3 Where the Importance Lies
I will now begin explaining why I, a privileged white woman, decided to dedicate my time to this research—where I feel its importance comes from. Just as I decided to take my first class in the American Indian Studies department at random, I found myself sitting in an anthropology class discussing the recent economic and social transformation of East Asia wondering why I decided to enroll in the course and whether any of the information I would learn would be relevant to my future. While admittedly most of the key lessons my professor tried to drill into my brain didn’t quite stick, an assigned article discussing the work of Kamanaka Hitomi has stayed with me long after I turned in my final assignment.
Hitomi, a filmmaker focusing on nuclear disasters, was asked by interviewer Katsura Hirano why she felt her work in exposing the truth of the Fukushima disaster to the Japanese public was important to her. Hitomi had recently concluded her fourth film addressing the effects of nuclear accidents, Little Voices of Fukushima, which highlighted mothers in Fukushima, Japan who struggled to protect their children in the wake of the 2011 disaster. She had decided to make this film partially because the Japanese government had been promoting efforts to increase their reliance on nuclear energy, and garnered widespread public support. Hitomi felt the Fukushima disaster had been shoved under the rug by the Japanese government, leading to many citizens forgetting the true impacts of the disaster and failing to weigh its effects in their decision to support nuclear energy. This explanation led her to conclude that, “it’s like the adage that what goes unrecorded never happened. If we never make a record of what is unfolding, if we never grasp what is actually taking place, all is forgotten: the past, present and future are rewritten at the convenience of a designated few,” (Hitomi et. al 2018).
While there is a fairly accessible catalog of information about the atrocities the United States Federal Government has committed against Indigenous Peoples available in various forms, the general lack of attention put towards these issues in the media, education, politics, and in general public discourse prevents individuals from reaching this information. Without any exposure to these issues, few people are inclined to spend their time seeking these resources out to educate themselves, leaving the majority of Americans largely uneducated on Indigenous issues and in many cases holding outdated and stereotypical beliefs. The best solution to combat this issue, I argue, is to start with education in K-12 public schools, and by having this content written by the peoples most closely connected to it—meaning I am also calling for an increase in Indigenous educators.
By including this content in schools, this assures that youth are introduced to these subjects early in life, preventing powerful institutions from rewriting history in a way which best serves their needs. As mentioned earlier, it is not in the primarily white-led government’s best interest to educate the people on their failures or to recognize that negative histories still play an active role in society. Thus, the federal and state governments work to preclude the inclusion of the truth of Indigenous and colonial relations in our schooling systems. As Anderson calls attention to, “the notion of curricular trade-offs also implies a zero sum political arena wherein we can learn as much about a society’s ascendant values from what gets excluded from the curriculum as what gets included in the curriculum,” (Anderson 2012, pg. 507).
These curricular trade offs work to shape what can be referred to as “cultural memory.” This idea is relevant to multiple disciplines relating to discrimination, and is defined by Brown and Brown in the context of African American history as, “cultural memory refers to the discourses, texts, and artifacts that shape how we conceptualize and imagine a social context or a group’s experience… The architects of official school text …help to shape the cultural memory of African American history and, hence, the sociocultural knowledge circulated about this group. Collectively, this knowledge defines how African Americans are imagined in the present,” (Brown and Brown 2010, pg. 142).
This cultural memory in regards to education is largely shaped not by the federal government, but by individual states, as education is designated as a state power by Article IX, section 2 of the US Constitution. This means that, “state laws have the potential to establish zones of sovereignty and to serve as resolutions for acknowledging a collective national memory, one built on a foundation that apologizes… to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States, and to acknowledge the wrongs of the United States against Indian tribes in the history of the United States in order to bring healing to this land,” (Benaly 2019, pg. 6). While the separation of power allows certain states to highlight the Indigenous Nations which have historically inhabited their lands, which in turn can advance sovereignty and treaty rights and resist a reification of colonial thinking, in certain states this also allows, “supporters of a more conservative view of American history to work to silence minority experiences and historical narratives that do not support a united American master narrative,” (Shear et. al 2015, pg. 68).
Furthermore, those states that do prioritize inclusion of Indigenous histories and contemporary movements are perhaps often the states which need this education least. This is because the inclusion of this curriculum is strongly correlated with the population of those who identify as American Indian/Alaska Native and the amount of federally or state recognized Tribes in the state (Foxworth et. al 2015). While this education is absolutely necessary universally, I argue that it is the states with smaller Indigenous populations who would benefit most from inclusion of these curricula because their students are more likely to graduate without being exposed to these issues than students in areas with higher Indigenous populations.