Quick thoughts on Indigenous People's Day

Hi everyone,

The week got away from me, and I realized that Indigenous People’s Day was upon us! Here’s your special Friday newsletter, all about how to talk to kids about Indigenous People’s Day. Why does it exist? What happened to Columbus Day?

I have been thinking about Indigenous People’s Day - especially since I read this super cool story about humans walking around what is now New Mexico 23,000 years ago. And I’ve been thinking about Interior Secretary Deb Haaland providing a land acknowledgment from the White House as the Biden Administration renews support of National Monuments, and Joseph Pierce and other folks who have been writing lately about how land acknowledgements need to lead to land being returned.

As I’ve written about before (check out my musings here and here), I think a lot about how I start stories with my kids. Most important to me on this topic is avoiding all of the mental traps about indigenous cultures that I fell into over the years - and there are SO many. I’m not going to recount them all here, because I think repeating stereotypes to debunk them tends to reinforce the stereotype itself, but suffice it to say that in my education there was not a three dimensional depiction of indigenous people and culture - they invented canoes and teepees, they were slaughtered and ripped off because of their land, something about the Trail of Tears, drug and alcohol problems. I’ve spent a lot of time annoyed with myself because of how moved and surprised I was reading There There by Tommy Orange because I had never encountered the idea of urban indigenous communities.

I also worry about the causality of the switching from Christopher Columbus Day to Indigenous People Day. Biden’s proclamation on Columbus Day acknowledged "the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities." This, I think, makes sense - if you’re going to talk about Columbus, don’t do it outside of the context of violence.

But the inverse can’t be true - we have to talk about indigenous people and culture outside of the context of Columbus and genocide. I feel like, over and over, the stories that we about atrocities in the American past are the extent of the story - we limit stories of Black Americans to slavery, civil rights, and baseball. We need stories that highlight what the stakes are - what we’re fighting to save. Families and friendship and jokes and education. Only highlighting slavery and mistrust and genocide means that a bunch of bad stuff happens: we still center white actors and white version of events; we don’t get to look at the long term implications of the atrocities so everything remains in the past; we flatten the real folks doing interesting things in the world to being the sum of the worst things that happened to their ancestors.

So - here’s my plan. We’re not going to mention Europeans at all on Monday. We’re going to watch Molly of Denali and talk about how the show depicts indigenous culture - and where we’ve seen signs of indigenous cultures in other things we’ve watched and seen (Coco!) We’re going to read the book We are Water Protectors, and talk about how brave they were for resisting big oil.

And then, later, we’ll talk about the rest. We’ll resequence the story to talk about how present indigenous ideas and culture are in our lives, and then about how they were here first, and then about Columbus arriving and the atrocities of encounter with the Europeans. And then we’ll look at indigenous cultures from all over the world and what patterns we can see. This is a multi-year project, obviously, but we have time to get the story right.

That’s all I got til next week! If you have anything you want to read about, send me an email and I’ll spend some time musing.