Blog 8. Facing our past.

The question about whether we should relate to an unjust past has an obvious answer to me – of course we must. I started out our session with scholar Lili Cole by stating my position, that I stand on the side of truth, regardless of the consequences. I still hold that view, but through our session on historical memory and later our session on justice in accounting for the past, I got to explore the nuances of excavating the past.

Truth is incredibly complicated, and excavating the truth needs to done very carefully. Different groups have different interpretations of events, and in some cases, getting the different groups to agree on the fact of the events themselves can be problematic.

In my notes from the sessions, I wrote that historical trauma and collective memory cannot be bypassed. For those who would argue that rehashing the past merely creates conflict unnecessarily, I would say that any conflict that arises in a societal discussion of the past merely shows that the existence of latent conflict. In other words, the conflict was always there; it did not burst into existence the moment we started talking about the past.

The challenge is what can be done when various parties really cannot find common ground. I think this is why I am somewhat afraid to dive into the fact of genocide of Native Americans during the founding of the United States. I am afraid to dive into it because I am afraid of what the implications will be, afraid that I might have to change something about the way I live or where I live or how I relate to others. What would it mean to really respect a Native American person’s perspective, which could be fundamentally in conflict with that of a descendent of the people who first colonized the land, or a descendent of people who immigrated to this country after others had paved the way by colonizing the land? Something would have to give.

History is charged; it is not neutral. And we cannot construct our shared story by giving equal weight to all sides. Where someone has suffered, I must side with them. I must privilege the view of Native American nations and of African slaves and their descendants. But to really do this implies something for me, some change of no longer going along with my society’s grand narrative and status quo. Am I ready to face the implications of this?