Wednesday, February 13, 2019

History is messy, and it has to be taught honestly, warts and all;

teachers who only 'teach' a version tailored to what they want people to believe are a threat.
...Smith went one step further, likening the ugly truth of history to a “mangy, snarling dog standing between you and a crowd-pleasing narrative.”

“Obviously,” Smith said, “the story should be, needs to be, that the enslaved black people and soon-to-be-exiled red people would join forces and defeat their oppressor.” But such was not the case—far from it. “The Five Civilized Tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.”

In other words, the truth is about as far a cry from a “crowd-pleasing narrative” as you could possibly get. “Do you want to hear that?” Smith asked the audience. “I don’t think so. Nobody does.” And yet, Smith is firm in his belief that it is a museum’s duty to embrace and elucidate ambiguity, not sweep it under the rug in the pursuit of some cleaner fiction.

Far too many people prefer the cleaner fiction to the facts.  And they don't care what damage said fiction does.

1 comment:

markm said...

Where racism comes in with respect to the Cherokee is that, unlike the many "wild Indian tribes", the Cherokee adopted the ways of their white neighbors. They parceled out the tribal land to private ownership. They farmed, with and without slaves, including cash crops as well as their own food, and attempted to participate in the US economy. They became "white" in everything but color. And yet the whites ultimately stole their farms and plantations, and drove them beyond the frontier.