By Professor Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Native Sun News Today Columnist
We in the western world are great celebrators of our “founders” as a way to embrace our beginnings. Americans can’t resist it. Indeed, on a main avenue here in
Rapid City a Founder’s Day Park Area is a popular gathering place. It is a way of making history and providing homage to the kind of images we can endure.
Recently, an Alderwoman in a local women’s equality day discussion says she wants to broaden the Women’s message by asking the Parks and Recreation board to change the name of the FOUNDERS Park from “founders” to “ancestors,” a more inclusive handle to include a “strong native history”.
As I heard about this I was reading
An American Genocide by an Indian History Professor, Stanford University,
Dr. Benjamin Madley. It is a
study of the killing of Indians in California between 1846 and 1873 referring to that time as a period of “extermination” which Madley describes as the Federal Indian Policy accompanying the Gold Rush.
A Founder’s story? Does it remind you of other times? And places?
Elizabeth
Cook-Lynn. Courtesy photo
Some comparisons: as California school children in the 1980’s (a hundred years later) read about Ishi, the last of theYana Indians and Captain Jack and the Modoc War, students in South Dakota read about Little House on the Prairie and Wounded Knee: our own tragedies. We commemorate the good and the bad, the point being that the lessons of these tragedies are all behind us now, all is forgiven.
Indian-White History of America isn’t unique but the truth is, our history is not behind us and it is not forgiven. Even as we glorify it and remember it, it takes its place in all its beauty and ugliness right beside us no matter our reordering it to fit our times and much of it remaining in a shroud of silence.
Yet, America can’t bear to face itself. What it wants from this history is reclamation and redemption. To celebrate the historical figures and the remarkable stories of times past America wants forgiveness. We are Americans, we say. We are the Founders. And we want somehow, in some way, to celebrate our Founders. Because we are Americans.
Perhaps the reason the city council woman wants to change the name from “founders” to “ancestors” is because “founders” seems somehow offensive. She has an inkling of what the past really means. Perhaps the term is a reminder of the tremendous death toll of Native Americans in the early years and the violence of making a new nation and its aftermath.
In his book, Madley does not offer reconciliation nor does he silence those who say that a Federal Indian Policy was formed from the beginning to set in motion a campaign to exterminate the first peoples of the land. He gives much evidence in his research for that interpretation of historical record.
Many stories of that period are not reconciliation stories, this writer says. Nor are they forgiving, and he complains that they are rarely a part of our reading schedules anywhere or anytime.
Contact Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at ecooklynn@gmail.com
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