Of course, the Miwok are STILL THERE, and surely have done and are continuing to do far more than just process acorns, but you'd never have guessed it from anything our teachers told us!
Seriously!
It is especially shocking compared to how much more effort was made to teach us about the past and present of other ethnic groups in California. And outside California! (Not that those efforts were without their own problems, but when it came to Native people, they seriously didn't even try.)
Yeah. Thinking about it, I think part of what was weird about the stuff I was taught in school (and maybe this has something to do with my age -- this would've been in the eighties and early nineties) is that they really seemed to focus heavily on "life sucked for group x for this reason," and never to explore "and here's what's going on TODAY."
I once thought that it was just a reflection of either white guilt over how badly we've treated, y'know, pretty much everyone we've ever met, or the idea that "history" means only "stuff that happened before you were born." I think now, though, that it's actually probably a combination of the two -- "yeah, we treated people badly, but these days... ooooh, lalalalala, look, a DUCK!" I think my teachers, the history-book writers, and the school officials really just couldn't cope with having to tell children "we have historically oppressed anyone who wasn't EXACTLY like us, and hey, look how far we haven't come!"
Pretty early on in the contact period, Abenaki people realized that Europeans had certain ideas of how "Indians" dressed and behaved, and some of them played into that, dressing as Plains Indians to promote their selling of crafts and souvenirs.
Huh. I can see that. I wonder if there wasn't also a little bit of the notion that if everyone dressed like Plains Indians, their actual traditions might be a little more hidden (and protected?) from European meddling? I dunno, but I can see how that might happen.
Of course this doesn't suggest that it's somehow their fault, but rather that the problem has deep roots and we don't seem to have learned a lot since hundreds of years back.
Yes. It's amazing to me how much of the European mindset seems to involve not seeing what's actually in front of us but instead deciding what SHOULD be in front of us, and determinedly seeing THAT. I mean, obviously, there are times when that kind of obliviousness serves a purpose, even if that purpose is awful, but it's so pervasive that it shows up even when it directly hinders what we're trying to do (I think, for example, of all the time we spend in beginning art classes just learning to see what things ACTUALLY look like, instead of what we THINK they should look like, even when we can clearly see that the results of drawing from our warped conceptions of things produces stuff that looks totally alien).
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-11-07 06:24 pm (UTC)Seriously!
It is especially shocking compared to how much more effort was made to teach us about the past and present of other ethnic groups in California. And outside California! (Not that those efforts were without their own problems, but when it came to Native people, they seriously didn't even try.)
Yeah. Thinking about it, I think part of what was weird about the stuff I was taught in school (and maybe this has something to do with my age -- this would've been in the eighties and early nineties) is that they really seemed to focus heavily on "life sucked for group x for this reason," and never to explore "and here's what's going on TODAY."
I once thought that it was just a reflection of either white guilt over how badly we've treated, y'know, pretty much everyone we've ever met, or the idea that "history" means only "stuff that happened before you were born." I think now, though, that it's actually probably a combination of the two -- "yeah, we treated people badly, but these days... ooooh, lalalalala, look, a DUCK!" I think my teachers, the history-book writers, and the school officials really just couldn't cope with having to tell children "we have historically oppressed anyone who wasn't EXACTLY like us, and hey, look how far we haven't come!"
Pretty early on in the contact period, Abenaki people realized that Europeans had certain ideas of how "Indians" dressed and behaved, and some of them played into that, dressing as Plains Indians to promote their selling of crafts and souvenirs.
Huh. I can see that. I wonder if there wasn't also a little bit of the notion that if everyone dressed like Plains Indians, their actual traditions might be a little more hidden (and protected?) from European meddling? I dunno, but I can see how that might happen.
Of course this doesn't suggest that it's somehow their fault, but rather that the problem has deep roots and we don't seem to have learned a lot since hundreds of years back.
Yes. It's amazing to me how much of the European mindset seems to involve not seeing what's actually in front of us but instead deciding what SHOULD be in front of us, and determinedly seeing THAT. I mean, obviously, there are times when that kind of obliviousness serves a purpose, even if that purpose is awful, but it's so pervasive that it shows up even when it directly hinders what we're trying to do (I think, for example, of all the time we spend in beginning art classes just learning to see what things ACTUALLY look like, instead of what we THINK they should look like, even when we can clearly see that the results of drawing from our warped conceptions of things produces stuff that looks totally alien).