Recently there was a commercial for a local news report on the legacy of the residential schools to which Native children were compelled to go, in which they were forced to learn English and assimilate into the United States culture, losing all traces of their indigenous cultures. This has been in the news lately due to the reporting about the Canadian residential schools, but the United States has its own very long history of using these schools as an adjunct to their project of colonizing the land and eliminating its original inhabitants.
Yet the news report said they were unearthing “the secret of the residential schools.”
And I started yelling at the television. “Secret from whom?”
This history was taught to me when I was a kid attending school from the late 1980s to 2000. In my elementary school in Indiana, around third or fourth grade, we had units on Indiana history. One section focused on the Native people. We would get little yellow booklets that told simple stories about what it was like to be a Native, how they fed and clothed themselves, what their daily lives were like, and how it was for them when the pioneers arrived. The next semester we learned about the pioneers. Those booklets were blue, and covered similar material from the pioneer perspective.
Even then, as a kid, I noticed out loud, “In the Indian stories the pioneers are the bad guys, but in the pioneer stories the Indians are the bad guys.” And it wasn’t lost on me that we were the descendants of those pioneers—not necessarily literally, through blood, but we were citizens of the nation those people built.
The country built by those pioneers and their descendants did not find satisfaction in its thirst for cheap land and cheap labor. They kept expanding westward, and made up theological-sounding justifications for why it was their right. They kept bringing people from other lands—forcibly through enslavement, or through exploitative immigration policies—to build the infrastructure and do to the manual labor needed to build great wealth—mostly for the wealthy, white, land-owning men.
But at some point, those of us who inherited this culture and nation-building decided to believe in our innocence. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, I occasionally would hear the expression that “America lost its innocence that day.” A quick investigation into collective memory—a Google search—shows that this same expression was often said referring to assassination of John F. Kennedy.
“America lost its innocence that day.”
What innocence did the United States have when this is its history? Our intelligence agencies have funded coups and insurgent armies in other countries. Was our innocence the naïveté that it could be done to us? Is that innocence worth preserving?
Years ago, in my undergraduate English days, Salman Rushdie came to campus and we had the opportunity to sit with him in a smaller conversation. I remember him wondering aloud why American writers didn’t write about empire. In my early twenties, confused, I wondered to myself, “How is America an empire?”
We have army bases across the world and territories under our control who did not willingly join us and have no democratic representation. We have prisons in other countries. And I didn’t know America was an empire.
Telling ourselves of our innocence is an amnestic, a spell to forget our history. When we are wrapped in the comforting blanket of our innocence, all we can see is our victimhood, and not our culpability. And those who would dare break the spell, try to take the blanket, face our rage.
We’re like the obnoxious kid in class who keeps poking the girl in front of him with a pencil and then has the audacity to be shocked when she finally turns around and slaps him. What’d I do to deserve that?
Confronting the truth of our history and our ancestors is medicine. Seeing our collective guilt and culpability need not destroy us our cause us to collapse in despair. It’s the truth that will set us free. It shows us that we are not powerless victims, not noble martyrs in a world that incomprehensibly hates us. We have power, and we’ve wielded that power in ways that have consequences.
Losing the lie of innocence means we get to finally grow up and become responsible adults in the community of all humans. It means the possibility of real solidarity and recognizing what truly are our common interests and values. All you have to lose is your ignorance.