By Professor Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Native Sun News Today Columnist
We hardly have time these days of the
coronavirus to think of why the world needs a new green deal. It is an unfortunate time because we do need a new green deal, as it is called in climate change terms.
As we harbor what some think of as a vain hope that we can eventually rid ourselves of our current pestilence in the White House, though, we are forced tolook to the future of better times.It is hard to think of those better times when before our very astonished eyes we witness on television the murder of a black man by a white policeman. You’ve got to admit, not many of us get to see a murder take place before our very eyes. This one took nine minutes.
It is no accident that such thoughts of such crimes arise at this moment of delayed student Graduation Ceremonials.We wonder:what do our children face in their futures?For me this is not an idle question. As an American Indian writer of rather dismal political stuff and a retired teacher of a course called Federal Indian Policy, I know the stories of our history, and filled with criminal scenes.
Elizabeth
Cook-Lynn. Courtesy photo
I drove past a beautifully colorful parade of young Indian graduates from local high schools in the downtown of our city yesterday.Horns honked and people waved and young men and women smiled.
It is time.
It is time.
Time for me to say that I will not let these young people face the future without knowing the past. That is one of the reasons I continue to write though I have the dismal thought that it is long past the time that it seems to matter.
Americans of the last century should not be allowed to forget the past, for it is only when they know the striking, selfish white man’s past in this America, can we know what we have become.
Our young people deserve the truth. We should tell them that history is not something to escape. It is something to revisit and revise.
As the daughter of the Isianti Sioux, driven from Minnesota and much of western South Dakota by greedy people who have come here in the beginning mostly from Europe, we know an ugly history.
This killing of blacks by whites has been allowed because we Americans have an unhealthy devotion to the here and now with not a moment’s look in the mirror or the Indian/Black racial past. For the average American the fault lies in the idealism of a Christian theology which they call history and a way to peace.
Contact Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at ecooklynn@gmail.com
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Native Sun News Today
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