{"id":189510,"date":"2021-07-26T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2021-07-26T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=189510"},"modified":"2021-07-22T07:42:38","modified_gmt":"2021-07-22T06:42:38","slug":"civilizing-the-savage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/07\/civilizing-the-savage\/","title":{"rendered":"Civilizing the Savage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>21 Jul 2021 – <\/em>We crossed the Atlantic, encountered a bunch of savages, defeated them, claimed the continent. We won! This is the history I remember learning, as satisfying and stupid as a John Wayne movie.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The myth is crumbling and cracking, its certainty now as precarious as the statue of a Confederate general. Truth flows in through the holes, e.g.:<\/p>\n

By the late 1830s, most of the native residents<\/a> had been \u201cremoved\u201d from a big chunk of the South \u2014 a few million acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida \u2014 so white men could start growing cotton there. In 1838, a final group of stubborn Cherokees were deported to Oklahoma Territory, as President Martin Van Buren sent 7,000 soldiers to do the job.<\/p>\n

The soldiers, according to history.com, \u201cforced the Cherokee into stockades at bayonet point while his men looted their homes and belongings. Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200 miles to Indian Territory. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation were epidemic along the way, and historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that was just the final installment of the Trail of Tears, which forced some 125,000 Native Americans \u2014 Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee \u2014 out of their birth lands. And the Trail of Tears was just a small part of white America\u2019s history of conquest and arrogance as it claimed the continent.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the U.S. government authorized \u201cover 1,500 wars<\/a>, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people,\u201d history.com tells us, noting that, by the end of the 19th century, there were less than a quarter million indigenous people left on the continent, compared to an estimated 5 to 15 million of them in 1492.<\/p>\n

Apparently this is what \u201cvictory\u201d looks like, at least the small, dead kind of victory that is based on moral ignorance, which is to say, on dehumanization: the necessary precursor to war.<\/p>\n

How is it that humanity has managed to advance in so many ways yet still clutch to its core the right to dehumanize part of itself, whenever it chooses? Why do we find it simpler to remain prepared to kill a declared enemy rather than to reach for ways to understand that enemy and, in so doing, evolve? Perhaps evolution \u2014 moving beyond our settled certainties, entering the unknown \u2014 is simply too scary to face.<\/p>\n

And war isn\u2019t always waged with guns and bullets.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the century and a half that the U.S. government ran boarding schools<\/a> for Native Americans,\u201d Rukmini Callimachi writes in the New York Times, \u201chundreds of thousands of children were housed and educated in a network of institutions, created to \u2018civilize the savage.\u2019 By the 1920s, one group estimates, nearly 83 percent of Native American school-age children were attending such schools.\u201d<\/p>\n

The war being waged by boarding schools was a war on culture. Children were robbed of their language, of their cultural context, which are crimes I can hardly imagine enduring. Who they were was beaten out of them. They were beaten, so one woman remembers, with brooms and mops, with belts, hangers, shoes, branches, sticks, wire.<\/p>\n

But the beatings were only stage one. One boarding school \u201cgraduate\u201d \u2014 or rather, escapee \u2014 told Callimachi that the cruelest thing he experienced was not the routine beatings. His grandfather had taught him how to carve a flute out of the branch of a cedar tree. He brought the flute he had carved to the school . . . uh oh, big mistake! His teacher \u201csmashed it and threw it in the trash.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was not simply the confiscation of a toy. The theft pierced the boy\u2019s soul: The teacher had stolen his music from him. Callimachi writes: \u201c\u2018That\u2019s what God is. God speaks through air,\u2019 he said, of the music his grandfather taught him.\u201d<\/p>\n

What magnifies the cruelty of this moment almost beyond comprehension is that this wasn\u2019t an individual act of mean-spiritedness. This was national policy! The boy\u2019s flute was simply an object of savagery and the purpose of the boarding school was to civilize him: \u201cKill the Indian in him and save the man.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this is the history that needs to be taught, but not, I would add, merely in a good-guy\/bad-guy context. The collective human consciousness needs to open, as we dig collectively to grasp: why?<\/em> Why did white Europeans then \u2014 and why do whoever we are now \u2014 devote so much of our energy and resources to destroying what we don\u2019t understand? Why do we honor \u2014 and fund \u2014 our impulse to hate?<\/p>\n

Once again, I ask these questions not in regard to individual, but rather collective \u2014 governmental \u2014 behavior. I fear that as we unite, we diminish our ability to respect, and understand, the complexity of the universe, and of our fellow humans. We unite around simplistic certainties, and these certainties seem always to involve an enemy, or Other. And empowerment means being able to kill, rather than understand, embrace and learn from \u2014 or hear the music of \u2014 that Other.<\/p>\n

This is history\u2019s primary lesson: The savage we need to civilize, continually, is within ourselves.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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