testament prophets to seek out injustice and correct oppression.
FRANKFORT, KY – JANUARY 31: Gun rights activists carrying semi-automatic firearms pose for a photograph in the Capitol Building on January 31, 2020 in Frankfort, Kentucky. Advocates from across the state gathered at the Kentucky Capitol in support of the Second Amendment. The rally will include speeches from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and former Washington, D.C. Special Police Officer, Dick Heller. (Photo by Bryan Woolston/Getty Images)
You are part of the Massacre Generation. School shootings have been a reality since before some of you were born. You witness violence and hatred: White supremacists marching in New Orleans and Charlottesville to protect monuments explicitly commemorating white supremacy. Entering college on the eve of what many of you anticipated would be the election of the first woman President, you saw instead the ascent of an incurious “Reality TV” star who has at various times insisted that freedom of the press does not allow the press to criticize him; that torture, specifically prohibited by American laws, should be brought back; that we should wall ourselves off from the rest of the world; that women are objects who can be grabbed and groped at his pleasure; that ingesting disinfectants is a possible cure to the pandemic he supinely watched take over the country he was charged with governing; that the norms and values and responsibilities of civil society and basic ethics simply do not apply to his family and favorites, and that he has total authority with zero responsibility. And so many of his followers—frightened, violent, and clinging to a degenerate variety of Christianity uninformed by mercy, grace, and love–continue to degrade American public life.
Reasoned, humane, and just public policy is simply impossible without an informed, engaged, and rationally-thinking public willing to ask tough questions.
In other words, you all have come of age in this moment where a lot of really old issues—race and inequality and class and gender and violence and justice, are resurfacing in complicated and anguishing ways. The pandemic in new ways has exposed very old inequalities and power structures that benefit the few at the expense of the many. The problems are out there. They are so apparent. But to name them and to ask, “What can we do?” and to gather the information to solve them, can be tough. And so many of these problems we face are rooted, in part, in a rejection of critical thought, in an embrace of the irrational, and a society with these problems can fall prey to demagogues with their simplistic answers, and will find it difficult to display emotional maturity, and will be prone to violence. You have seen it. In front of one state capitol building, it seems, after another.
What are we going to do about all of this? To make America great again, or as great as it might be, we are going to have to rely upon you, and you are up for the challenge. I’ve been speaking to young people like you for more than two decades. Believe me. Those like you with a solid grounding in the liberal arts, whatever your majors, will best see that “injustice anywhere” just may be a threat to justice everywhere. And that if it is “an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny, that binds us, one to another,” as Martin Luther King once wrote, that you may be among those best suited to do something about it.
You do have power. I have seen it over the past four years. I am thinking of so many of my students as I write these words. Teachers will tell you that our students change us and, if we let them, they can make us better.
It takes courage to trust and to respect and to appreciate, as well as to care and to love, and to accept the validity of ideas presented by those with whom we would be predisposed to think we might disagree. To never underestimate others, to take people seriously, whoever that person happens to be, to accept the possibility that those with whom we disagree might have a point and, indeed, to admit that we might be wrong. To appear vulnerable in the face of those who despise us. It is not an easy thing for us, and it is not an easy thing for our students. It takes courage, and a willingness—a true commitment—to approaching everything and everyone with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised.
It is so easy to feel like the challenges we face are too big and it is possible, I think, that we all feel at times like we are not enough to make a difference—that we need to be wealthier or have more expertise or access or a stronger prescription or whatever. But what if we used our skills and our thoughts and our reason and acted as if we were exactly what was needed? If we all knew we could work to close the gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be, even a little bit, would we have the courage to act? Would we really do it?
I believe you can.
A long time ago I had a great history professor. His name was Albie Burke. He died about ten years ago. And even though I left Cal State Long Beach where he taught in the late 1980s, I still got back to campus every other year or so to have lunch with him and to catch up, to talk about the Supreme Court, constitutionalism, politics, and all sorts of other things. We were both historians who sort of wanted to be lawyers. I can remember feeling nervous and unprepared before having to present some of my work in seminar, my thesis project on two really big Supreme Court cases in the field of American Indian law. And believe me, I was stressed out. We would meet in his very Spartan office, and he always made really incisive eye contact when you were speaking to him. Bright, bright, blue eyes. He would listen very quietly, never interrupting. Very comfortable with silences. And then when you finished, spilling out your guts, coming up with all your excuses, telling him how you were not ready, he would pause for a few beats and then say: “You will never be prepared. You still got to do it.” He’d smile just a little bit as he said that. It was a tough lesson for some of his students, I think, but his point was that you can spend all your time worrying and fretting and fearing and preparing and not doing. Fear can keep you from doing what needs to be done, in public life, and in terms of what you want for your own lives. It is so easy to talk yourself out of pursuing your dreams, of tackling the challenges that may lie in front of you, and that lie in front of all of us.
Here’s what a student of mine wrote for her final essay in my Western Humanities course last year, a class that some of Plato’s characters might dismiss as mere stargazing. I gave the students an essay by a war correspondent reflecting on his long career and the seemingly limitless capacity of people for inhumanity and barbarism. I asked the students to write about human nature, justice, and the problem of evil, as they contemplated this article, and works by Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Augustine, More, the Bible, Shakespeare. “The question remains,” this very talented student wrote, “how do we account for all of the hatred, violence, and injustice that we witness? What words do we use to describe it? How can we possibly rationalize it and make sense of it? Where do we find its opposite in the world, and how do we eagerly point at that, so as to say, ‘See, this is also us. This is also me.’
“In a world and a human history overwhelmed by hatred, violence, and injustice, what counters it, I argue, is love, compassion, faith, and the courage to rise above it.”
There is great wisdom in these words.
Look for the beautiful more than the dutiful. Your rising generation is already better than mine in important ways—its open-mindedness, its tolerance, its acceptance of difference. I want to encourage your fearlessness, even where we have failed to demonstrate it ourselves. I know we have a lot of influence. Or at least we have the potential to be highly influential: a cruel or an uncaring word from us, for example, even when cast off thoughtlessly or uncritically, or because we are stressed out or too busy, can do so much damage, while a simple kind word, a single note of encouragement, can do something that students like you might remember for the rest of your lives, something that can help them write a beautiful life story.
I feel that I have the best job in the world. Each and every day, I have the opportunity, if I choose to truly be present, to truly listen, to be awed by your achievements, humbled by the obstacles you have overcome to get to and through my college, inspired by your creative thinking, pushed by your challenging questions, and amazed by the alacrity with which so many of you seek out injustice, attempt to correct oppression, and in thousands of small ways show the vital courage to make the world—our world—a better place. It saddens me that I will not be able to see you on graduation day, to wish you well, and most of all, to thank you for the past four years.
A Discussion Forum for Teaching and Writing Native American History
