The wrong history
In school the history of the women’s movement wasn’t spoken about, the only thing that I heard about was suffrage, but I didn’t understand what women had to go through to get the right to vote. History was never something that I paid attention to in school, because it was never taught in a way that I could understand. So many things didn’t fit, so many people were left out and I learned early on that the history I was going to be taught was going to leave a lot of people and events out, that stories were going to be changed to fit patriotism and American pride and that the books that I would flip through would show white faces and any people of color, of different class, sex, orientation, borders, language, and so on would be silenced. What I needed to know about everyone in this world wasn’t available to me until I was ready to think and learn for myself.
The first time that this came about was in first grade. It was soon to be Thanksgiving and Christopher Columbus was being admired, everyone wanted to dress up and cut out colored paper and make Indians and Pilgrims to celebrate the wonderful union and founding of America. We were all told to the carpet and the teacher told us to sit “Indian style” and while everyone else sat down I questioned her on why she had called it Indian style. She told me that Indians sit like “that” and that we weren’t focusing on them right now. I told her that if I was going to sit anything it would either be cross-legged or Native American style. She told me to be quiet and to sit down and listen to the book we were reading on Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the “New World”. I again brought up the fact that he didn’t discover anything, but that we white people came and stole the land from the American Indians and put them into reservations. She told me to go sit out in the hall until I was ready to come back in and participate appropriately. Scolded for the “wrong” history early on I didn’t listen much to the history I was taught in school. Instead I heard stories from my family members who were around during the times of history that I missed out on. What my parents were doing during the Vietnam war and what happened when the American Indian Movement was born and American Indians came into Custer South Dakota and threw a bomb into the court house where my grandfather was inside with the other white people of the town trying to figure out what to do because an “Indian” had been killed in a bar and the “Indians” were mad.
So why is it that I never learned about the American Indian Movement, the women’s movement, or about the Zapatista’s or about the white privileged men who wrote the books that I would read well into the end of high school? Why is it that the children that I was educated with somewhere inside still think that Columbus discovered America or that women were content being silenced? I’m not sure why history was made to speak clearly to me in my color, my language, my side of the border, my class, and all of my other privileges, but I know that there is a history that needs to be uncovered and it needs to be taught to those who still think that Columbus discovered America and that women belong in kitchens and men belong in workhouses.