Today the new citizenship exam goes into place, with consequences for those who seek to become citizens of the United States. The new examination is different, to be sure. It is a quiz more than a test, assessing the applicants factual knowledge of arbitrarily selected bits of information about American history and the nation’s political system. The questions in Part A focus on “Principles of American Government,” those in Part B on “Systems of Government,” and those Section C on “Rights and Responsibilities.” Then follow a couple of dozen questions on American History divided into the “Colonial Period and Independence,” the “1800s,” and “Recent American History and Other Important Historical Information.” Finally, there is a small selection of questions on “Symbols” and “Holidays.”
There has been abundant criticism of the new exam. Widely viewed as part of Stephen Miller‘s plan to make American citizenship more difficult to attain, critics have asserted that the new test is more difficult, especially for those with limited English proficiency. As Maeve Higgins pointed out in the New York Times, the “potent administrative changes” put into effect by the Trump Administration, including those to the test, are “insidious.” “However innocuous some changes may seem, they illuminate the end goal: curbing legal immigration.”
These are, indeed, important critiques, not to be discounted. The Trump Administration’s hostility to immigrants and refugees is well documented and utterly undeniable. What bothers me, however, is the sheer inanity of the enterprise. Of course new citizens should know something of the country to which circumstances have led them to apply for citizenship. This is not the way to accomplish it. “Here are some questions with the answers,” the government says. “Memorize enough of these and, after all the other paperwork and expenses you have endured, you are good to go.” Memorization and regurgitation pose the final hurdle.
Yet however difficult the new quiz, I am willing to bet that an enormous number of American citizens would not pass. This morning I gave my students the quiz, randomly selecting 20 questions from the list of 128.
2. What is the supreme law of the land?
3. Name one thing the U. S. Constitution does?
6. What does the Bill of Rights protect?
9. What founding document said the American colonies were free from Britain?
15. There are three branches of government. Why?
25. How long is a term for a member of the House of Representatives?
29. Name your US Representative.
33. Who does a member of the House of Representatives represent?
34. Who elects members of the House of Representatives?
48. What are two Cabinet-level positions?
50. What is one part of the judicial branch?
69. What are two examples of civic participation in the United States?
77. Name one reason why Americans declared independence from Britain
80. The American Revolution had many important events. Name one.
83. The Federalist Papers supported the passage of the U. S. Constitution. Name one of the writers.
88.James Madison is famous for many things. Name one.
91. Name one war fought by the United States in the 1800s?
99. Name one leader of the women’s rights movement in the 1800s
114. Why did the United States enter the Persian Gulf War?
124. The Nation’s first motto was ‘E Pluribus Unum.” What does that mean?
My students did fine. They are readers and thinkers. College students do not deserve the critiques they get from so many of the oldsters. But look at the news. Listen to the rhetoric coming from our leaders in the Senate and Congress. We have constructed a country that allows civic illiterates who have little knowledge of what the Constitution says, what it means, and from whence it came to flourish in the nation’s public
Coach Tuberville, Ready to Obstruct Democratic Bills in the Senate
life. The permissible answers to the questions on the quiz, as is the entire endeavor to quiz would-be citizens in the first place, is ideological and intended to advance an uncritical patriotism. Senators represent the citizens of their states, the quiz says, not the people. So too with Congressional representatives, a notion that would have surprised the Founders. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton all are “famous for many things.” Aspiring citizens should be ready to name one, as if knowing any of this quiz show data leads directly to meaningful and productive citizenship.
Native Americans show up in a couple of questions. If applicants are asked “who lived in America before Europeans arrived,” they had better be ready to say “Native Americans” or “American Indians,” and they need to know the name of at least one Indian tribe. This hardly prepares new citizens to comprehend America’s centuries-long history of dispossession and colonialism. At the same time one can correctly answer the question about the “many documents” that “influenced the U. S. Constitution” by mentioning the “Iroquois Great Law of Peace,” even if few historians actually agree.
Not knowing the answers to these questions has not kept many Americans from participating in politics, with disastrous results. Most Americans, after all, according to a Woodrow Wilson Foundation study from 2018, would fail the old version of the test. Americans who do not know what the Constitution says, for instance, are in a poor position to challenge the machinations of a party or party leader intent on taking from them the rights that Constitution protects. The last four years ought to convince you that we are indeed in a crisis. Too many Americans, too ignorant of their country’s history (or any history for that matter), and functionally illiterate about how the American constitutional system ought to operate, make fit tools for tyrants.
There is evidence that the Trump administration is intent on wrecking the place on the way out, like an angry tenant evicted from an apartment who wants to get back at the people who turned him out. That includes the issue of immigration, as the Trump administration rushes to complete more of its silly border wall, and to put new restrictions in place like this ineffective test. But what we need are fewer restrictions on immigration. Hell, drive through the Midwest, and the Plains states, and you can see the massive depopulation, desolation, and devastation that might be reversed by immigration. A taco truck on every corner would be far more economic enterprise than many of the small emptying towns of America’s broken heartland have seen in a generation. What
Bad Citizens.
we need is more discussion of making citizenship productive, informed, and meaningful. Americans long have viewed citizenship as a mold into which immigrants must be pressed. Native Americans, too, who formally became citizens in 1924, were prepared for “rights and responsibilities of citizenship” in the same rote, heavy-handed manner as immigrants today. Citizenship is seen as a bar one must clear, an objective achieved, not as something one lives, breathes and does. Citizenship does include both rights and responsibilities, as the new exam suggests. One of those responsibilities is active and informed engagement in the body politic, to nurture a sense of duty and selflessness, and to think of the nation before the stock portfolio. We are in this together. “It takes all of us,” as the lettering on the back of the football players’ helmets reads. Citizenship is not an entry pass to a country, not in a thriving democracy anyways. It must be a way of life.
In his comments at the close of the White House Conference on American History, a gathering that did not take place at the White House and that included few historians, President Donald Trump offered a chilling vision that is one more sign of the country’s steady advance towards despotism.
Trump wanted to “preserve our glorious inheritance: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights,” though nothing has threatened them so much as his administration. The Constitution, he said, “was the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western Civilization,” and “no political document has done more to advance the human condition or propel the engine of progress.” So he said.
Only enemies of the American state would disagree with him. He denounced “a radical movement” that “is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance.” These enemies of the American people have demolished statutes of slaveholders, that they have engaged in protests and riots. “The left-wing cultural revolution” visible everywhere, he said, “is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”
He denounced Howard Zinn, whose forty-year old People’s History of the United States terrifies the right. Zinn has lived rent-free in the minds of think-tank denizens like panelist Mary Grabar for many, many years. Zinn, Trump said, wrote a “propaganda tract” that tries “to make students ashamed of their own history.” The 1619 Project, meanwhile, “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principles of oppression, not freedom.”
Those pushing these views are disloyal. Trump said that. Like America’s enemies, they “want to see American weakened, derided, and totally diminished.” Teaching “critical race theory” to our children, he continued, “is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.” Thus “Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” These ideas are so dangerous, in other words, that they must be suppressed. They are poisonous and they must be rooted out and eliminated. Indeed, the President boasted of having “recently banned training in this prejudiced ideology from the federal government.” We will reeducate those exposed to these subversive ideas.
The panelists, mostly white men speaking at a panel organized by the President of the United States at the National Archives, played variations on this theme. There was absolutely nothing new here. They could have plugged in the National History Standards in the place of the 1619 Project, and it would have been a 1990s flashback, or “multiculturalism” for 80’s Night. With no sense of irony these well-compensated denizens of Right Wing Think Tanks and ideologically-connected Colleges lamented their marginalization. And, one by one, they expressed their fear of ideas, taught by historians, that they know they cannot refute. It was a disgraceful affair, capped by the President signing an unconstitutional executive order establishing the “1776 Commission” to indoctrinate American children with “patriotic” values. Because he is afraid of them being indoctrinated.
I know many friends who have laughed at this President’s many monstrosities, but we are not laughing any more. This is dangerous. It is no joke.
When I hear how colonists wiped out close to 70% of the Indigenous population of the Americas and dispossessed them almost entirely, I do not believe that the country was founded on principles of liberty and equality. When I figure that more than 2/3 of the people who crossed the Atlantic to come to English America between 1630 and 1780 came in chains, liberty and freedom do not compute. When I remember that nearly 50% of enslaved children born in Virginia died before their fifth birthday, and that the United States abolished slavery only after a bloody Civil War and after our former imperial overlords in Great Britain, it does not seem to me that freedom and equality are cardinal American values, whatever we say about ourselves. When I realize that in the very same speech in which the President claimed the country was founded on such glorious principles he denounced those who want to take down monuments to white supremacy and congratulated himself on the punishments he has decreed through an unconstitutional executive order for those who damage them, all I see is hypocrisy and the emptiness of his arguments. I walk away from this still convinced that the widely held notion that this country was founded on principles of liberty and equality is the biggest lie in American history.
We can hardly expect a country founded by those who enslaved millions to have done otherwise than to create a republic based on white supremacy. And when I hear so-called historians, like some of those gathered at the President’s Conference on American History, claim that the Revolution is unfinished, that we are still engaged in the work of crafting that “more perfect union,” I am left unmoved. We have been at this for close to two-and-a-half centuries, I might point out. How much longer will it take for you to admit that our commitment to liberty and equality may be highly qualified at best?
The biggest lie in American History has been challenged in all sorts of ways. Historians, like those involved in the 1619 Project, have done so. And so have so many of the young people protesting out in the street.
The response of these “historians,” for few of them actually had any training in history, is not to engage with the evidence or to present interpretations of their own rooted in primary source research. Rather, they challenge the patriotism of those who write these histories, and who question “these truths.” You cannot possibly love the country if you believe these things, they say, and your thoughts are so dangerous that they must be suppressed.
At one level, there is nothing new about any of this. History has always been political. I think of the debates chronicled in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dreamyears ago. I remember reading of the treatment received by Charles Beard after he published his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Much of what Trump’s chosen panelists said about Howard Zinn’s People’s History and the 1619 Project was said about the National History Standards twenty-five years ago. History as academic discipline versus history as civic education and indoctrination; history as a scholarly pursuit versus a set of comforting myths we tell ourselves about our past; history as a method for studying change over time versus history as a dogma, the challenging of which is dangerous and subversive: it has all been done before.
So the arguments presented at the White House Conference were all pretty familiar. I have been at this for a while, and I have followed the “History Wars” over many years with great attention. I have seen this before. The notion that historians are unpatriotic, that they will destroy their students’ love of country, and that they are teaching kids to be ashamed of their nation’s past, has been repeated many, many times. But what strikes me as new, this time, is the stridency with which the President and the speakers at this conference cast their opponents not merely as historians with whom they disagree about the past but as enemies of the state. They advance a coward’s ideological purity that casts historians as dangerous subversives. The President likened them to child abusers, aligned with leftists, anarchists, and socialists. Oh, they are so frightened. And they will strike those who frighten them. This long ago ceased to be funny, and is one more reminder of how much is at stake in the coming election.
Last night officials at the Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute executed Lezmond Mitchell for a brutal crime committed half his lifetime ago. The 38-year-old was the only Native American on federal death row, and the fourth person killed by the government since the Trump Administration resumed executions after a hiatus of nearly two decades.
Mitchell was convicted of a truly horrifying double homicide. In 2001, according to the New York Times, Mitchell and three others “plotted to carjack a vehicle to use in an armed robbery. Mr. Mitchell and Johnny Orsinger, his 16-year-old accomplice, killed Alyce Slim and her granddaughter, before decapitating them and disposing of the bodies in a shallow hole. Three days later, Mr. Mitchell and two others robbed a trading post on the Navajo Reservation, using Mrs. Slim’s pickup truck.”
There are problems with this case. Because both Mitchell and his victim were Navajos, the crime fell under federal jurisdiction because of the 1885 Major Crimes Act, an important piece of legislation that played a role as well in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McGirt. Mitchell was arrested and held in a tribal jail for nearly a month. Without an attorney present, FBI agents interrogated him. They brought him before the court only after he had confessed. Mitchell’s confession was never recorded and in his only recorded statement, said that he had no direct role in the slayings. The jury also learned little of Mitchell’s tragic life story: the horrors of intergenerational trauma, drug abuse, and mental illness. Only one Navajo sat on the jury.
Now here is where things get complicated. As the New York Times put it, “the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 allowed tribes to opt in to the death penalty, and nearly all—including the Navajo Nation—have opted out. But Mr. Mitchell was convicted of a federal crime to which the tribal option did not apply, ‘carjacking resulting in death.’” The federal prosecutors understood that Mitchell’s accomplice was the primary assailant, but he was 16, and ineligible for capital punishment. Mitchell, just twenty, took the bulk of the blame and faced execution if convicted. Had he been tried for murder, he could not have been executed; the carjacking charge was a federal government workaround by a Justice Department that wanted to prosecute a capital crime. Navajo officials repeatedly called upon the government to commute Mitchell’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, as the government had done in twenty other murder cases.
Lezmond Mitchell is dead. As Carl Slater, a delegate to the Navajo Nation Council put it in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, “this case remains the only time in the history of the modern death penalty that the federal government has sought capital punishment over tribal objection for a crime committed on tribal land.” This judicial murder was a violation of the government’s promises to Native peoples under the Federal Death Penalty Act. It was, as Slater pointed out, a “grave injustice.” It is also proof that the federal government is a large and mighty beast, and that steps forward like the decision in McGirt are nearly always followed by steps backward.
The Major Crimes Act of 1885 amounted to the imposition of colonial control over native nations. When the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality a year later, it acknowledged that the Constitution contained no language granting to the United States the power to prosecute crimes between Indians committed on the lands of a Native nation. As a result, it justified this action on the basis of federal strength and the relative weakness of Native peoples. Echoing the language of John Marshall’s decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Court held that “these Indian tribes are the wards of the nation.
These Indian tribes are wards of the nation. They are communities dependent on the United States. Dependent largely for their daily food. Dependent for their political rights. They owe no allegiance to the States, and receive from them no protection. Because of local ill feeling, the people of the States where they are found are often their deadliest enemies. From their very weakness and helplessness, so largely due t the course of dealing of the Federal Government with them and the treaties in which it has been promised, there arises the duty of protection, and with it the power.
The 1994 act tempered federal power over Native nations when it came to the imposition of penalties for Major Crimes. It accorded Native nations the power to determine who would face capital punishment for crimes committed on Indian reservations. It was a pledge that tribes, in this very constrained circumstance, could choose to follow their own values. In Lezond Mitchell’s case, the Federal Government turned its back on that promise.
The list of the Republican National Committee’s resolutions and the bullet-point list of goals the Trump Administration has set for its second term show that the Republican Party is as obsessed with the teaching of American history as at any time since Rush Limbaugh began decrying the National History Standards back during Clinton’s first term. It is more racist now than it was then.
Limbaugh had read Lynne Cheney’s infamous piece in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the Standards, in which she had argued that the National Center for History in the Schools’ effort to create a guidebook for teaching American history was “politically correct.” It left out the Founding Fathers, she claimed falsely, and it celebrated the stories of minorities and women and would leave students with a cynical and pessimistic view of their Nation’s history.
Acting on this cue, Limbaugh took an American history textbook on his show (Yes! He had a television show!) and proceeded to tear the pages out of the book to demonstrate the sort of censorship “liberals” were imposing on American children. It was brainwashing, he charged, and it was dangerous.
These sorts of reactions to the teaching of history are commonplace. Teaching history is always political. There has always existed a tension between history as civic education (the production of patriotic and law-abiding citizens) and history as academic discipline (the critical study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures).
Now the target is not the National History Standards but the 1619 Project, and all it represents to the fever-dream imagination of the Republican Right. You can see this reaction in the efforts of Republican Senator (and 2024 GOP Presidential candidate) Tom Cotton, who late in July introduced his “Saving American History Act of 2020.” In it, he proposed “that the true date of America’s founding is July 4, 1776, the day the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress,” and that “the self-evident truths set forth by that Declaration are the fundamental principles upon which America was founded.”
Many Americans who know little of their nation’s history would have agreed with Cotton. But Cotton was worried nonetheless. He warned that “an activist movement is now gaining momentum to deny or obfuscate this history by claiming that America was not founded on the ideals of the Declaration but rather on slavery and oppression.” In the aftermath of the murder of an African-American man by four Minneapolis police officers, protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement had agitated successfully for the removal of monuments to Confederate “heroes” and other racists, slaveowners, and secessionists. Earlier Cotton had called for the use of American military forces to violently remove these almost entirely non-violent protesters, a suggestion the President evidently liked.
But now Cotton was taking aim at the 1619 Project. It had appeared in the New York Times a year before he introduced his legislation. Cotton’s resolution required that no federal funding be provided to public schools that used or taught any of the 1619 Project materials. Cotton asserted that the 1619 Project was a “racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the principles upon which it was founded.” It must be suppressed. It must never be taught to children.
So we should not be surprised that the Republican National Committee last month waded into the controversy by passing a resolution “to conserve history and combat prejudice—Christopher Columbus.” The Genoese explorer was, the resolution read, “a courageous, determined, faithful man of vision, whose voyages to the Americas linked two continents…and ultimately laid the foundations for the birth of the United States of America.” Columbus’s voyage, part of “the expansion of Western Civilization, and the establishment of the United States, has led to an ever-improving free and equal society benefitting all Americans.” Therefore, the RNC resolved to encourage “public educational institutions to celebrate Columbus’s unparalleled contributions to human connectedness; his role in the creation of America, and his importance as a figurehead for Americans facing anti-Italian and anti-Catholic prejudice.”
The Republican National Committee also approved a resolution denouncing the “threats to the First Amendment,” which it believed had escalated “in the wake of the Chinese Coronavirus outbreak.” Among these threats was that “Freedom of Speech” was “trampled on daily with the notion of political correctness; the plan to eliminate ‘hate speech’; and the promotion of a ‘cancel culture,’ which has grown into an erasing of history, encouraging lawlessness, and violating the free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.”
That probably sounds a bit over the top in comparison with the relatively sparse language of President Trump’s fifty-point list of goals for his second term. One of these is to “teach American Exceptionalism.”
But what that means is quite simple. The President may be a clown, but he is still dangerous.
If you argue, as nearly every historian does, that enslavement was central to the growth and development of the United States, that the Constitution as an instrument of governance protected the institution of slavery and hard-wired it for control by slavers, you are anathema to today’s Republican Party. If you assert that this country could not have developed in the way that it did without a systematic program of Native American dispossession, your loyalty is suspect. If anyone has ever told you that what you have written or said is “politically correct,” what they are really trying to do is dismiss your hard work without doing the heavy lifting required to counter the evidence upon which you built it.
Republicans have committed themselves in 2020 to writing into textbooks and curricula the biggest lie in American history, a self-serving and propagandistic depiction of the nation’s history that either out of ignorance or ideology denies the role of slavery and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in its founding.
This entire administration, for the past four years, has shown its incapacity for telling the truth. Lie after lie, it is exhausting. Its brazen corruption, its monumental incompetence—I feel like it grinds me down at times. And now, they want to teach and preach that Columbus was brave and pure, that slavery was an aberrant flaw rather than the absolute foundation, and that this country was founded on principles of liberty and equality it has never managed to live up to. I write these words in the aftermath of yet another police shooting, this time in Kenosha, where a white officer fired seven shots at point-blank range into the back of a young African-American man in front of his three children. Racism lies at the heart of this republic’s story. You cannot deny that. It lies at the core of the reasons why Donald Trump became president in the first place. And in its diseased interpretations of the American past, it lies so very close to the heart of today’s Republican Party.
This past Thursday, the Onondaga Nation issued a statement on the notorious statue of Christopher Columbus located in Columbus Circle in downtown Syracuse. They did so at the invitation of a Syracuse Inter-Faith Commission, and as a contribution to the 23-member panel that will issue recommendations to the mayor about what to do by the end of the summer. The Onondaga Nation’s statement is worth your time and attention.
The Nation expressed their hope that “through diplomacy, discussion, and open minds, these discussions will lead to a positive solution for the future of Syracuse with inclusion for all people to live in peace as neighbors and brothers.” They looked forward to “an outcome that will encourage peace, understanding, and the united brotherhood exemplifying the foundation of cooperation, peace, and equality for the generations yet to come.” They reminded Syracusans that the city stood in the heart of what was once their homeland, the site of the central council fire of the Haudenosaunee, and that the Onondaga Nation “carries a great responsibility in the continued existence of our sovereign government.” The Nation’s “traditional teachings are morally dignified and highly principled in peace and democracy and our way of life means being ever thankful for the many gifts of our mother earth. We are,” the statement reads, “people culturally mandated to respectfully live as caretakers of Mother Earth and as equals to all beings within the natural realm.” Anyone who knows anything about the history of Syracuse knows that the City and its people have seldom lived up to these ideals.
The statement struck a conciliatory and diplomatic tone in addressing the City’s Italian-American community, which has raised money to keep the Columbus statue right where it is.
We fully understand the wishes of the Italian American community to honor their heritage, but it is burdensome for the people of Onondaga to see Christopher Columbus memorialized with a statue. Within our lands and hearts, finding equality and peace is difficult knowing the hardships our ancestors endured as a consequence of his campaign. Our own monuments, beautiful lakes, streams, rivers, and the earth itself, has suffered greatly as a direct result principle of the Doctrine of Discovery to which Columbus used to claim the lands in the name of the Spanish crown.
The power of the pen favors the writers of history. In truth, what was “discovered” on this continent we know as Turtle Island were well established independent nations of indigenous peoples. People living within their respected ways of life in accordance with their individual cultures. As indigenous people, we are taught of the exploits of Columbus while our own history was being unheard, misunderstood, and often erased.
The Onondagas thought it best that the statue be removed. The space it occupies might be repurposed to better ends.
At this crucial time in our joint history with the need for unity and compassion at hand, we ask ourselves is honoring the heritage of the Columbus righteous and just? Should we continue to ignore all the different peoples who suffered enumerable atrocities? We think not. We know we are not responsible for the transgressions of our ancestors, but it is never the wrong time to do the right thing. The Onondaga Nation does not wish anyone’s culture or heritage to be affronted in the manner ours have suffered; but to find a way to allow the space currently occupied by the Columbus statue to be reinvented and reenergized into a symbol of unity for all.
The statement concludes with a call to find a good mind, to come together and find a consensus and a solution “in which all the peoples who call Syracuse home may find a way to continue to honor each other’s heritage and cultures.”
There is a lot going on in this document. Columbus appears in it as both myth and symbol, as something more than a historical figure. I have written about this “mythical Columbus,” and the functions these myths serve, on this blog in the past. For Italian-Americans Columbus serves as a symbol of freedom and a hero whose experience shows that Italians are important in American history, and that Italians were present at the very creation of the American Nation. In reality, we know that Columbus was an aggressive slaver who never set foot in North America. For Native peoples, Columbus is made to stand in for all the burdens suffered by Indigenous peoples. To the Onondagas’ charge that Columbus was responsible for “the hardships our ancestors endured as a consequence of his campaign,” a historian might argue that Columbus never came close to the Longhouse. He did nothing to you, and neither to “the lakes, streams, rivers, and to the earth himself.” Those who followed him did loads of damage, but that is a longer and more complicated story. “The Doctrine of Discovery,” which according to the Onondaga Nation Statement “Columbus used to claim the lands in the name of the Spanish Crown,” was as much a justification for colonization drawn up centuries later than it was license for empire: Indigenous peoples paid no attention to papal bulls and colonial charters, and the European “Ceremonies of Possession,” as historian Patrica Seed called them, were performed for other Europeans, not native peoples. The work of colonization was brutal and violent, but the process in North America especially was a remarkably unintellectual process. The Doctrine of Discovery mattered little on the ground in the Americas, where Native peoples retained the power to ignore it. Indeed one can find many instances of Haudenosaunee orators dressing down Europeans and their pretentious claims to discovery and conquest.
But there is a problem with these arguments. One of the things that has struck me as I have worked on a history of the Onondaga Nation is the Nation’s willingness and ability to speak for Indigenous America writ large, and to have Native North America listen. The Onondagas always have carried more influence than their relatively small numbers would lead one to believe. And for the Onondagas and their allies, the problem with the Columbus statue in Syracuse is precisely the things he has come to symbolize for all Indigenous peoples: the well-documented and undeniable brutality of European colonization, and a campaign erasure, violence, and exploitation that has lasted centuries, from 1492 to the present. With its feet on the heads of Indigenous peoples with Plains Indian Headdresses, and with its friezes depicting Columbus as both hero and conqueror, the statue is a grotesque and graphic celebration of five hundred years’ of genocide, and an white-washing of the viciousness of the Columbian Encounter in the Caribbean.
The Onondagas would like to see the statue removed. They are not alone in this. But they spoke to the people of Syracuse as neighbors. They acknowledged the position of the city’s Italian-American community. But in terms similar to what has been done with the Skä۰noñh Great Law of Peace Center, which repurposed an old living-history museum representing the Jesuits called Ste. Marie Among the Iroquois, the Onondagas spoke of working together in a unified manner to give new meaning to the space occupied by the Columbus statue, to allow it to “be reinvented and reenergized into a symbol of unity for all.”
When the Onondagas filed their “land rights action” more than fifteen years ago, they stated their wish to “bring about a healing between themselves and all others who live in this region that has been the homeland of the Onondaga Nation since the dawn of time.” At a time when groups like Upstate Citizens for Equality were ginning up white peoples’ fears of being dispossessed by Native Americans in Cayuga and Oneida territory, the Nation made clear that it wanted justice and an acknowledgment of their rights to the lands taken in violation of United States law, but that “we will not displace any of our neighbors—the Onondaga know all too well the pain of being forced to leave our homes and do not wish that on anyone.”
There is a long history informing the Onondaga Nation statement. In its demonstration of the Nation’s leaders’ diplomatic skill, and the tactfulness with which the Nation’s leaders assert their will, and in its call for cooperatively defining and sharing space, it echoes themes that run throughout the long history of the Onondaga Nation, and especially in its relations to the non-Indigenous community of what has become over time Central New York. In the relationship between Syracuse and the Onondagas over many, many years, the Onondagas have often been been better neighbors to the City than the City has been to them. The City has expressed a willingness to listen, but acting on what it hears might be difficult. There are many who want the statue preserved. Let’s hope that the Mayor’s commission approaches its work with a good mind, and a desire to be good neighbors to the Onondaga Nation.
Jesse Goldberg is a graduate of the institution where I teach, SUNY-Geneseo. Though I never taught him, I have followed his career on Twitter largely because he was spoken of so highly by a number of my colleagues. I have followed closely as well the recent controversy surrounding some of Dr. Goldberg’s tweets and the craven response of Auburn University, where he recently signed a one-year contract to teach.
Dr. Goldberg wrote on Twitter, “F*ck every single cop. Every single one.” He wrote that “the only ethical choice for any cop at this point is to refuse to do their job and quit. The police do not protect people. They protect capital. They are instruments of violence on behalf of capital.”
Strong words, indeed, but let’s not be too precious about this. You have heard this rhetoric during the back-and-forths on cable news, and you have seen “FTP” and “ACAB” and more written on walls on TV and quite likely in your hometown. Nonetheless, the right-wing reaction was predictable. The College Fix and similar sites went nuts. Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks called for Dr. Goldberg’s firing. Auburn’s administration clutched their collective pearls, shrieked “Oh My God!” and promised to weigh their available options in the face of such objectionable speech.
I have been in Dr. Goldberg’s shoes, though when I had this experience the internet was in its infancy, social media did not exist, and Montana, where I taught, was something of a closed circuit which by its nature contained the reach of the controversy. People on cell phones across the world could not read about what I had said and contact me immediately. Dr. Goldberg was not so lucky. He had it a million times worse.
I began teaching in Montana in the fall of 1994, right out of graduate school. That December, the National Center for History in the Schools published the National History Standards. I learned about them after stumbling across Lynne Cheney’s famous editorial in the Wall Street Journal. I saw the debate on CNN’s “Firing Line,” and thought I would read them for myself. Most of my students aspired to be teachers, and it struck me as the responsible thing to do.
I found nothing to object to in the Standards, and I said so in an editorial that appeared in the Billings Gazette. I argued the criticisms of the Standards came from those who objected to students learning about the history of BIPOC, Women, and non-elite Americans. I asserted that those who objected to the Standards did not argue in good faith.
I liked writing for the newspaper. More people would read one of my opinion pieces than any book I might write, it seemed, so a couple of weeks after the Oklahoma City Bombing, I wrote another one. There was at the time a lot of attention paid to Right-Wing militia groups like those to which Timothy McVeigh belonged. I wrote that these groups certainly were a threat, but I asked readers to consider that “the threat these marginalized groups pose may…pale in comparison when weighed against the recent explosions of discriminatory legislation and racially charged public discourse” taking place in Congress and in state halls across the country.
Both of these pieces pissed off a lot of people. I got mail at my home address, calling names and making threats. Menacing phone calls. It was unnerving.
I taught at the time in a deeply dysfunctional department. There was the angry historian of Revolutionary France, a Harvard Ph.D, who seethed with resentment. He had been denied tenure at the University of Rochester and, I believe, Case Western, and felt he deserved better than an open-admissions college in eastern Montana. Perhaps if he had written more and spent less time hanging around in the dorm lobbies, his career might have been different. Then there was the Missouri-Synod Lutheran Pastor, who said that being a history professor was the “best part time job in the world.” He reminded me of that “Joe Isuzu” guy from the old TV commercials. The department chair was an Iraqi Seventh-Day Adventist who believed, firmly, that African Americans and Native Americans came to Billings only because it was easier to commit crimes in the city than it was wherever they came from. And there was a self-proclaimed expert on lynching, who told me that he thought the Willy Horton advertisement was a perfectly reasonable attack on Michael Dukakis. When I asked him why Lee Atwater, the ad’s creator, apologized for it on his deathbed, I received no answer. Probably should not have asked that question.
Two of these guys—the historians of Revolutionary France and the expert on lynching—took my articles personally. They said that in my editorials I had, in effect, called them racists. I hadn’t, but perceptions, you know? At MSU-B, even though I was fortunate to be on the tenure track, my contract was renewed each year. And every year, the Missouri-Synod pastor and the department chair voted to keep me. Every year, the student representative on the committee voted to keep me. And the other two voted to fire me. Each of the four years I was there.
I am close to my dissertation director. We still talk regularly. I asked him for advice. He wrote me a letter and said that I should remember that for the Old School, new professors should be like the children of long ago: seen and not heard. I asked my dad for advice. He said “don’t get in a pissing contest with these guys.” He may have used some word other than “guys,” but I cannot remember. I was never happy in Billings, and the only thing that solved the problem was to leave. After I signed my book contract, I was hired in New York, and I never looked back.
I hear commentary all the time from people on the right denouncing what they call “cancel culture.” Their laments were embodied in the resolution recently announced by 2024 GOP Presidential Candidate Tom Cotton and two of his colleagues that calls for Congress to protect the “First Amendment rights of students at public universities from unconstitutional speech codes and so-called free speech zones.”
I am willing to concede that there are in my field closed-minded and dogmatic people. That is true for any field. Those who challenge certain orthodoxies might expect to be engaged in angry and urgent debate. Perhaps they will be “unfriended” on Facebook or no longer followed on Twitter. Perhaps one of their critics will show their anger as “Reader No. 2” when they submit their work for publication. THERE IS NOTHING NEW ABOUT THIS. CHALLENGING ORTHODOXIES ALWAYS PRODUCES A REACTION. It comes with the territory and, as my dad used to say in another line I grew up with, “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
What Dr. Goldberg faced is significantly different. Dr. Goldberg received death threats, and threats of violence. Social media makes it easier for those so inclined to spread terror, and no country makes it so easy for those who hate to do evil.
I have had profound disagreements with colleagues in my field. If you are a professor, it is likely that you have, too. No one in academia has ever threatened to kill me or hurt my children. Nobody at an academic conference has listened to what I said, or read what I wrote, and tried to get me fired. Write an opinion piece on the history of the 2nd Amendment, or pointing out that New York State is built on stolen indigenous land, however, and all hell breaks loose. Repeat the language coursing through American streets in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, and your life and career are in danger. Alabama’s Mo Brooks called for the firing of Dr. Goldberg. This from a representative who has lost no opportunity to debase himself for a President who boasts of his “pussy grabbing,” tells American-born congressional representatives to go back to where they came from, and dismisses those parts of the world where he does not own golf resorts as “Shithole countries.” You want to talk about objectionable and destructive speech? Please. Spare me.
Academia is in dire straits right now. College budgets are broken. Some schools, I am told, might go under. Others are laying off faculty and staff. Graduate programs, meanwhile, are filled with immensely talented young scholars. Many of those who hope to pursue careers in academia will never get that chance. Tenure-track jobs are few and far between. The academic job market has long been horrible, but now it is even worse.
Maybe you dislike what Dr. Goldberg wrote on his Twitter account. Maybe you found it intemperate, impetuous, rash, and unwise. Maybe you find it disturbing, provocative, or objectionable. You are entitled to all those feelings. I do not know what baggage you carry with you that causes you to find Dr. Goldberg so threatening that you need to threaten his already tenuous career. But here’s the thing. You have no right not to be offended by things people say. As long as those words do not threaten violence, than hearing them is part of the price you pay for living in a free society. If you disagree, fine, enter into a debate. Argue. Pose your alternative. And steel yourself to face some criticism. But that sort of exchange requires a degree of intellectual courage that is getting harder and harder to find every day, especially on the Right.
Dr. Goldberg survived this. Auburn, seeking perhaps the path of least resistance, said that he would not teach, but that he would hold a research position this year. In support of Tom Cotton’s resolution, Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler said that the proposed legislation will “ensure students on college campuses will be able to express their beliefs without the fear on censorship or retribution.” For students, this resolution is a solution in need of a problem. The senators are worried about leftists silencing students. They are chasing phantoms, while ignoring the very real assaults on freedom-of-thought launched by the political right. Whether we like or dislike what Dr. Goldberg wrote, we all should be in agreement that he has the right to say it.
I try to read things that have nothing to do with my research at least once in a while. I recently finished Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. The book was not at all what I expected, and in her exploration of art I found in Laing’s words insights useful to my own work as a scholar and a teacher, but also as a parent and a friend in this endless pandemic spring that has extended into summer.
There are so many things art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have the capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.
If I sound adamant it is because I am speaking from personal experience. When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.
There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings–depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage–are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.
I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it is about two things: learning to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.
Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.
Stay safe, friends, and look out for each other. We live world that is dangerous in part because of choices our fellow citizens have made. This has been a difficult five months, and as I read the paper and follow news from home in California, I fear it is not going to get any better any time soon. Control what you can control.
Last week I published an essay in the Livingston County News about the threats posed to the Seneca town of Conawaugus by a proposed solar development project planned by a company called Horseshoe Solar. Based on my visit to the site, it looks like construction is already under way, and it is being done without the consent of the Seneca Nation of Indians or the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, both of which have claims to the lands in question. Unfortunately, I inadvertently submitted an early version of the essay. That meant the final version, which was informed by the advice of Jare Cardinal, formerly of the Seneca National Museum, did not make it to the paper. I have posted the intended version here:
Livingston County has a deep history, going back many centuries before the first white soldiers, speculators, and settlers cast covetous eyes on the Genesee Valley. It is the homeland of the Seneca Indians. If Horseshoe Solar has its way, some of that important local history will be erased, because the corporation wants to build a vast solar energy facility on the site of the Seneca town of Canawaugus, near today’s Avon.
Horseshoe Solar commissioned a study of the proposed project by Panamerican Consultants, a research firm with an office in Buffalo. The study’s conclusion diminishes Seneca attachment to the region and the historical reality that the site of Canawaugus has a history going back farther than that of London in England. Their report relies on published sources and borrows too uncritically the ethnocentric language of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeology. The report’s authors spoke to no Seneca people, nor did they do any research in the archives. Scattered across the proposed construction site, they say, are “camps,” and “multi-use sites.”
Seneca people were not confined to their homes or “camps.” There was more to their existence than village sites and burial grounds. If you look at the archival record, you will see that the “Chenussio Senecas,” which included those of Canawaugus, were major players in the history of three American empires: France, Great Britain, and the United States. The Genesee Valley flowed through the heart of Seneca culture for centuries. They made use of the the valley to hunt and fish and grow crops. This was a world of towns and villages, of diplomacy and warfare, peace and violence and trade and commerce. Canawaugus was the birthplace of two important leaders in Iroquois history, Cornplanter and his half-brother the prophet Handsome Lake, but even more, was home to many Senecas, both men and women, who had a major impact on Haudenosaunee history well into the 1800s.
The Senecas “sold” their Genesee Valley lands in an 1826 “treaty” that even Horseshoe Solar’s historians concede was “arguably fraudulent.” Had they bothered to look at the primary sources, they would see easily that there is little doubt at all about the despicable practices deployed by the American treaty commissioner. His malfeasance is one reason why the Senate failed to ratify the agreement and why, after a lengthy investigation, President John Quincy Adams never resubmitted it to the Senate. It was easy in this case to smell the very large rat.
Federal law requires all land transactions to be ratified by a 2/3 vote of the United States senate. That has been the case since Congress enacted the first Trade and Intercourse Act in 1790. Because the 1826 agreement never received that ratification, the Senecas justifiably view the site of Canawaugus as unceded reservation land, protected by earlier treaties. It is native ground, to which they still assert a powerful claim. And like Standing Rock, it is a site of significance to native peoples offered up for corporate energy development. This should matter to us all.
New York could not have emerged as the Empire State without a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession. Canawaugus is one of the sites where this sordid tale of despoliation and deception played out. It is a vital part of this county’s history of violence, exploitation and appropriation. It would be a true tragedy to destroy this site in such a cavalier manner.
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
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22005719/AP_20197105978754.jpg)
