A manifesto of ignorance

Meticulously organizing my precious time each week in the mornings to get some work done before spending quality time with my family, batendo papo with friends, or enjoying a good book, you would think that e-mail newsletters were the last thing to subscribe to. Alas, given the propensity to have first-hand information on the latest publications, I tolerate the occasional bookstore-newsletter. Only, it got me all riled up recently, recommending among the bestselling non-fiction works Liberty and Tyranny by Mark R. Levin.
‘Oh well,’ you might say, ‘just another partisan-inspired manifesto’, and you sure are right about that. His diatribe against liberal policies was almost fun to read for revealing the preconceptions and bias of his conservative argumentation. However, what drew my ire was the fact that the book presents a cacophony of oh so bigot, colonial, imperialist deliberations. The reader is impressed upon with the thought that America, prior to founding, was settled by people mostly from Europe – and that pertains to the matter of Native America so benevolently obnubilated in Levin’s tirade. For all that he is so concerned about America’s civil society, he disregards his own standards and duty as an individual of that society, to “respect the unalienable rights of others and the values, customs, and traditions, tried and tested over time and passed from one generation to the next, that establish society’s cultural identity.” (3) Of course, he is only talking about settler-colonial identity and European values in this context.
‘Ah, but that was to be expected from such a writer’, is what you interject, and I agree. But when I read such a testimony of essentialist doctrine, calling for an end to “multiculturalism, diversity, and bilingualism”, I do think it is time to unsubscribe from those convenient email newsletters …

Oh no, not again (what they call) ‘Columbus Day’ ...

Squeezing into the tight schedule of a working Mom a quick stop at USPS to get a quite urgent package on its way to Europe – in between picking up my youngest and hastening to his swimming lessons – I was quite annoyed when standing in front of closed doors: Columbus Day!

Not that I don’t grudge them their day off, but that was just the last straw – I could take no more of this ill-named to say the least, National Holiday that at its very core is aimed at silencing the indigenous voice: With my 2^nd grader coming home from school with a self-drawn picture of Columbus – that he intended to pin to his wall to his Mom’s horror – and my Kindergartener asking questions whether Indians still ‘lived in teepees’, I knew it was time to take drastic action. So, I grabbed my copy of Rethinking Columbus, and read to them Tina Thomas’ “The Untold Story”. Oh for sure, it was a harsh fall for them to the bottom of reality (‘Columbus was just SO MEAN’) but I got the reaction that I wanted: I had them thinking of the underlying ambitions (gold, gold, and gold) as well as the consequences (oppression, murder, enslavement) of that oh so brave venture-voyage, and induced them to take the perspective of the people WHO WERE THERE BEFORE, in the so-called ‘New’ World.

I know I will have succeeded when they don’t put up with the glorifying, cliché-prone version of Columbus Day in school, and start thinking and talking in class about the Other voices, peoples, that still today, continue to be silenced.

Happy Native American Day!

Sources:

Tina Thomas, 1998. “The Untold Story”. Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, eds. Bill Bigelow & Bob Peterson. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.