We Should Own Up To Dark Side Of History

Hello Jennifer: You stated some million Native Americans were killed by bounty hunters in California.

You referred to “Ishi, The Last Yahi,” edited by Heizer and Kroeber, 1979, as your source. Please give me specifics about documentation of this atrocity. - Lael

Dear Lael and others: The source for my California information was a PBS documentary titled “Ishi,” produced by WGBH in Boston. It was episode No. 605 in a series titled “The American Experience.”

Transcripts are available for $5 from Journal Graphics, 1535 Grant St., Denver, CO 80203, or the video from (800) 255-9424.

I called the Burke Museum at the University of Washington for more detailed information, but they were too busy to help callers.

I suggest you become researchers and, using your local library, contact the leading Native American museum in California and find out what it has on the California bounty system of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

You may find good records that confirm the documentary statistics or reveal other atrocities. The important thing for me, however, is not whether the data add up to a million or a few hundred thousand or whether Native Americans died because of bounties or other violence.

The important information, in this case, is not in the details; it is in awareness of some of the patterns of our history.

If we do not own up, in a direct way, to our past, we cannot chart a more ethical future.

It is fine to work hard and have what you want. It is not fine to hurt, destroy or cheat others along the way.

We have a political and a social culture that allows us to damage others and still be respected or accepted. Perhaps our history has somehow given us permission to hurt each other for material or political gain.

We, as with many societies, have a history of exploitation. Greed will continue to be a sword in the side of our democracy if we keep saying “equality is fine as long as I get to keep MY privileges.”

Read the following letter from a Methodist pastor in Idaho. - Jennifer

‘Prairie Reflections’

I hear grumbling across this prairie. I encounter frequently the disdain for certain hunting and fishing rights, gaming rights, tax-free cigarettes and the right to sell pyrotechnics.

I think we are being sold a bill of dishonorable goods by a few expedient lawmakers who persuade many of the notion that the majority population is somehow being victimized by a minuscule minority.

I agree with your column that our culture is producing “… a new class of politicians willing to argue that it is intolerable for a white male anywhere in America to taste one drop of the discrimination over the decades that has been gulped in gallons by blacks and women.” And I would add, over the centuries has been choked down in rivers by indigenous Americans.

We have no honor if we claim victim status and give sullen lip service to discrimination while reality bellows of our overwhelming dominance.

Why is it so hard to accept our own unjust history? Why is it so hard to collectively recognize the brutality of our past?

Has the statute of limitations run out on sincere regret and confession? Are we saying that we no longer inherit the sins of previous generations, as though these have no bearing on the structure and fabric of our generation, as though the loss of 10 million suddenly quits aching?

Can’t we today, for our ancestors yesterday and because of our children tomorrow, confess a tragic wrong? And in so doing return a bit of honor lost and give witness to our vocation as God’s moral agents.

I am sorry. I am so sorry! - Pastor Steven Rice

Dear Pastor Rice: Thank you for your powerful message from the Idaho prairie. We demand of other countries that they admit to their history, that they let the world know they are aware of their own past.

We find it hard, as do the Germans, the Japanese, the British or the Russians, to believe that this history actually refers to us. We think of our own country with such love that we do not want to see our own shadow.

Growing up requires each of us to know and confront the shadows within our own character so that we can limit the harm we do to ourselves and others.

Denial is an easier road, but it leaves us without honor and it eats at our soul. - Jennifer

xxxx