Monthly Archives: October 2020

2020 Campaign

See How We Are

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Four years ago on Election Day I took my daughters to Rochester’s Mount Hope Cemetery. Among the local luminaries buried there was Susan B. Anthony, the famous champion of women’s rights. The cemetery was kept open late. We went to visit Anthony’s grave on the day I cast my ballot for what I fully expected would be America’s first woman president.

We were not alone. The cemetery was packed. We never made it to Anthony’s grave. The lines were too long. But we did stand in a crowd filled with women young and women old, who shared our sense that something momentous was going to happen that night. The atmosphere was hopeful, at times festive. With a woman succeeding the first African-American president, maybe it was possible to see another ceiling shattered, a change for the good.

I watched the coverage that night. I sensed early on that Hillary Clinton was going to lose. I could see the tension in James Carville’s face relatively early in the evening as he watched the returns coming in from Florida. That is when it dawned on me that it was over, and that sixty-two million Americans had voted for a monster whose only qualification was a puffed up financial resume, an infinite capacity for dishonesty, and a lethal ability to combine corruption, vindictiveness, racism and incompetence.

Over the past four years I have cut people out of my life who continue to support this monster. For each of his crimes they have had an excuse or a denial. At times I am disappointed in myself for doing this, but I no longer believe these individuals can be reasoned with. Why continue to bash my head against a wall? They are toxic people, and for my own health I have cut these toxins out. So much of the past four years has been toxic. So much rot. So much sickness.

As I write these words I think of a song by my favorite band, X, called “See How We Are.” We are not well.

I was never among those who thought of the policies pursued by Trump and his supporters as “Un-American.” From his fear and hatred of immigrants, his racism, his predatory behavior toward women, his greed, his avarice, and his civic illiteracy, he strikes me as a perfect representative of what this country has become, and in a large measure always has been. I know there are people committed to what many consider this nation’s ideals, but at times it feels like they lose more rounds than they win. My only hope is that there are enough sane people in a handful of states who will defy efforts to disfranchise them and vote to save what’s left of this tattered republic. Sometimes I worry that this election already has been stolen, that the republic cannot be saved.

The last four years have been hard. This year has been especially hard. Trump was not the sole cause of all of this. Or he was both a cause and a symptom. And the underlying causes of Trumpism, those American toxins, will remain in the body politic, even if he is somehow prevented from stealing this election. Look at the Republicans already maneuvering to run for President in 2024: Tom Cotton, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz, that vicious empty suit from Missouri and Crenshaw from the district where I briefly lived in Texas–they are no better than him.

I am not hopeful for the future. I do not believe that this country is an exceptional place. We contend with problems that other countries have addressed more successfully. Sometimes I do not believe I will be able to forgive those who continue to support this violent monster.

Vice-President Biden has called for a return to decency. Watching him on TV, I am willing to believe in his basic decency and kindness, even if I wish he took different stands on some of the issues that matter to me. I voted for him last Saturday. But I know he is just a guy, the candidate of a political party whose moderate leadership has failed to effectively counter the President’s tyranny. They continue to appeal to norms that long ago were torn asunder.

Trump’s regime–and I hope it lasts only one term–will have been a historic presidency. It has demonstrated how bad things can become when a significant number of the American people forfeit their civic responsibility to be informed, critical, and compassionate citizens. These have been painful years, but for the love of God do not tell me you were surprised by any of this. It is not just Trump. Tens of millions of Americans share in the guilt for what has happened over the past four years and, like Frank Bruni, I will never be able to look at this country the same way again.

Long ago Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Richard Price expressing his faith in the people. He said that “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” Maybe the election of 2020 will serve this purpose. Don’t bet on it. That the United States was founded on principles of liberty, justice, and equality has always been the biggest lie in American history. And the past four years have shown that the forces of racism, fascism, illiberality, callousness and corporate greed are not going anywhere. We will live with the illness for a long, long time. I am not certain we will ever recover, whatever the outcome of the election.

Party Platforms

Putting America’s First Peoples First, in America, First!

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Just a couple of days after President Trump used his Columbus Day Proclamation to stir up the dingbats and those who find mention of Columbus’s slaving voyages an assault upon their white privilege, his campaign issued its “Putting America’s First Peoples First” platform for a Native American policy for his second term. “Forgotten No More!” the policy proposal screamed. The President has been trying in the campaigns closing days to win the support of Native American voters.

Native Americans, who have long listened to American government plans to put them places, whether first or elsewhere, can be forgiven for their skepticism.

The “First Peoples” plan rests upon five “Core Principles.” First, “Recognizing Tribal Sovereignty and Self-Determination.” Next, the President pledges to promote “safe communities” by “increasing public safety in Indian Country–particularly by continuing to find solutions to long-standing challenges like missing and murdered Native Americans and the opioid and meth crises.” The President committed his administration to “building a thriving economy with improving infrastructure” for native peoples. Despite his refusal to acknowledge Indigenous Peoples’ Day or the suffering that followed the Columbian encounter, the President wanted to honor “Native American heritage” and improve education, including “access to high-quality education options that are consistent with Tribal traditions, languages, and culture.” Finally, the President’s plan includes a pledge to improve health care for Native American communities. The language in each of these proposals was circular, written in a slapdash manner. We will make education better by improving education; we will make Indian communities safer by eliminating conditions that make them unsafe, and so on. Each of these headings included a number of specific policy suggestions, none of which were original or showed much imagination.

It is all a sham. You should know this by now. There is no reason to believe a word that anyone affiliated with this administration says.

The successes that President Trump has claimed–signing Savanna’s Act, for instance, or the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2017–were measures with widespread bipartisan support. No matter who was president, these bills would have become law. The items listed in the President’s “Putting America’s First Peoples First” plan were entirely non-controversial. They are items with broad support, and they have been pursued for years.

And none of this can erase the fact that the President has been a disaster for Indian Country. Despite his Johnny-Come-Lately approach to recognizing the Lumbees, there is no denying that Trump’s bungling of the Coronavirus pandemic brought devastation to Native American communities. His administration failed to quickly and equitably deliver CARES Act funding to beleaguered Native communities, causing further suffering. To satisfy his corporate allies, he has opened sites sacred to Indigenous peoples to corporate exploitation. He has shown no respect for Native lands, and respects Indian tribal sovereignty only so long as tribes give him what he wants. While his plan calls for “growing the pipeline for Tribal entrepreneurship through opportunities for Federal contracting,” the only pipelines the President seems interested in are those his corporate enablers bore through Native American lands.

Who cares what this administration says? Why does anyone listen any longer?

We have had four years of lying, graft, self-dealing, deceit. There is no reason for any one to believe a single word they say. The only people who claim to believe what this President says are fools or accomplices. In every way possible, he and his administration have coarsened this country’s already jagged edges. Their cruelty and vindictiveness, their dishonesty and their violence, their racism and their avarice, have shown to the world that this country is not anything close to what it claims to be. In every way possible, this President and his supporters have made everything worse. They are craven, cruel liars, who have left a stain on the ragged fabric of the Republic that may never wash out. The President’s late arrival on Native American issues is purely transactional. Support me, and I will see what I can do for you. But he has absolutely nothing new to say, and nothing to say on these issues worth our time and attention.

Constitution, Uncategorized

Amy Coney Barrett’s Constitutionalism is a Fraud

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            Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett argues that the Constitution and its amendments ought to be interpreted in the manner its creators intended. Originalism, the name for the legal theory to which she subscribes, has its adherents who believe that they can intuit the farmers’ intent from the close reading of the nation’s charter documents and the context in which they were written. But originalism has always been a problematic and ahistorical approach to legal interpretation, because so much of the meaning of the Constitution was contested, ambiguous, and unclear at the time it was written.

            This point is amply borne out by the Indian affairs clause of the United States Constitution.  Article I, Section 8 contains a list of powers that “we the people” bestowed upon the legislative branch of the government. Among those is the right to “regulate commerce…with the Indian tribes.”

            But what does “commerce” mean?

            The first federal Congress, in an attempt to add some flesh to these bare bones, enacted in the summer of 1790 the first of a number of “Trade and Intercourse” acts. These laws asserted federal control over non-native Americans and attempted to regulate their conduct when they engaged in commerce with Indian nations. Traders who wanted to engage in the Indian trade needed a license from a federal agent and so on. But there is nothing in the sparse language of the Constitution, or the subsequent legislation defining that language, that gave to the people of the United States power over the internal workings of Indigenous Nations. Yet, over many decades, the United States has seized control over more and more aspects of life in Native American communities, finding justification for this “plenary authority” in Article I, Section 8. “Commerce” now means pretty much everything and anything.

            Judge Barrett has said nothing about Indian affairs during her relatively short legal career, and it never came up in the questions she avoided answering during her hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  But Judge Barrett has made clear her immense respect for Justice Antonin Scalia. During his tenure on the court, tribal interests prevailed only a fifth of the time. Scalia wrote five majority opinions on the subject, all of which were defeats for Native American interests. Yet in each of these cases, the language of the Constitution provided no clear guidance.

            Scalia’s closest intellectual partner on the Court had been Justice Clarence Thomas, who has said very provocative things about the Indian Affairs clause. In 2004 Justice Thomas upheld the constitutionality of a law that allowed Indian tribes to prosecute non-member Indians, but he was troubled by the Court’s arguments. 

            Thomas could not accept the Court’s assertion “that the Constitution grants Congress plenary power to calibrate the ‘metes and bounds of tribal sovereignty.’” He could not “locate such congressional authority in the Treaty Clause. . . or the Indian Commerce Clause.” A decade later, in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013), Thomas again considered the constitutional basis for plenary power, this time in a case involving the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act.  “Although the Court has said,” he wrote, “that the central function of the Indian Commerce Clause is to provide Congress with plenary power to legislate in the field of Indian affairs,” neither the text nor the original understandings of the Clause “supports Congress’ claim to ‘plenary’ power.”  The contested adoption proceedings at the heart of the Baby Girl case involved neither commerce nor tribes, and Thomas believed that “there is simply no basis for Congress’ assertion of authority over such proceedings.”

            In 2016, in the case of US v. Bryant, Thomas once again wrote that Congress’s “purported plenary power over Indian tribes,” rests on shaky foundations.  “No enumerated power–not Congress’ power to ‘regulate commerce…with Indian tribes,’ not the Senate’s role in approving treaties, nor anything else, gives Congress such sweeping authority.” And in a 2017 dissent in a case involving the Secretary of the Interior’s decision to take 13,000 acres of Oneida land in New York into trust, Thomas again criticized the Court’s Indian Commerce Clause rulings.  Allowing the federal government to take land within a state into trust on behalf of an Indian tribe, Thomas argued, could not be supported by any language in the Constitution, and it would have shocked the “Founding Fathers” to “find such a power lurking in a clause they understood to give Congress the limited authority to ‘regulate trade with Indian tribes living beyond state boundaries.”

            Justice Thomas defined “commerce” narrowly. If Congress had no acceptable justification for its claim to plenary power, Thomas believed that power must exist in some other entity.  For Thomas, it seemed to be with the states.

            What does “commerce” mean, and what did it mean in 1787, when the Constitution was ratified, or in 1789 when it went into effect? It is difficult to say. Various “Founders” disagreed and changed their opinions over time. Justice Thomas has pointed out that the Court’s Indian Commerce Clause rulings are built on a fiction, that they stand without justification in the Constitution’s language. Plenary power may rest on nothing more than brute force. No principle, no historical document, can justify it.  Many of Justice Thomas’s colleagues disagree. They argue that Article I, Section 8 does indeed grant to the federal government “plenary power” over Indian affairs.  The Founders used the word “Commerce.”  They provide little support for those who see in the Constitution what can best be understood as an extralegal, and extra-Constitutional, extension of federal authority over Indian affairs. 

            Judge Coney Barrett’s commitment to discerning an original meaning to the Constitution conveniently ignores all the gray areas, those realms of law and constitutional interpretation where the matters under consideration have been contested ever since the document first was written, debated, and ratified.  Originalism is a scoundrel’s argument. It will be used by the new Supreme Court majority to injure women, people of color, and our friends and family in the LGBTQ community. We could talk about abortion, or the right to marriage, or the very practice of judicial review itself, the Constitution does not always speak clearly to us.  Originalism, a most tendentious way of deducing its meaning, is a flawed approach that has been used as a lever to prop up the power of the federal state to do, in the end, as much or as little as it wants.

Teaching Native American History

Trace

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I just finished reading Lauret Savoy’s Trace. “We make our lives among relics and ruins of former times, former worlds,” she writes. “Each of us is, too, a landscape inscribed by memory and loss.” These words weigh on me, in the seventh month of my mother’s illness, in the midst of a global pandemic that has turned everything upside down.

It is not safe for me to travel to visit my family. I will fly home in January for a visit. Traveling in these times fills me with dread. I worry I will become sick, or will pick up the sickness and carry it with me to people more vulnerable than I.

“From what do we take our origin? From incised memories?” There is so much wrong in this world, and so much darkness. I think of my home town often. Thinking of place, and her place in it, Savoy notes that the “American land preceded hate.” Always, I think that things did not have to be the way that they are. It is the historian’s incessant cry: Along with “Why?” there is always the question of “Why not something else, something better?”

An immense land lies about us. Nations migrate within us. The past looms close, as immediate as breath, blood, and scars on a wrist. It, too, lies hidden, obscured, shattered. What I can know of ancestors’ lives or of this land can’t be retrieved like old postcards stored in a desk drawer.

Savoy speaks to me. As a person struggling to get by, feeling burdened and unmoored. I have work to do, and I attempt to do it as we careen towards an election where the irrational and the millions of Americans who are historically illiterate threaten to cast aside those things we hopefully tell ourselves make us special. About place names, Savoy wisely writes that “if history can be read in the names of the land, then the text at the surface is partial and pieced.”

A reader might do well to look beyond ‘official’ maps for traces of other languages, other visions. He or she might do well to acknowledge, and mourn, the loss of innumerable names born out of textured homelands that no longer reside in living memory. We all might do well to remember that names are one measure of how one chooses to inhabit the world.

Where are we? Who are we? Sometimes I feel like I do not know how to answer these questions. So many people seem never to bother asking them in the first place.

In one chapter Savoy tells of her visit to Walnut Grove Plantation in the South Carolina piedmont. She took the tour, listened to the docent. The tour and educational materials produced about the plantation lionized the owners as hard-working immigrants who had attained self-sufficiency and independence. The enslaved peoples, whose graves Savoy saw nearby, were not mentioned. The visit reminded her of Edmund S. Morgan’s “American Paradox”: that American freedom and American slavery are intertwined and entangled so thoroughly that one cannot be understood apart from the other. In American history, and at Walnut Grove.

“What to remember, what to forget?” Savoy asks. “How a society remembers can’t be separated from how it wants to be remembered or from what it wishes it was–that is, if we believe stories of ancestors reflect who we are and how we came to be. The past is remembered and told by desire.”

We do not comfortably tell stories of enslavement, Savoy writes, or of dispossession. Stories like these don’t work well with “heritage tourism.” Americans do not like to be reminded of their nation’s misdeeds. The current president has declared a culture war on those who seek to undermine American heroes and challenge American monuments. And here’s the problem with that.

A supposedly long-gone past offers an illusory comfort to the living. It’s not my fault. I didn’t own any slaves, and neither did my family. Barricaded safely in the present, the living can condemn the institution while ignoring what made it desirable to privileged classes–and what has fed an ever-mutable caste system to the present.

Reflecting upon, and rejecting, the history taught her as a child, Savoy writes that

the events that occurred and the narratives told of them can never be complete or single-voiced. Each of us participates in it. We contribute to it as players, as witnesses, as narrators, as producers, and consumers in an ongoing past to present.

“What to remember, what to forget?” Much of my own teaching serves to dismantle the comforting myths and half-truths my students learned in elementary, middle, and high school. Thinking of the burial ground at Walnut Grove, Savoy notes all the graves of the enslaved, and the stories not told about those people who enabled the owners’ self-sufficiency and independence. Few of us want to look there. Few of us wish to see where the bodies are buried. Yet the Walnut Grove burial ground, she writes, “seemed to belie the enslavers’ power to extract work without consent from the enslaved. Not just work, but blood, breath, life itself. Silence reminded me, too, of pieces erased from a many-storied past: complex communities excised, interior lives of ‘property in person’ ignored.” Pasts erased, lives forgotten, experiences ignored.

She writes

We live among countless absences of memory in this country. They convey both remembrances and omissions, privileging partial arcs of story while neglecting so many others. Historical sites are contested story sites for the meaning of America’s past-to-present.

To whom is history responsible? What I realized at the burying ground was that each of us is implicated in locating the past-to-present.

History layers itself in language and acts, “of meanings shrouded over generations. The question has to be turned around and made personal: What then is my relationship with history, told and untold, on this land.”

It is hard to engage painful elements of America’s past and be self-reflective, particularly if one must confront deeply ingrained beliefs and ideas that have shaped, or made comfortable, one’s sense of self or place. Or if one seeks to shed a sense of inherited shame or pain in order to step away from stories of group victimization. But the legacy of slavery, and the racism it fed and reinforced, remains a malignant symbiosis. It feeds who we Americans think we are, as citizens and as communities. It still festers as untended wounds, open and disfiguring to some, hidden from view to others.

This is a beautiful reflection on the work of the historian, at least as I have come to see it over the thirty-odd years I have spent in graduate school and as a teacher. I write about Indigenous peoples. I work to understand the processes of dispossession that shaped the land upon which I live. I have worked, in small ways, in the conqueror’s courts in what so often seems like a futile effort to obtain some remedy for the clear crimes of the past. Always, I tell myself that it wasn’t inevitable, that hardly anything is inevitable. It did not have to be this way, and there is another path if we wish to take it. Sometimes, however, when I am reading through the mountains of evidence that document these injustices, I find this especially difficult to believe. But I hope. Always. Savoy’s concluding thoughts about her visit to Walnut Grove resonate with me.

I don’t have answers, but I do have desires. That the intricate relations implicating us in each other’s lives could be acknowledged by the recent immigrant and native, by descendant of colonists and those enslaved by colonists. This isn’t being trampled by history or consumed by guilt over the past, nor is it being victim without end. It is instead honoring the lives of those so often unacknowledged by taking responsibility for the past-in-present–by opposing injustices today for which accountability is direct. This comes closest to my mind for a true re-pairing toward truth and reconciliation.

Monuments

I Read Donald Trump’s 2020 Columbus Day Proclamation So You Don’t Have To

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I was a bit surprised that the administration managed to get their Columbus Day Proclamation done this year, given all the chaos in the White House. So many people seem to be out sick. But on the 9th of October, a couple of days in advance of the holiday, President Trump called upon Americans to join him and “commemorate the great Italian who opened a new chapter in world history and to appreciate his enduring significance to the Western Hemisphere.” Christopher Columbus is an American hero, he said.

The proclamation celebrates Columbus’s bravery, his fortitude, and his contribution to the history of the United States. His arrival in the “New World” “marked the beginning of a new era in human history,” and “Columbus represents one of the first of many immeasurable contributions of Italy to American history.” The President’s staff recycled a lot of language from their earlier Columbus Day proclamations, and for its first two paragraphs, the 2020 proclamation follows a well-worn path.

In what many hope will be his final Columbus Day Proclamation, however, the President seemed to acknowledge that many Americans, and especially many Native Americans, see Columbus as a symbol representing more than five hundred years of genocide and settler colonialism. “Sadly, in recent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy.” If you read this blog, you know that these critics of Columbus are anything but, and that a broad scholarly consensus has formed around the enormous destruction wreaked by Columbus and his successors.

Nonetheless, the President continued.

These extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discoveries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions. Rather than learn from our history, this radical ideology and its adherents seek to revise it, deprive it of any splendor, and mark it as inherently sinister. They seek to squash any dissent from their orthodoxy. We must not give in to these tactics or consent to such a bleak view of our history.

Therefore, the President said, we will squash the activists. We will punish you if you suggest that our history is something other than goodness and light. And Donald Trump emphasized that he is on the job. He will save the western heritage from the scholarly barbarians at the gates. He mentioned that earlier this year, for example, he signed Executive Orders punishing acts of vandalism against monuments on federal property, calling for the creation of a “National Garden of American Heroes,” and establishing the “1776 Commission,” which, he wrote, “will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and honor the founding.” What’s more, President Trump pointed out that in September he signed an Executive Order intended “to root out the teaching of racially divisive concepts from the Federal workplace, many of which are grounded in the same type of revisionist history that is trying to erase Christopher Columbus from our national heritage.” Much was at stake, the President said. “Together, we must safeguard our history and stop this new wave of iconoclasm by standing against those who spread hate and division.”

Radical activists. Extremists. Revisionist History. The words are said sneeringly, and the President’s words are intended to delegitimize and cast as disloyal those who challenge the simple-minded patriotism of the radical right. History, after all, is being revised all the time. We historians ask questions about the past, we gather the evidence, we consider the work of those scholars who preceded us, and we offer our answers. The value of our work is determined by the soundness of our reasoning and the strength of our evidence. Historical interpretations are revised in scholarly publications, in books and articles and really good student term papers and, increasingly, in the street. Ignore the truth about your monumental heroes long enough, the radical right is learning, and someone may revise your cherished statue into a piece of rubbish.

There is nothing funny about the President’s proclamation. Those who point out that this nation was founded in violent processes of dispossession and enslavement are making claims abundantly supported by evidence. There is an enormous body of fantastic scholarly work now reaching the interested public bringing attention to the ubiquitous brutality of American slavery and the thoroughness of dispossession. Scholar after scholar highlights and points out the problem of systemic racism in American society not because they are disloyal, but because they want to make things better. It is the scoundrel’s way, and the tyrant’s, to ignore this scholarly work and the evidence upon which it is based, and instead to denounce the brave people who make these claims as traitors and extremists. Be brave, my friends, because you have to know that this president and his supporters won’t. That puts us all in danger.

Teaching Native American History

“We Need To Take Away Children”

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As a nation we have always claimed that we need to take away children. The New York Times yesterday ran a deeply disturbing story examining closely the Trump Administration’s “Family Separation Policy” supported most forcefully by then-Attorney-General Jeff Sessions. “We need to take away children,” Sessions told prosecutors at the Mexican border. If people crossing the border cared about their kids, the Attorney General said that they would not have brought them. It did not matter how young. It did not matter if they were in diapers, or if they still were nursing. It did not matter what horrors in their homeland they ran from. And when called to account these Trump administration officials lied about it. They knew it was morally abhorrent, but they did it anyways.

It was a stunning story. It was not a surprising one.

Jeff Sessions fired by Donald Trump: Here's what we know now

One could write a history of North America, with the cruelty meted out on the children of peoples of color as the narrative thread weaving the entire horrifying tapestry together. Cruelty towards children runs through the entire story.

It rests at the center of the trade in human flesh central to this nation’s founding. Children ripped from parents. There is no way to excuse these horrifying crimes.

There is Columbus, whose big day is just around the corner. He looked at a child swimming, a little girl, and saw only that she would make a suitable slave. He scooped up Indigenous children, packed them aboard his ships, and sent them back for sale in Iberian markets. There is the murder of Paspahegh children by armed colonists from Jamestown. The colonist George Percy appeased his men, angry at taking any prisoners at all, by allowing them to throw these children into the James River and shoot them in the head. I think of the burning of Mystic fort in 1637, of so many other massacres of native peoples across the continent, where Native children fell beside their parents, victims of a style of warfare practiced without restraint by “civilized” peoples against their “savage” enemies. “Nits grow into lice,” the perpetrator of one of those massacres reportedly said. I think of the slaughter of Christian Conestogas by the Paxton Boys, the mass murder at Gnaddenhutten, the epidemics that carried off native children and sparked the Ghost Dance among their grieving parents, or the boarding schools where American officials so confident in their deluded good intentions collected and removed indigenous children from their homes. And today, when we can read of the murder of native peoples by well-armed police, the too-frequent disappearance or murder of Native American women and girls in both Canada and the United States, and the travesty of South Dakota’s treatment of Native American families in its foster care system. It is exhausting.

When I teach I tell my students about George Percy. That weak and cowardly aristocrat who settled at Jamestown led a raid by an English party against the Paspahegh Indians, whose town stood a short distance upriver from that sickly fortified settlement.  Percy’s soldiers took the “Queen of Paspahegh” and her children hostage but his men began to grumble.  He gave in to them, threw the children overboard, and allowed his men to entertain themselves by “shooting out their brains in the water.”  I tell them of the Paxton Boys’ massacre of peaceful Conestoga Indians in December 1763.  The Paxton men killed fourteen of them: men, women, and a couple of children, no more than three years old.  The Paxton Boys split their skulls with tomahawks, and took their scalps as trophies.  This was intimate violence, acts committed at close range. To children.  To babies.  In order to help my students make sense of the Ghost Dance, I tell the students about the movement that occurred on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation.  Among the Kiowa ghost dancers were a lot of parents, and they danced on the snowy ground hoping to see, once again, the children who had died, innocents slaughtered by measles, whooping cough, and pneumonia.  Grief lay at the broken heart of the Ghost Dance movement.  And of course that grief continues.  Harold Napoleon, in Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being, a book that will break your heart as it educates you, described Alaska Native communities immersed still in a grief caused by what he called “the Great Death.”

We cannot teach the past without considering the pain, the grief, and the sadness that people felt. If we want to reach our students, we need to help them feel history as they learn it, to consider those moments of brutality and violence and sadness. And in so many ways, this current president and his cascading collection of war criminals, grifters, and cruel incompetents forces us to realize that the pain we teach and write about is still very much present and very much alive. They feed on the misery they cause, find justification in your suffering. There is so very much at stake in the approaching election.