Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Truth?
By: Coka Brown
Tags: Native American Rights, Us History, Cancel Culture, 2020 Presidential Race, Politics

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Truth?

Whitewashing American History: The Real “Cancel Culture” Culprits

Courtesy of Steve with Unsplash.com

Cancel me this. Cancel me that. Just don’t cancel if it promotes my beliefs, please. Fuck political correctness! That is, of course, unless you’re talking about America’s founding fathers and foundations, which have no place for 21st-century judgment. Tout, don’t criticize, America hater. “Free speech for me, not for thee,” remember?

In my rock star drinking days, I might have won a drinking contest for the number of times “cancel culture” peppered speeches at the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC). President Trump declared (or at least his speechwriters did) that they want to “fully restore patriotic education to our schools.” Trump lauded westward settlement in his speech, as most American school children are taught to do, and the pioneers who bravely tamed “wild, uncharted territory.” Of course they left out the millions of Native Americans who had already been living in this so-called uncharted territory and the women, children, and elders who were slaughtered to form what we now know as the U.S.

Christopher Columbus came tumbling down throughout America in the wake of George Floyd’s death, as did confederate soldiers and memorials. In response, Trump threatened citizens with jail time and militarized force. He echoed the sentiments of many Americans in his RNC speech and said “Americans build their future. We don’t tear down our past.”

They say we should learn from our past, not erase it. But if they truly believe this, why do they demand the erasure and minimization of the vile parts of America’s past? Why do they gaslight facts that don’t flatter the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Andrew Jackson and call it “revisionist history?” Why do they try to silence certain voices from history? Whose culture are they really concerned about canceling?

Bring on the whitewash

Cabot Phillips decried, let me hear it — CANCEL CULTURE, on foxnews.com in his recent article, “‘Cancel Culture’ Distorts History to Portray U.S. As Evil Nation That Must Be Transformed.” He certainly isn’t the only right-leaning mouthpiece dumping loads of white paint from his lofty perch to conceal the New York Times’ “1619 Project.” Phillips railed about the project focusing on slavery in America’s foundations instead of other values, such as liberty and justice, the values adults try to siphon into American children’s virgin brains the moment they learn to parrot the “Pledge of Allegiance.”

The idea that slavery, in all its evil and insidiousness, has an open path into school curricula scares Phillips and his ilk. Among many things, Phillips says:

The history courses that are taught often seek to indoctrinate students with the idea that America’s lasting legacy is one of genocide and oppression, not freedom and liberty for all. This narrative of an evil America lays the foundation for the embrace of far-left ideology that would upend our entire social and economic order with endless protests and other actions — even violent ones — to transform our “evil” country into an imagined utopian society.

Assuming Phillips has not negatively experienced the effects of genocide and oppression, I can see why he would object to “upending our social and economic order.” Why not keep things status quo if it’s working out just fine for you, right Phillips?

Conservative podcast host Ben Shapiro, one of the loudest voices in the pro-narrow history chorus, also accuses “lefty liberals” of revising history when they shed light on past American atrocities. Shapiro recently wrote “How To Destroy America in Three Easy Steps,” in which he admonishes books like “The People’s History of the United States” and also takes issue with the “1619 Project.”

Admittedly I only flipped through Shapiro’s book and haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading it. I did notice in the book that Shapiro conceded Native Americans were treated badly in the formation of the United States. But he still managed to sweep it under the rug just as he does here. Shapiro says, “If you want to say the United States committed a certain level of ethnic cleansing with regards to the Trail of Tears, there’s some accuracy to that,” as if that was the only instance of brutality and forced removal committed against Native Americans. He continues the erroneous claim that disease, not murder, was the real Native American population reducer.

Hispanic activist Ralph Arellanes recently called for New Mexico to end its support of Chicano and Native American studies in reaction to the removal of Spanish conquistador statues in New Mexico. Arellanes argued that the studies teach Latinos “self-hate” for their Spanish heritage. He claimed that students have left class in tears after being told that Spanish conquistadors participated in the genocide of Indigenous peoples.

Being of Mexican-American and Indigenous descent from the U.S. southwest myself, I couldn’t agree more with one social media user’s response: “Self-hatred? More like self-awareness!”

Even if Arellanes’s claim about students crying over a history lesson is true, Arellanes believes, just like other cancel culture criers, that because the truth is painful, it should not be told. Because the truth might just cause citizens to question the establishment, it is best to keep the truth hidden. It is better to continue beautiful lies by omission than to share appalling truths in “patriotic education.”

Standing Rock — Is this shit still going on?

I admit I didn’t give much of a shit about American history either beyond the pro-America basics — freedom and justice good. Slavery bad. Westward expansion good. Native Americans dying bad. Yeah it sucked for them, but we’ve moved past that, right? So why dwell on things we can’t change?

That indifference and ignorance upended when I went to Standing Rock in North Dakota in 2016 to support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their fight against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe vehemently opposed the construction of The Dakota Access Pipeline because of the threat it posed to their drinking water and because construction of the pipeline desecrated spiritual and cultural sites for the tribe. It also violated the Fort Laramie Treaty that guarantees (supposedly) the “undisturbed use and occupation” of reservation land.

Original plans for the pipeline placed construction near Bismarck, which is majority white, but the route was changed for several reasons, among which included the threat to the water supply for Bismarck.

Low flying drones buzzed over the Oceti Sakowin Camp on the Standing Rock reservation. Armed officers stood on the surrounding hilltops. Sacred fires and burning sage scented the biting air. The winter chill tried to nip at my skin through layers of sweaters and a thick winter coat. Tents and tipis popped out everywhere. And yurts. Some were labeled. The medical tent. The Two-Spirit tent. The legal tent.

A kind Pueblo Indian man took me under his wing. He showed me how he heated his tent and cooked his food without using fossil fuel. I listened to his experiences and the experiences of other water protectors (protesters) who had been defending their water and their land for months — getting tear-gassed, getting shot with rubber grenades and fire hoses in the dead of winter. One young water protector had a chunk of her forearm blasted off. Protesters were constantly surveilled. Authorities followed water protectors for doing nothing more than going to a store. I would soon experience a form of this stalker-like behavior just by being at the camp. Cell phones hacked, hijacked, and stolen. There were also rumors about the “dusting” of chemicals on the reservation from low-flying planes.

The following day, I attended the camp’s orientation that was set up to educate us noobs. The presenters talked at length about colonization culture and implored visitors not to bring alcohol or anything that could be considered a weapon to the camp. The protesters insisted on remaining unarmed, despite being surrounded by armed individuals around their camp. In orientation, they reminded us to be mindful of the space we occupied because we were in someone else’s home, on someone else’s land, and we didn’t have a right to come in and try to take over, like settler-colonizers. We were to respect elders, respect the culture, respect the land, and the home we were visiting.

The presenters warned about the many scare tactics being used against protesters — mics on phones being tapped. Drones. An armed militarized presence.

An Indigenous elder woman I met in the legal tent schooled me with as much patience as she could muster for my ignorant, colonized ass. She explained, “This isn’t a fight that started last April. This has been going on for HUNDREDS of years.” She talked about ceded land, of which I knew nothing, and Natives’ ongoing struggles to protect their treaty rights. “Is it too much to ask that we have clean drinking water?” she said.

My mind struggled to absorb everything I heard, everything I saw….I couldn’t believe this crap was still going on. I thought we had moved past injustice toward Native people in America, that we all agreed it was wrong to force Natives off their land, to kill them off. Yet here they were, in 2016, being forced to defend their land, defend their sacred burial sites, and being forced to potentially live off of polluted drinking water. How could unarmed citizens be attacked for defending their own land? In America? The land of the free? Whose constitution guarantees justice for ALL?

Uncovering America’s past

Days in Standing Rock taught me what years of school could not — that everything I learned about American history, everything I knew about Native Americans, including my own Native American ancestors, came from a white, colonized point of view. I never once heard history from the voices of Native Americans. I suckled the white milk, munched the white mashed potatoes, the white bread, the white lies that schools fed me, the lies that proponents of patriotic education wish to continue. After Standing Rock, I sought out what schools hid — the meat. The bloody, oozing, red meat that no one wants to remember or wants to admit forms the foundation of America.

Like Ms. Pac-Man gobbling pellet after pellet, I devoured every book I could find written BY Indigenous people, not just about Indigenous people. I talked to Native American elders. I listened. I listened to pain. Listened to trauma. I heard the voices of my own Indian ancestors that had been buried in the shadows of my Spanish and Mexican ancestors. My Indian ancestors had always been a nameless afterthought in my family history, barely an existence at all. I had no idea the brutality Natives endured at the hands of Spanish conquistadors in the U.S. southwest. I didn’t know there were heinous reasons our Indian heritage was all but erased.

As renowned historian and Native American rights activist, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz says in the introduction of her book “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,”

“Multiculturalism became the cutting edge of post-civil-rights-movement of US history revisionism. For this scheme to work — and affirm US historical progress — Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture.”

Dunbar-Ortiz goes on in the intro to say,

“To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without which consideration not much in US history makes sense, unless Indigenous peoples are erased.”

Manifest Destiny. Westward expansion. “Our” great land from sea to shining sea. We cannot consider these virtues unless we leave Native Americans out of the narrative, which is largely how history is taught. Who wants to be associated with theft, genocide, or forced removal?

My home country looked much different without the colonized goggles smacked on my eyes the moment I entered the public school system, hell the moment I was born and grew up in a country where “cowboys and Indians” was a normal game kids played, where kids sang “10 Little Indians,” where the r-word was the name of a pro-football team.

I didn’t know there are over 500 federally recognized tribes in the U.S. and that they are sovereign nations. To this day, I don’t know of many American public schools that include Native sovereignty or treaty rights as part of the core curricula in civics classes. I’m willing to bet most Americans have no base knowledge at all about treaties between the U.S. government and sovereign tribal nations.

Once the goggles were removed, I couldn’t not see the white supremacy that had always been hidden in plain sight. The Doctrine of Discovery, for example. The Doctrine of Discovery is a centuries-old doctrine that proclaims European nations gained title to the lands they “discovered,” and that Indigenous inhabitants then lost their natural rights to the land. This doctrine is still used as precedent in American court cases today.

The great faces of Mount Rushmore look different to me now. I had believed what most Americans probably believe, that Mount Rushmore was a feat of engineering and artistry, a symbol of democracy and American greatness. What I did not know is Mount Rushmore is part of Paha Sapa, or the Black Hills, which was sacred to the Lakota Sioux and which the Supreme Court ruled had been taken illegally from the Lakota Sioux in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians. The Sioux were awarded millions of dollars, now worth billions, but they refused to accept the money because the land was not for sale.

I had no idea that Andrew Jackson, the president many presidents since then revere, whose portrait hangs in Trump’s office, the president on the American $20 bill, signed the “Indian Removal Act” and was largely responsible for the deaths and forced removal of Native Americans.

I did not know that Christopher Columbus brutalized and enslaved natives on what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Columbus’s brutality was so egregious that he was sent back to Spain in chains. I also didn’t know Columbus never set foot on the North American continent.

Wounded Knee 1890. Wounded Knee 1973. The Sand Creek Massacre. The Pueblo Revolt. The Trail of Tears. Scorched earth tactics that burned food supplies of Natives and indiscriminately slaughtered Native children. It was like opening a sealed door that hid an incriminating movie reel, one that was impossible to unsee once viewed.

I also had no idea that Standing Rock was just one example of many modern-day injustices against Native Americans. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe almost lost trust of their land recently. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe is suing Donald Trump and 10 other federal officials over interference of their checkpoints to keep their reservation as safe as possible from the spread of COVID-19. These are just a few examples.

American hypocrisy: give ’em the old razzle-dazzle

The Trump campaign put on an impressive show for the 2020 RNC — a sparkling spectacle that assured Trump supporters he is no racist. He has plenty of black friends, after all, who will publicly vouch for him and insist he is not a racist. Even a Native American spoke in defense of Trump! And did you see all those folks of color in the not-six-feet apart, maskless audience?

He certainly needed a live audience to pull off his showmanship and sleight of hand. The perfectly timed applause and cameras panning to smiling, nodding spectators that appear more diverse than previous Trump gatherings. The performance no doubt swayed plenty of undecided voters toward the Trump end of the political pendulum the way a speech, not bolstered by cheers, to a camera alone could not.

But you can always count on xenophobia and racism to flow from Trump’s mouth as easily as saliva, even if they are disguised in lies. The master deflector purposely continues to refer to COVID-19 as the “China virus,” which is the equivalent of flipping the bird and saying “neener neener” to people who have voiced concerns about the racist connotations, the history of racism against Asian-Americans, and the increase in attacks against Asian-Americans from idiots who blame them for COVID-19.

In the hour-long RNC speech, Trump lauded modern-day colonization, displacement, and genocidal policies, only he camouflaged it by calling it job creation. He congratulated himself for hastening the construction of the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines. There was no mention at all of the Indigenous nations who oppose the pipelines for destroying their land and clean water sources. The audience applauded.

I wonder if anyone who clapped knows about the human rights violations against Indigenous people who protested the Dakota Access Pipeline, violations that were taken to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. I wonder if they know about the PTSD Indigenous people and their allies still suffer from the abuse at the hands of law enforcement. I wonder if they know about the Indigenous political prisoners born of Standing Rock.

Trump touted the southern border wall as a key accomplishment of his presidency. In all his braggadocio, he will never mention the Tohono O’odham Nation. He won’t tell his adoring fans that the wall violates the spiritual rights and livelihood of the O’odham Nation, a Native American nation whose land is in both Mexico and Arizona. Trump will never mention that the sacred burial ground of the O’odham Nation was blasted to construct the wall, which is akin to blasting Arlington Cemetery, as O’odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris, Jr. says here. He’ll never discuss how the wall negatively affects the livelihood of the O’odham Nation.

How do we proclaim to be a just nation that stands for liberty and justice for all while continuing to displace and violate descendants of its original inhabitants?

Mark and Patty McCloskey, more polished and made up than they appeared in the viral video in which they were seen brandishing guns at protesters in front of their home, made a cameo appearance at the RNC. They lamented that they were charged with a crime for pointing guns at protesters. Mr. McCloskey told the camera, “They’ve actually charged us with felonies for daring to defend our home.”

Bwahahaha! Welcome to life for Native Americans for the last few centuries!

Unarmed, I repeat unarmed, Indigenous citizens and their allies were thrown to the ground, pepper sprayed, shot with rubber grenades and fire hoses, arrested, and jailed for daring to defend their home in Standing Rock. I remember asking the friendly Pueblo man I met why water protectors chose to remain unarmed. He said, “Because if we were armed, we’d all be dead by now.”

The McCloskeys had no such concern when they stepped out of their mansion to fend off protesters. The McCloskeys had no fear of being killed by law enforcement or by mercenaries when they aimed their guns— they knew damn well no administration or no corporation was coming for their home and livelihood. The embodiment of white privilege at its finest.

Not surprisingly, Fox News TV host Tucker Carlson has also supported the McCloskey’s right to defend their home. Also not surprisingly, Carlson simultaneously disregards colonization here, which disregards Native Americans’ rights to defend their home.

Carlson says “The destruction of colonization, white supremacy, and capitalism. What does that mean exactly? We’re not sure; we’re not delegates to the DNC. But we’re pretty certain it’s gonna be bad news for you!” Translation: “I don’t know what it means, but because someone from the left said it, it must be bad!” By the way, who is the “you” you are referring to, Carlson?

Note, I am not arguing against or for capitalism. But I am pointing out Carlson’s dismissal of colonization, something he clearly couldn’t care less about.

Exposing, not eradicating, history

Exposing history exposes us for who we really are. Maybe that is why so many people fear it and fight to hide it. As Dunbar-Ortiz says,

“How then can US society come to terms with its past? How can it acknowledge responsibility? The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of the past.”

Native American presidential candidate Mark Charles, from the Navajo Nation, beautifully advocates for creating a “common memory” and a national dialogue in America on race, class, and gender in his TedTalk “We the People.”

Charles says the lack of a common memory is at the heart of America’s problem with race. He explains we have a white majority who believe in a history of “discovery, expansion, exceptionalism and opportunity,” versus communities of color with “lived experiences of stolen land, broken treaties, slavery, Jim Crow laws, boarding schools, ethnic cleansing, genocide, Indian removal, internment camps, segregation, mass incarceration, and families separated at the border.” He goes on to sum up the disparity by saying “We have no common memory, and I think we can all agree that community on a national level is absolutely in the pits.”

In short, they can throw all the “America hater/if you don’t like it, leave/you have no understanding of history/you’re cherry picking facts” torches they want. No amount of gaslighting or attempts at squashing the truth will undo the past or the continued effects of the past.

The ongoing whitewashing, the ongoing masking of America’s settler-colonial past will ensure that colonization never ends and that we continue to hide hypocrisy. And I know the hypocrisy is not unique to one side of the political spectrum. Who is really promoting cancel culture? Who is really trying to cancel the truth?

The ongoing denial will ensure treaties continue to be broken. It will guarantee division. And it will diminish hope for unity or reconciliation. There is no way to unify when there is no agreement on the truth. To do as Mark Charles did and quote George Erasmus: