The past leads to us if we force it to. Otherwise it contains us in its asylum with no gates.
We make history or it makes us.
- Marge Piercy
A useful book for anyone teaching Social Studies or History is 1491, by Charles Mann, because it highlights a crucial part of our work as teachers. Mann's book looks at the Americas just before the arrival of great numbers of Europeans. He paraphrases the traditional European view of "PreColumbian," or "Prehistorical" Native Americans in this way:
They lived close to Nature in a kind of primeval Eden, migrating, hunting, farming in an endless unchanging cycle. Most of all, this view goes, they did not disturb the natural world around them. Generations followed upon generations in this way, until the white men came and broke it all apart, and history began, for good or evil, take your choice.
The trouble with this point of view, as Mann points out, is the unchangeable quality of it all. Since history, by definition, is change, the Native American people, in this traditional presentation, had no history. Once Columbus came, history began. Mann goes on to paint a very different picture, one of people who altered the natural landscape to suit their particular societies, who developed cultures and told their stories, as we do now, to explain the world around them, and who passed through social and political upheavals, conflicts, technological change, and migrations, all before Columbus.
Perhaps it is in the nature of all dominant, conquering societies to write and promulgate history in their own image, and to destroy and trivialize those which preceded and might oppose them . Eduardo Galeano, in his Memory of Fire writes eloquently about the destruction by fire of eight centuries of Aztec and Mayan texts - histories and literature - by priests and conquistadores in Mexico. Slave traders made it a practice to "break" Africans before they came to the slave markets, to isolate them from others of their tribe, to beat and torture out of them any memory of Africa, their native languages, or their African names.
In quite another, more subtle and gradual way, this is what traditional social studies teaching does to our children of color, our young women, and our working class children. Sure, we teach them history, but we leave them out of it. It's as if they and their people are mere spectators, silent and passive. Who are the actors? Sure. Great White Men - the generals and kings, the prime ministers, the Presidents, the business people who amassed great fortunes. "Progress" (of the European race) or, by its other names, conquest, colonialism, subjugation, exploitation, is the context in which everything happens.
"We're taught about the Carnegies and the Fords and all the other millionaires, but not what working people do," said Dolores Huerta. James Baldwin called this a "criminal conspiracy" against young black children. For many years, African-Americans were taught that their people were slaves, victims, defeated and silent. For those same years, Chicanos and other Latinos learned that they simply didn't exist in "our" history. Asians learned the same lesson, and women, and working people in general. School is the place where this conspiracy happens. Teachers taught (and teach- remember the teacher in Salinas?) this, textbook authors wrote (and write) this, and the world at large carries it out. Taking away the past means taking away the present. Such history lessons are at once both the chronicle and the continuing practice of conquest and exploitation.
This all begs the question - how do we escape History's Asylum, or better, how do we teach our students to escape it? First, throw away your history textbook. Sure, it might have nice graphics, pictures, photos and the like. But don't use it, for several reasons. First, it has been homogenized, passed through a long and deadening process to get adopted. Such books have to satisfy everyone, including the most conservative and anti-progressive state school boards in the country. They are major investments for publishing houses, so they can't be too controversial, anyway. They are filled with the dead and unburied Myths that have sustained and justified the darkest deeds of the American nation, often ignoring, or glibly passing on, major moral issues.
Worst of all, the texts are a package, a closed, rectangular prism named "History." If we leave it as it is, the textbook is History's asylum, as the poet mentioned. History, the text tells us, is in this book, not in the world; it is past and set in type, not happening all around. The people in the book make history, and the rest of us read about it. History, above all is something to be studied, not lived or made. So throw the book away. Our project is to wake our students up and make history.
Lesson - Autobiographies. When did your family come to California?
Everyone makes history, not just Great White Men. Everyone has a history. Our students can realize their own place in history by writing their own autobiographies.
I give my kids a long rectangle of paper, folded into seven segments. Rolls of paper are good, or the old tear-off computer paper. Each segment has a title:
My Family. When We Came To California
How My Parents Met
What Happened the Day I Was Born
What I Was Like When I Was Little. First Day In School
The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me
The Scariest Thing That Ever Happened to Me
What I Want to Do in the Future
On each segment, then, the kids write and draw about that part of their own lives. There are several good things about this lesson:
- First, children,in order to find out about their own lives, must use their memories. They must talk to their parents and other family members. They need to consult archives - family pictures and records. (These should be photocopied and returned.)
- They are able to see that they are not alone in the present, but part of a past that includes generations of relatives.
- They'll have to use research skills, learn to interview, to write down what they hear, and to edit and make it part of their own story.
- The "California" question can be used as part of a larger historical question: Why do people migrate? Most of the time, it is in search of a better life, whether that means a chance to work and otherwise prosper. And some people, we have to point out, did not come to the Americas by choice.
In writing about themselves and their people in this way, children can come to see the significance of their own their own histories. They can understand that they, too make history, and are actors in it, not merely consumers or spectators of it. A good next talk might be to identify prominent events in local, national and world history that happened during their lifetimes and correlate their own stories with the stories of society at large.
In this attached video, check out the vicious, racist images of African-Americans in white popular culture. Malcolm X makes the point about the teaching/learning of history: "As long as you can be convinced that you never did anything, then you can never do anything."
