Forbidden to Remember, Terrified to Forget: Trauma, Truth, and Narratives of Indigenous History
Channel: AskHistorians
Date: 2021-10-20

Settler societies around the world rest on foundations of violence perpetrated against the original inhabitants of the land. While open conflict has become less common over time, the resulting traumas have been perpetuated by brutal processes of forced assimilation. Even as these societies take unsteady steps towards acknowledging and attempting to reconcile this past, the reality of these histories and their incompatibility with heroic national narratives is a source of inescapable tension. This panel explores these tensions, seeking to carve out space to acknowledge the traumas suffered by Indigenous peoples amidst wider processes of local and national mythmaking.

Learn more about this panel at https://www.askhistorians.com/indigenous-trauma

This panel includes a live Q+A with the panelists 21 October 2021 @ 3:00 - 5:00 PM EDT, on https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians

Featured in this panel are:

"Forgetting the Bear River Massacre: Analyzing Physical Memorials To Explain Nationwide Historical Amnesia" by Berklee Baum
"Sight Unseen: On Visibility at the Assiniboia Residential School" by Josh Dawson
"Thirteen Headstones: Reclamation of the Unknown Burials at Carlisle Indian Industrial School Cemetery" by Elle Ransom

Moderated by Kyle Pittman

This panel is part of the AskHistorians 2021 Digital Conference. For more Conference content, please go to: https://www.askhistorians.com/2021-digital-conference

Land Acknowledgement: 

The AskHistorians Digital Conference (AHDC) Organizing and Diversity and Inclusion Committees acknowledge that the AHDC 2021 is being produced in and viewed from various locations across the world. Many of these locations include lands that are the ancestral, unceded, and treaty territories of Indigenous Peoples from Turtle Island, Abya Yala  [ab-EE-ah ee-AH-lah], and the Americas in their entirety to the traditional lands of Indigenous Peoples in Sweden, Australia, and across the globe. We acknowledge that these lands have been stewarded by these Indigenous communities and nations since time immemorial and we offer our gratitude to these Peoples. We, moreover, recognize that, five hundred years later, settler colonial nations continue to benefit from the brutal realities of genocide and forced removal that enabled the original settler colonizers and conquistadores to seize these lands.

The AHDC organizers acknowledge both the land upon which we are virtually hosting this conference, those lands from which the conference is being viewed, and the deep-rooted and long-lasting wounds caused by white imperialism and settler colonialism. The harmful effects of these actions continue to hurt Indigenous communities across the world. We recognize the responsibility we have as historians to amplify Indigenous Voices and speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves. We also acknowledge that while we pursue this goal, academia itself has often been at the forefront of colonial domination and must therefore reckon with its own injustices. Understanding this, we have chosen to make a donation to the Indigenous organization, Forest Peoples Programme, in an effort to give back to Indigenous communities around the world. While we appreciate that Indigenous political, trade, and kinship relationships extend beyond the geographic boundaries that we commonly assign to distinct communities and nations, we would like to particularly acknowledge the Indigenous Peoples upon whose ancestral lands the AHDC 2021 has been produced or hosted as follows:

Coast Salish
Doeg
Massa-adchu-es-et (Massachusett)
Pawtucket
Piscataway
sq̓ʷaliʼabš (Nisqually)
Wenrohronon