13 A Few Bad Men
Along with the misconception that Indigenous peoples are “of the past,” many students graduate from their K-12 education without understanding that the traumas Indigenous peoples hold stem from institutionalized injustice, and not just from a “few bad men.” The “few bad men” narrative often portrayed by history books allows students and educators to believe that because these “few bad men” have long been deceased, the issues surrounding them have halted as well. ”A common denominator is rejection of the concept of systemic racism and an embrace of the belief that racism has been outlawed; as a result, any residual racism is the problem of a few bad apples that can be solved on an individual level,” (LoBue and Douglass 2023, pg. 554). The villainization of certain historical characters ignores that they are simply reflections of society as a whole at the time, and were often portrayed as heroes in the past because of how well they upheld the values of colonial interests. A striking example of this was just displayed in an archaeology class I am enrolled in just a few days ago at the time of writing.
The archaeology class I am in is conducting a survey of the history of the University of Washington’s campus lands, and our class has been brainstorming ways to bring attention to the colonial presence still embedded in the university, and how we may organize through various ways of protest in order to make efforts towards decolonization of the university. For the past week’s class we were each instructed to read the Treaty of Point Elliott, which was negotiated between Isaac Stevens—the first governor of the Territory of Washington—and representatives from many of the Washington Tribes. The treaty resulted in the cessation of the majority of each of the Tribes’ lands in order to establish the State of Washington, and was negotiated through a major language barrier and according to many accounts was a result of coercion.
During discussion of the treaty and how it would relate to the class’ decolonization efforts, one student expressed the importance to her of vilifying characters like Isaac Stevens and other individuals responsible for this land theft, and she was met with widespread support. It wasn’t until I pointed out that these characters were just individuals performing their duties—and while they absolutely weren’t heroes—we needed to portray the larger issue at hand, that ideas like spray-painting over road signs with Stevens’ name were dropped. While I agree that colonial markers on the university grounds should be removed, focusing on these troublesome individuals rather than the fact that the vast majority of society at the time of the university’s founding supported the removal of the peoples native to these lands allows this larger society to avoid these repercussions.
This lack of awareness, again, was not the fault of the students in my class. It is rather the failure of their education systems to point out the larger structural injustices that is truly to blame, as Anderson states, “we too often settle for curricula that fail to help students think more critically about their social world,” (Anderson 2012, p. 507). While yes, the fact that Christopher Colombus is no longer portrayed as a hero to most youth and America’s “founding fathers” are increasingly being viewed less as role models and more as the colonial poster-children they are, society has largely failed to recognize that these men are simply products of the cultural environment around them.
This is an issue prevalent not just in Indigenous Studies, it is also very present in other conversations surrounding historic discrimination—as Brown and Brown point out in relation to African Americans, “It positions individual people…as acting in a deviant, morally corrupt way that distances these practices from the societies and institutions that supported and benefited from the slave trade… We recognize that narratives that position racial violence as the acts of a ‘few bad men’ create a cultural memory of US racism as deinstitutionalized and disconnected from the maintenance of racial inequities in the US,” (Brown and Brown 2010, pg. 147). Brown has found that discussions of violence against African Americans in US History textbooks, “portrayed these as the acts of lone individuals who were disconnected from larger social/institutional structures…less as an institutionalized system and more as an individual practice that depended on the predilections of individuals,” (Brown and Brown 2010, pg. 146).
The dangerous result of this portrayal, according to Anderson, “is that by focusing so intently on the details of the case students will be unable to connect the details to the larger American political, economic, social and cultural context that shaped these events,” (Anderson 2012, pg. 505). In relation more specifically to Indigenous studies, the incomplete narratives presented in public education systems result in misinformed conclusions, with one of many results of this being that, “arguably, it would be easy for students to see Indigenous Peoples as America’s greatest enemy given how the standards shape the transition from cooperation to conflict, without providing space to consider various Indigenous histories, cultures, and experiences in past, present, and possible future,” (Shear et. al 2015, pg. 86). These incomplete narratives and subsequent misinformed conclusions result in many having a misconstrued view of structural discrimination, which has partially resulted in the fairly recent opposition to a controversial school of thought: Critical Race Theory.