Now What, My Friend?

On living in the landscape of the forgotten

“Now what, my friend?” she asks as we finish our walk. That was last Monday when the temperature was 49 degrees and the farm fields we passed were green and bare of snow and even the cows in the old barn beside the road seemed at once pleased and bemused at the warm, suddenly blue-skied spring-like day. “Now that you’ve read all this history about slavery and settler colonialism, where do you go from here? And how do you reconcile all this with your understanding of the climate crisis?”

These questions follow me all week.

I read headlines and cry.  Ron DeSantis bans an AP class on African-American history because it “lacks educational value and is contrary to Florida law.”  The Supreme court “seems ready to toss out affirmative action.”  

I read more history.  Laws were made that children born to black women were born enslaved and could be sold, which meant white people could profit from Black women’s wombs.

In The 1619 Project I read this:

At the time of the Civil War, the value of the enslaved human beings held as property added up to more than all of this nation’s railroads and factories combined.  And yet, they owned nothing and were owed nothing from all that had been built from their toil.

In Not a Nation of Immigrants, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, I find this:

As Native nations resisted encroachment starting with the first English settlement in 1607, the traumatized settlers hardened the mythology of providential destiny, fueling indiscriminate carnage, which was even more hideous in the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, escalating exponentially until total conquest was complete in 1900.

Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash

I feel the presence of a vast landscape of the erased and the forgotten, the cut-off, upon which this nation, this state, this place on the edge of the (finally) snow covered forest was born.  I have lived so long in this place of the forgotten, wandered its airy rooms, smiled at my innocent face in the mirror, gazed out its curtained, viewless windows. I feel stunned, cheated, deceived. Sad.

I wonder at my own culpability in this forgetting.  I ask everyone I see this week, even people much younger than I in their thirties and forties, “Did you learn about the extent to which we dehumanized and murdered Native Americans to have the land for ourselves?  Did anyone around you question Manifest Destiny? Did you learn about the connection between the birth of capitalism and sugar and chattel slavery?” Only one person, a man not too much younger than I, was taught something of what has been forgotten. 

He tells me about learning this history in high school in the late sixties. In his public school, he took an AP class and the teacher taught a whole semester on critical thinking about Manifest Destiny.  “But the teacher didn’t last long, they fired him a few years after I graduated.” This man who learned about what was supposed to be forgotten went on to have a career in repairing hearts.  I wonder what I would have become if I had known these things earlier. 

On Friday, a school snow day is called for the first time this year. The grandchildren, Finn and Addie, 13 and 11 now, having played in the snow and built forts as high as their heads and gotten bored and likely shooed out of the house by their working mother, arrive around noon.  “Do you want to watch some more of that series, Reservation Dogs, with me?” I ask. I get a resounding yes.  

The Hulu series is written and produced and acted by an almost all Indigenous cast and crew. It is filmed on a reservation in Oklahoma and realistically portrays the family disruption, the poverty, the struggles with addiction that Indigenous people deal with today.  But it also features the courage, the humor, the spirituality and Native values and culture which support their struggles and their amazing resiliency.   

There’s a lot of cursing in this series.  Every other word, it seems, is the f word, so the kids, feel quite pleased that I allow them to watch this.  They aren’t sure their mother would approve. If there is a tradeoff here between hearing the word fuck fifty times in an hour and the kids being swept up into our national forgetting, I know what I consider to be the worst outcome, and it isn’t the f word.  I want them to know that there are Native Americans still here, that they too face problems with friends and parents and figuring out what to do with their lives.  And I want them to know what kinds of pain these kids face. 

“Why do you think they live like this on the reservation and have so much trouble with things?” I ask before the video starts.  “Because we stole all their land and killed their family and made them poor,” Finn answers, seemingly annoyed, as if I was asking a stupid question I’d asked a hundred times before and should know the answer myself. 

How does a 13-year-old take in this truth of American history when most of our country still hasn’t faced these truths about our violent seizure of their lands, a forgetting which allows us all to gaze innocently at ourselves in the mirror?  I am barely able to grapple with it myself, but I know I am determined to speak about it, to tell stories, to explore history, to write what I discover and what hasn’t yet been written.  Someday I will write the foundational story of this town, the Thomas Means Massacre, and this time not everyone in town will be so well pleased with that image in the mirror.   

Last Fall, wandering in the shadows among the moss covered boulders and the stout white pines, I felt, as they passed me by, the brush of the spirits of the Native Americans who lived here three hundred years ago.  When I stood still, I heard them whisper, “We have much wisdom to teach you, much you need to learn in order to preserve this place and save your kin.” 

“If only you could see this,” I hear Grandmother Woodchuck whisper to me now.  “If only you could see the way this land looked before you and your kin arrived.  If only you could see the forests open below the canopy, the low shrubs burned and cleared, the deer roaming, the rabbits running. If only you could see the fields before the cows arrived and the pigs roamed and the native plants all died.  If only you could see the way we cared for children, the way we sang to them, the way we danced and resolved our conflicts. If only you could see the world before you arrived and shaped it according to the ideas of your god.” 

The father of social anthropology, Robert Redfied, of the University of Chicago, considered the replacement of the Indigenous worldview by the technical order of modern civilization as one of the great tragedies of human history.  From his perspective:

Industrialized humans have become unvirtuous and holistically destructive in comparison to 99% of human genus existence….The pillars of original virtue include relational attunement, communal imagination and respectful partnership with the natural world. Restoring the Kinship Worldview, Topa and Narvaez, p.9

Capitalism and industrialization were born of the riches of chattel slavery and the theft of land and resources from Indigenous peoples.  Our “modern” minds are suckled by a world view of domination and coercion, traits which allowed the minds of our ancestors to condone chattel slavery and the genocide of hundreds if not thousands of Indigenous tribes. These are the same traits which threaten the seas with warming and thousands of species, maybe our own, with extinction. 

Wise men and women are proposing we learn a new Weltanschauung, a way of conceiving of the universe and of our relationship to it.  Now that my mind is not so much deceived and emptied by forgetting, I know exactly where to turn for the lessons of relational attunement, communal imagination and respectful partnership with the natural world: to the spirits of the forest and to the present day scholars and writers who hold that Indigenous knowledge and from whom we can learn a way of living on this planet that we so desperately need in order to survive.  

“Tell me how all this ends,” Addie asks at a tense moment in the drama. Oh, I wish I knew, I think to myself. Will it end in this empty room of forgetting?  Will we all be so numb, so full of forgetting that we watch the earth go up in flames, watch as the floods carry us away, watch as we starve or die of thirst? Or will we remember and be saved?