None to be found, neither witches, nor butter. Hope defied, again!
Well, it was a trail name, referring to an orange-colored jelly-like fungus that is parasitic on fungi that inhabit decayed logs. (Tremella mesenterica.) That fungus did not make an appearance on my last hike either, but many other beautiful things did during my first excursion to Chehalem Ridge Nature Park.
The 1260 acres park opened a few months ago about 40 minutes southwest of Portland, near Cornelius. The land had been subject to housing developments before the market crashed. Then Metro stepped in in 2010 and purchased the land from a lumber company, with funds coming from the Trust for Public Land, the $6.1 million its largest acquisition. Since then smaller adjacent properties have been added.
Over the last 6 years the park was developed in earnest, by down-cutting the Stinson Lumber’s monoculture of fir trees where possible, planting native shrubbery and conifers, and giving remaining old growth of oaks, cedars and madrona trees room to breathe.
There is a 10+ mile system of trails, some wheelchair accessible, that is shared by hikers, horse riders and bikers in some places.
The parking lot has functional buildings and covered picnic areas, tons of space for kids to romp around. Pets are not allowed in the park, though, to protect sensitive wildlife.
Trails are clearly marked, and in the more crowded areas at the beginning there are plenty of benches so people can rest when needed.
Several view points offer stunning views of the coast range mountain and the Tualatin valley stretching out into the misty clouds.
Many of the trail names come from the Atfalati language, spoken by the Northern Kalapuyas, a tribe among the many that suffered a horrific fate when the colonialists arrived. With the settlers came the diseases. Malaria, transmitted by mosquitos, the potential vector Anophelesfreeborni common in western Oregon until the early 1900s, was brought to Ft Vancouver by traders and spread from there. It reduced the tribal populations in the valley within three years, 1830 – 1833, by 80% (!), an apocalyptic loss. It hit the White settlers as well, but they knew to treat it with Quinine and had the remedy available, if in limited quantities.
“Cumulative evidence suggests that cultural unfamiliarity with the new diseases—that is, people did not know how to treat them—and the lack of effective medicines may have been as or more important than biological resistance, genetic or acquired, in accounting for the high mortalities. The loss of population resulted in abandoned and consolidated villages, the breakdown of social and political structures, and the loss of cumulated knowledge possessed by specialists (in a culture without written records), making the epidemics cultural as well as biological disasters.” (Ref.)
The Kalapuyans lived in tribal territories containing numbers of related and like-speaking, but basically autonomous villages. They were extremely versed in ecological management, treating the land for 4000 years with controlled, low intensity fires in the fall to create open oak savannahs and mixed forest growth.
This maximized the landscape for the products they needed most – seed, textiles, wapato, and forage for game.
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In addition to the wood land trail, I hiked the short side trails of ammefu, which means ‘mountain’ in Atfalati, ayeekwa referring to bobcats,
Bobcat or coyote scat?
and mampał, which means lake and could be a reference to Wapato lake, currently under restoration for a national wild life refuge after having been converted to onion fields by farmers.
Despite the January date, spring was in the air. It must have been the light green, bordering on chartreuse, everywhere. The forest floors covered with the invasive shining geranium,
the moss carpeting stumps, trunks and branches of the trees,
the first leaves of foxgloves, grass, lupines and even some fresh life among the Great Mullein.
The park also seems a magnet for piles. Piles from reforestation
piles from land management
piles from lunch
piles after lunch.
There is so much to appreciate in the land known as the Outside Place (Chehalem) by the Atfalati people. It speaks to the tenacity of life, even under hard conditions.
And if you are lucky you get to walk for a while behind goldilocks, who appreciated her Dad’s lesson on hibernation as much as I did. So much to learn, everywhere you turn. You just have to show up!
More vicarious walks for you all will be in the offing!
In the meantime here is an old Kalapuya prophecy, translated in 1945 by Melville Jacobs.
Long ago the people used to say that one great shaman in his dream had seen all the land black in his dream.
That is what he told the people. “this earth was all black (in my dream).”
He saw it in a dream at night. Just what was likely to be he did not know.
And then (later on) the rest of the people saw the whites plough up the ground
Now then they say, “that must have been what it was that the shaman saw long ago in his sleep.”
And here is a musical depiction of forest moods from a different continent….
Imagine a flood of young men who are uprooted, lack perspective, unable to find employment, frustrated by promises of improvement that never materialized, psychologically fragile because they feel displaced by others who they deem less deserving, and burdened with shame for an uncontrollable situation. Provide them with weapons, and encourage them to band together for ideological causes that clearly identify an “other,” a defined enemy, a target in a deeply divided country. Provide them with markers that signal belonging (to an in-group) like hats, or insignia. What have you got?
No, wrong, country, wrong century, not the Proud Boys and their ilk.
I want to talk today about the German Freikorps, armed paramilitary groups that wreaked havoc in the the years after WW I, from 1918 to about 1923 during the Weimar Republic. About 3 million soldiers returned to Germany from Belgium and France after the armistice in November 1918, experienced by them as a shameful loss. The treaty of Versailles reduced the numbers of German soldiers in a standing army to 100.000 down from a total of 6 million before the war. Many of the former soldiers, in fact almost half a million, kept their weapons after formal decommissioning, and were soon organized into militias that were financed by the government interested in defending Eastern borders, in Poland and the Baltics, and crushing sectarian uprisings in Germany itself.
In a starkly polarized country where the left as well as strongly reactionary forces hoped for political change (and the right-wing myth that the left had betrayed the army stoked hatred,) the armed members of these right-wing militias started to kill members of the opposition, both everyday Germans and famous political players. Leftists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were among them because they had been publicly anti-war. The Bavarian Senat president Kurt Eisner was killed because he was a pacifist. Matthias Erzberger (from a centrist party) was murdered because he had signed the armistice of Compiègne as a government representative. Foreign minister Walther Rathenau was killed because he was Jewish. The militias supported (failed) coups, like the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch where reactionary forces under Kapp tried to destroy the government. Anti-semitism became a battle-cry, Jews being even more abhorred than communists who were active participants in the struggle for political representation.
Fearing a civil war, the government did not punish the Freikorps members who had supported the coups and let them retreat, and even paid their wages. Many of these now floating veterans organized themselves loosely afterwards and eventually drifted into a growing Bavarian party: the NSDAP. In total, and that in itself a frightening fact, in a few years about 354 radicalized right wing killers where systematically protected by the German legal system, getting away with murder without punishment, while 10 of the 22 leftist killers received the death penalty. (Ref.)
That’s a political assassination every four days or so in a country smaller than Montana across the span of four years. We are not living in these times.
“Born of war, defeat and compromise, the new German republic was reeling from the effects of wartime rationing, material deprivation and the millions killed or wounded. The horrors of the Somme, the Marne and Verdun did not end so much as trickle back into whole towns, villages and cities, which had to accommodate the countless returning invalids, with their missing limbs and gashed faces, their damaged psyches and shell-shocked nerves.….more than four million people died as a result of armed conflicts throughout Europe in the first five years after the war, a number greater than the combined wartime casualties of France, Britain and the United States. Vicious cycles of civil war, revolution and counterrevolution meant that, between 1918 and 1923, the European continent was “the most violent place on the planet.” (Ref.)
But there are parallels that we ignore at our own peril. We do see numerous electoral successes by right-wing and authoritarian candidates in the United States, Britain, Poland, Hungary, Italy, India and countries in South America. The resentment towards globalization and cultural pluralism, combined with racist and anti-semitic ideas attitudes, echo the invective aimed at the Weimar Republic by nationalists and conservatives during the 1920s. We also face a disturbing increase in right-wing political violence across the world. A long but brilliant description by Anne Applebaum of the current slide towards autocracies can be found here.
In our own country cries for violence to be permitted are on the rise. So are little veiled comments by politicians that foment chaos and violence – just look at the January 6th evidence. And we have no way yet to measure the psychological ramifications of a pandemic that has blanketed us with death and given further rise to political division around the (enforced) mechanisms to combat the scourge.
Without invoking an analogy, we can still learn from the mistakes that were made in the 1920s, (in)actions that promoted if not installed a dictatorial regime that claimed to provide a way out of the chaos and reinstate power hierarchies of yore, so desperately longed for by the shaken German people. We can look at the role of the legal system.
“One of the most crucial failures of the Weimar Republic was the failure of its courts to uphold and defend the constitution. Court judges and state prosecutors tended to side overwhelmingly with right-wing offenders; the Kapp Putsch of 1920, for instance, in which right-wing nationalists attempted to overthrow the government, resulted in just a single conviction.”
I don’t know if the train has left the station already. The appointment of ideologically biased judges, the vagaries of the American Jury system that is so open to manipulation, the fact that politicians get away with explicit calls for violence without major legal ramifications, are cause for worry. As congress-woman Ocasio-Cortez, after being the target of a video from a republican congressman depicting her being killed, said: “core recognition of human dignity, value and worth is a line that cannot be crossed.” If we forgo accountability, we open the floodgates.
This point is acknowledged even by some truly conservative thinkers. Aaron Sibarium, associate editor at the Washington Free Beacon, writes about the “Weimarization of the American Republic” here. I don’t agree with his both-sides are extremist approach, but he has interesting things to say about the fact of and mechanisms towards polarization that are implicated in rising threats of violence, the judiciary included.
Not mentioned, of course, is the very pragmatic, rational first step a country could take: curtail the absurd amount of lethal weapons that have deadly consequences in political violence. For all we know, our very own Supreme Court will march in the opposite direction come June. As I said: look at the legal system…the parallels there are frightening. Germany turned brown, the signature color of the Nazis. We know who contributed.
Photographs today are from the city of Weimar, from a trip I took there some years back.
The LA Philarmonic had a program last year called “The Weimar Republic: Germany 1918-1933″, selected by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Here are two of the pieces that were part of it (I only found them performed by other companies.) Kurt Weill’s Berliner Requiem and Hindemith’s strange one act-opera Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen.
the leading sheep of a flock, with a bell on its neck.
an indicator or predictor of something.
– Oxford English Dictionary
Two years ago I had the opportunity of portraying numerous artists of a project called Exquisite Gorge, offered by the Maryhill Museum of Art. 11 printmakers, in collaboration with community partners, carved an original artwork each for an assigned section of the Columbia River, all of which were ultimately connected in a two-dimensional, 66 ft long representation on the grounds of the museum. Each artwork portrayed a section of the river itself and linked to the next section, forming an “Exquisite Corpse.”
We are now entering the second iteration of this artistic adventure, Exquisite Gorge II, which will exhibit the skills and creativity of 13 fiberartists whose works will align the very same sections of the Columbia River as last time. I will follow the creation of these three – dimensional art works closely and also portray the community partners involved in multiple aspects of the project, including opportunities to inspire and educate about fiber arts. The culminating event will be on Saturday, August 6, 2022 at Maryhill Museum of Art, where each free-standing “exquisite corpse” section will be brought together to reveal the continuous sculpture formed by upright three-dimensional frames.
In some ways, this first essay is the bellwether then, an indicator of what’s going to be happening across the next many months. The title, however, was mostly chosen because it relates to sheep (wethers are castrated rams, to be precise, who were leading the flock while fitted with bells to allow shepherds locate the sheep across a distance.) The phrase also points to those who establish a trend, and we will discuss that as well. How’s all this related to art? Well, the fiber for many fiber art projects has to come from somewhere, and in some cases the source is, you guessed it, sheep.
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Jessica Lavadour Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
I loved the 3000 year-old Greek tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece as a child. I mean, heroes, adventure, boat trips, flying sheep, dragons, magic, revenge, what’s not to love? Jason’s first wife Medea, I guess; who’d love a woman who kills her own children? But then again, she was betrayed by him after she had helped him acquire the golden fleece that secured him a throne. I would also likely not have loved the fact that the story described, certainly by the time Apollonius composed it in the 3rd century BC, the Hellenistic colonization of the lands around the Black sea. I had, of course, no clue about such things in the late 1950s.
The pre-history of the myth, by the way, is much older. Excavations of the 1920s and 30s, in central Turkey, uncovered Indo-European tablets from a Hittite civilisation dating to the 14th century BC. One of these has an account on it of a story similar to that of Jason and Medea. Fleece played a considerable role as symbols of prosperity; Hittite clans from the Bronze Age hung them to renew royal power. For the ancient Etruscans a gold colored fleece was a prophecy of future prosperity for the clan. (Ref.)
My son sent this when he saw the portrait above…. must have done something right in my child rearing.
Sheep have claimed symbolic roles beyond their fleece, of course. Egyptian deities were depicted with rams’ heads. Christian symbolism had a field day with innocent lambs led to slaughter, shepherds guarding their flocks, sheep being the most cited animals in the Bible with over 500 mentions. Composers like Bach, Händel, Britten, to name just a few, integrated biblical verses about them into their music. Poets would pick up the symbolism, most memorably in William Blake’s Lamb. Novelists would hone in on the image of the Black Sheep, one of the earliest in 1842 by Honoré de Balzac. The tale of two brothers competing for inheritance, of power and cruelty of life has certainly parallels to the old Greek myths. (It turns out, by the way, that wool that has black strands in it can only be sold for a fraction of the price of white wool, because it makes even dye lots much more difficult to achieve.)
And who could forget the invisible sheep in a box in The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella that pointed to the sheep’s possible role in uprooting the horrible seeds of fascism, represented by Baobab trees? Or one of the funniest science fiction novels of all time, Connie Willis’ The Bellwether, whichperfectly captures both the way fads are generated and science progresses by stumbling into lucky breaks?
Let’s look at the real thing, though, not just the symbolic use.
The gods certainly allot a share of unpredictable woes to sheep farming, a complex enterprise. The animals provide meat (lamb and mutton,) wool and pelts for textiles (here’s where the art project comes in!,) and milk from the emerging dairy sheep industry. It has been an industry in steady decline in this country, from a record high of 56 million heads in 1942 to 5.17 million heads as of January 1, 2021, according to USDA statistics.
There are multiple reasons for this downward slope: higher feed and energy costs, land disputes and fencing, losses to predators and/or disease, a consolidation of the sheep packing industry and competition with cheaper products imported from other nations. Add to that the fact that conservationists are often in conflict with sheep farmers for areas critical to each group, and that wool in clothing has been replaced to a large extent by synthetic fibers. Meat consumption has declined as well, from an average per person consumption of 4.5 pounds annually in the 1960s to just 1.17 pounds in 2020. Climate change is also having a potential effect on sheep farming with the epic drought showing effects. Range sheep operations rely on grazing on native pasture lands, some of which are increasingly regulated and permit-dependent due to endangered species protection. Clearly, it is an uphill battle. One, it turns out, that some young people, reconnecting to the land, are willing to fight.
Meet Merrit and Pierre Monnat who started a sheep farm in 2014 near Goldendale, WA.
M+P Ranches has grown from fewer than 10 coarse wooled sheep to almost 300 fine wooled Targhee and Rambouillet ewes and grown in size to about 320 acres. The sheep move from pasture to pasture, grazing on dry sagebrush country, perennial grassland and alfalfa fields throughout Klickitat County during the warmer months. In winter they are grazing further East and are fed hay provided locally, to ensure that the ewes produce enough milk for the lambs that start to be birthed in February.
Originally from Texas, Merrit moved to the PNW for internships on farms, and ended up working on Vashon Island, WA, where she met her husband. Pierre, growing up in Seattle, spent many childhood summers on a relative’s farm in Wisconsin. Later he got involved in vegetable farming in Washington, and was ready for farming on his own when they got together. They built the business, quite literally, by hand: the barns, the service buildings, the fences.
The Monnats live in a farmhouse that is over 100 years old, reached by dirt road. Their products – meat and wool – are distributed locally through farming co-ops, and in direct sales from their website. In addition, they have horses, and have built a greenhouse that adds produce to their list of products, appreciated by restaurants that insist on farm-to-table quality.
It is a work-intense and relatively isolated life, with little time for anything else. It took multiple years to find a foothold in the community, although by now the couple feels integrated and appreciates the advice handed down from older farmers. The farm work is augmented by shearing services that Pierre offers with a mobile trailer, a labor that requires intense skill, focus and concentration to avoid harming the live stock. If you hire yourself out to do this you are also dependent on the owners doing the right thing – not feeding the sheep on the day of the procedure and keeping distractions like dogs etc away from the live stock. It can be nerve wracking. It will be fascinating to watch him do a shearing demonstration in front of a live audience at Maryhill Museum during the exhibit opening in August.
In a state that mirrors the national trends, Washington sheep farming has seen a reckoning since the 1950s. By 2019 most of the state’s farm flocks consisted of 24 or fewer sheep being raised at diversified, family-owned farms, with only one last big range operation still featuring a flock of about 5000 heads. (A terrific historical overview of the issues can be found here.) The aging of farmers and their retirement without successors is a serious problem. Primary producers over 65 now outnumber farmers under 35 by more than 6 to 1.
But perhaps ranchers like the Monnats are the bellwethers for a younger generation of people willing to explore something new without the traditional ways of easing into an established family business. Young farmers pursuing the fleece – white, not golden. Not exactly Jason and Medea, but defying the gods nonetheless, with intense work, passion and determination, not the dark arts.
They are part of a movement that contributes to the growth of the local food movement and could preserve mid-sized farms in the country. They are more likely than the general farming population to grow organically, limit pesticide and fertilizer use, diversify their crops or animals, and be deeply involved in their local food systems via community supported agriculture (CSA) programs and farmers markets. (Ref.) And in our case, they connect to local individuals and organizations focussed on art, whether they are providing wool for artisanal processing or education for projects like the Exquisite Gorge II. Let them be bellwethers, by all means!
Rams are kept in the barn for the winter.
And in the building next to the barn the new renters arrived, Margo Cilker and her husband who is a cowboy. Cilker has her first album out to rave reviews, including one on Oregon Arts Watch. Here is one of her songs, That River from the album Pohorylle.
One of the pleasures of writing an independent blog is the fact that I can cover topics I know absolutely nothing about, simply because I find them fascinating. You, of course, have a similar choice: you can explore new territory or decide to skip it, since it might involve some effort to listen in new ways. And listen it shall be: this week I am introducing a number of different artists who employ sound in order to map aspects of our world as linked to the past, present and future, or to capture ephemeral processes.
What they all have in common is that they are art – devised as sound sculptures in some cases, associated with visual images (painted, sculpted or digitally created) in others, or plain compositions using sound collected from the environment or electronically generated. I cannot tell if I am more fascinated by some of the underlying ideas, or the art works that result from the ideas. I guess it varies.
Today I will start with two artists who are about the present and the past. Wednesday’s segment will introduce two artists who explore the linkage between sound and psychological processes extending into the future. The two installments are meant as a package, examining working with sound from four different angles. I don’t expect anyone to listen to any of the links in full – that would cost a lot of time – but a bit of sampling will give you a taste of what’s out there and maybe instill curiosity for more.
Composer Bill Fontana is one of the pioneers of sound art in the U.S. with a career spanning five decades and taking him to international acclaim. He collects site-specific sounds and generates sound configurations from those recordings that reflect aspects of the site and are intended to shape our visual interaction with the site or visual surrounding. Working with acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers) that sample the environmental sounds, he creates “sculptures” with the input, musical transformations that are centrally experienced by the listener.
For example, he has composed subtle variations of the music of the Golden Gate Bridge, a live audio/video installation created for its 75th anniversary in 2012, now in the collection of SF MOMA. Here is a link to some of his acoustical visions – the bridge piece can be heard in the third segment.
Another sound sculpture can be found in Rome, in the entry hall of the National Museum of 21st Century Art. He connects Zaha Hadid’s architecture of the building with the acoustic, harmonic and rhythmical qualities of the water that has run in Roman aqueducts since time immemorial. Well, since Roman times. Ok, 2000 years.
You can hear the sculptural sound and the underlying source here.
Miami Beach at Night
And here is a link to one of his most recent projects, Sonic Dreamscapes that connects sounds of the Miami seascape under threat of climate change to our auditory cortex, making the listener aware of the fragility of our world. This multimedia installation was installed in Miami Beach in 2018.
The installation cycle begins during the day with individually recurring auditory recordings answering each other from different spatial points in SoundScape Park. By afternoon, the “musical vocabulary” will grow as additional sounds are added to the repertoire. As the evening approaches, environmentally inspired abstract videos will emerge on the video wall, allowing visitors to experience a myriad of floating sounds and meditative images.
Where Fontana is about connecting us to the sound of places with an eye on change across time, Satch Hoyt is a sound artist concerned with the sounds of people, their movements across space in the past and preserved echos in contemporary music. In addition to actual sculptures that interact with sound installations (link here, scroll down and click on the strips below the images to get to the sound,) Hoyt has an ongoing multi-media project in the works, Afro-Sonic Mapping, which traces specific traditional African music from centuries ago to the contemporary musical styles of the African diaspora.
Street Art in BerlinRemembering Colonial Times….
The project connects archival recordings of African music from Congo and Angola, collected by European anthropologists of the late 1800s and found in Berlin’s ethnology museum, to the urban music in the suburbs of large contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian cities. Turns out, the musical patterns transmigrated to today’s urban music, linking Luanda, Lisbon and Salvador da Bahia, or Dakar, Cali and Lima. With examination of aural histories, interviews and musical exploration with local African musicians to whom Hoyt brought the old recordings, and with collaboration with modern musicians across continents, he re-imagined the sounds, rhythms and melodies, rarely recorded in bygone periods of colonialism and slave trade.
Two years ago the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin offered the first large presentation of the project. Paintings, lectures, videos and 2 concerts attracted big crowds across a full week.Here is some of the music interspersed with an explanatory interview with the artist. The focus was on the lusophone triangle, between the large Portuguese speaking regions of the word, Portugal, its former African colonies (Angola, Mozambique) and Brazil, mapping the sounds, back and forth. I am not sure that Hoyt’s goal to “bring back the music to the places of origin where it was recorded and create some kind of sonic restitution in a postcolonial world, a transformation,” can be accomplished, I certainly would not know how to judge that.
But I find the idea of mapping the network of historical pathways of rhythms or melodies which were, other than language, the only things that could be brought and kept during torturous migrations, fascinating. Musicians acting as archeologists, digging out old artifacts under layers of later civilizations. Sounds of spaces or historical sounds, recorded and re-coded for us to sharpen our listening, to form connections – art as mediator.
Photographs today are of San Francisco, Miami and Berlin, respectively; the Democratic Republic of Congo has to wait for another life time….
When seeking beauty under my nose (my goal this week,) the city of Tigard is not necessarily the first place that comes to mind. Home to box stores, multiplexes, industrial sites and bathed in exhaust fumes from the unending traffic at the intersections of 99 W and Rt 217, this small community never beckoned for a visit. Well, that could change.
I discovered its Outdoor Museum, open since 2019, by accident. Visiting an amazing upholstery store (waitlist 6 months! should tell you all) to deal with a couch abused for 26 years by boys, dogs and a lounging blog writer who shall remain nameless, I walked down the main street of downtown Tigard, looking at small shops, street cafes and public art until I came to the Rotary Plaza.
A ¾ mi heritage trail begins here, commemorating individual families representative of the history and changes of this community.
Multiple rusty, angular panels mirror the inactive railroad tracks that run parallel to the trail, and display stenciled and printed information about diverse individuals who shaped the history of the place. Historic photographs bring the stories to life, reminding us that although change ultimately happens only through collective efforts, it is individuals who drive and sustain the collective.
The installations were executed by Suenn Ho who’s firm Resolve Architecture has, among others, a large portfolio in the realm of civic and educational design. Five Oaks Museum (check out their on-line exhibits!) provided the documentation. Various art works by contemporary artists are also on display along the way. In truth, it struck me as a hodgepodge of mediums and styles that were far more authentically representative of a community creating a memorial to its history than any uniformly curated exhibition could ever be. It captures caring about a place, rather than depicting it from an elevated perspective.
Here is a look at the displays. The trail starts with Harry Kuehne who built successful businesses in what was then called Tigardville (later shortened to Tigard by the railroad that wanted no confusion with Wilsonville, one of the near-by stops.) Lover of horses, he was owner of a livery stable that rented horses and carts to the general public and traveling sales men who arrived by train. He later branched out to add a farm machinery shop – his story is cleverly used as an entry to the changes that arrived across time, from rural outpost to connection via railroad to the arrival of the automobile and how all that influenced what farmers grew or businesses adapted to.
Those who are commemorated along the trail are testimony to the increasing diversity of the community. The story of Peter Hing represents the contributions of immigrants from China.
The story of John and Annie Cash does not shy away from reminding us of the constitutionally ensconced anti-Black discrimination in our state.
Next we encounter community leader Evangelina “Vangie” Sanchez who fought tirelessly for educational opportunities and integration of Latino children and families.
Then there are Yoshio Hasuike and Sachiko Furuyama. Although he was born in Tigard he did not escape the fate of internment during World War II.
I somehow missed taking a picture of the last station in this series, commemorating Baχawádas Louis Kenoyer, the last known speaker of the Tualatin Kalapuya languages, who provided testimony of this ancestors and his life on the Grand Ronde reservation. Luckily the story can be found here.
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Along the way, three sculptures by Christine Clark, commissioned by the City of Tigard, pick up the rusty tone of the commemorative plates and guide us along the time-line of people’s experiences: Live, Settle, Advance. (2020)
Live (full and detail)SettleAdvance
Mosaic artist Jennifer Kuhns represents important features for the region in Tualatin Liveblood (2020) with blue mosaic inlays in flowing patterns. They suggest water, the Tualatin river and Fanno Creek being nearby, and show added objects that were important to the tribes of the region.
Add to the eclectic mix two murals who face each other by Joshua Lawyer and MJ Lindo-Lawyer: here is the explanation for the work from the Downtown Tigard Public Art Walking Guide:
“Supported in part by a $75,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant and funding from Washington County Visitors Association, this mural was commissioned by the City of Tigard as part of the Tigard Outdoor Museum project. The mural depicts the Kalapuyan people – a Kalapuya group, the Atfalati, were the Tualatin Valley’s earliest inhabitants – and what they valued most.
The design showcases large animals as spiritual guides. The wolf leads a young woman on her fishing voyage – an activity that had deep cultural significance to the Atfalati, and which remains very popular in the Tualatin Valley to this day. The other contains references to historic cultures, local wildlife, and water. The two mirroring artworks painted under the 99W underpass show a contrast in color. One is lit up in mainly orange hues, while this mural is muted in blue colors. The dueling colors depict the two extremes of summer and winter. The seasons were vitally important to the Kalapuyan people, who based their seasons on their crop. The murals’ artists chose to depict the duality of nature, with a cooler scene shown here, and then a warmer, brighter scene shown on the opposite wall.”
Joshua Lawyer (2020) I found my kind of humor on his website…. MJ Lindo-Lawyer (2020)
I liked the fact that all of these women were depicted in modern clothing, placing them here and now in a continuum of their native culture, preserved through their elders.
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At the end of the trail you can cross over into Dirksen Nature Park which offers a loop through old growth forest and savannah and eventually leads across Fanno Creek back to where you started, a total of about 3 miles. (Step by step hike description can be found here.)
At the very beginning there is a new playground that displays serious creativity (and likely serious money.) Yet not a kid in sight when I walked by.
That was very different at about a kilometer south where an old playground with rickety structures was teeming with children of all ages and one lonely port-a-potty sported a line. I had to rest for a while and sat on a bench next to picnic tables where some 12 year-old beauties were trying out nail polish, happily chattering away in Russian. Little boys were chasing each other and screaming in Spanish, and two harried moms called to Ahmed and Arjaf, respectively, that it was time to go home. I was thinking about all the settlers that I had just learned about and how happy they would be to see Tigard as a place that made it possible for all to call it home, meeting and mingling at work, at play – and hopefully at the outdoor museum to understand how integration, both legally and factually, had to be fought for by courageous immigrants and their allies.
So where shall we go next?
Music today is from the Mosaic Concert (New music and art by NW women) presented by Cascadia Composers. Lisa Neher’s compositionLook withinis played by the Delgani String Quartet.
“So who are the good guys?,” my Beloved asked. “What do I know,” was my response, having only vague associations with Haiti, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, paramilitary violence of the Tonton Macoute, and devastating earthquakes. Crash course in history ensued, immediately regretted, given the revelation of nothing but horrors.
The small French-Creole nation occupies the western third of the Caribbean Island Hispaniola. Its inhabitants are the poorest in the Western hemisphere, with ⅔ of its children malnourished, and 1 out of 5 dying before the age of six. 60% of Haitians live on fewer than $2 a day. About half the population does not know how to write or read. How did it get there?
The island was claimed by Columbus for Spain in 1497, but the French took over in the 17th century and soon colonized it as a slave state raising sugar cane. Hard labor, torture and tropical disease ravaged the slave population, with endless slave ships arriving from Africa to keep the required numbers up around 800.000 slaves working for the French colonial masters. Definitely not good guys. In fact, really bad guys, because after a successful slave rebellion in 1804, they “negotiated” for years with the help of war ships to be paid reparations for their lost colony and human capital, eventually settling Haiti with a crushing debt of 150 million Francs to achieve indemnity, the acknowledgement of independence. With interest the debt was paid off finally in 1947. By then the necessary borrowing to be able to make the installments had undermined any chance to build a functioning educational and health system or public infrastructures. Details can be found here.
So the slave rebels were good guys? Hm, not entirely. The consistent rape of Black slave women by White slave owners had led to a separate class of Mulattoes who sought domination over the Black population after the uprising. Long story short, much infighting ensued between groups that really should have united forces against the colonial masters. The Mulattoe elites often used Black generals or politicians as puppets or their interest. Eventually the country divided in North and South being ruled by two different factions. The South clung to the ideal of the French revolution, with land being distributed to the poor. There, the average Haitian was an isolated, poor, free, and relatively content yeoman. In the north, the average Haitian was a resentful but comparatively prosperous laborer under restrictive rule of a royalist king.
Continued factional fighting and bloodshed eventually led to an occupation by US forces in 1915. Good guys? Ahem. Occupation was driven by interest in access to the Panama canal and vying for control of the Caribbean over European, particularly German interests. The occupation lasted until 1934.
Fast forward to 1957 with the election of Francois Duvalier, Papa Doc, who installed a regime of terror with the help of paramilitary executioner forces, the Tonton Makoute. Evil guy. More than 30.000 Haitians considered opposition were killed during his reign. His son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc, took over after his father’s death but had to flee to France when the extent of his kleptocracy, his regime’s theft and corruption became public. The role of the US? Bad guys. In the course of pursuing cold war interests, they did nothing to stop the atrocities or persecute those responsible later on, not even during human rights-focused administrations such as Jimmy Carter’s. “Butch Ashton, a business man who made his fortune during the Duvalier dictatorship by establishing corporations such as Citrus (a fruit exporter) and the Toyota dealership in the country’s capital, vehemently claims that the Tonton Macoute militia was trained by the U.S. Marine Corps and that the highest levels of the American government were complicit in this arrangement.” (Ref.)
And here we are in demand again, or so it is claimed by political observers who suspect that Haiti’s elite was behind last week’s murder of the current president, hoping to stave of a brewing revolution by the ever more impoverished population, suppressing it with the potential help of an American military intervention alongside Colombian and Honduran forces. Who was President Moïse, assassinated by a tightly organized group of paramilitaries pretending to be US Drug Enforcement agents, Americans and Columbians among them, apparently supported by Columbian ultra right-wing President, Iván Duque Márquez, bosom buddy of Brasilian president Bolsanero? (Particularly bad guys.)
Moïse a good guy? Nope. He had been clinging to the presidency even though his term was over; he had been syphoning away the money given through the Venezuelan funded program Petrocaribe to offset the devastating effects of the 2010 earthquake – 300.000 dead eventually and over a million Haitians made homeless, migrating to the cities in search for escape from starvation. Mass demonstrations against corruption and repression, urging his removal stoked fear in the 12 or so elite Haitian families who indirectly control the country.
There is clearly increasing rebellious fervor coming out of the millions of people cooped up in Haitian shantytowns. Marauding forces (no good guys either) were for the last decade a scourge on both the rich and the poor, with indiscriminate kidnappings and murders. Some of these gangs were hired by the business- and landowning mid- and upper class to protect their interests. Others formed as a response to the increasing poverty, particularly after the earthquake. Enter Jimmy Cherizier, a cop with an elite unit of the Haitian National Police called UDMO, the Departmental Unit of Maintenance of Order, who has organized many of these “gangs” into a G9 unit of vigilance on steroids and the expressed goal of cleaning up the rot of Haitian elites’ repression and extortion.
Moïse’s assassination might very well have been a means to an end to invite Columbian, Honduran and, in the end, UN or US forces, as a powerful barricade against a threatened revolution from below. In the meantime people starve to death, die of Covid-19 (inoculation has not even started,) and are kidnapped for ransom on random bases. No-one official coming to their rescue, as far as we can see, certainly no functioning government. Ariel Henry, the man who Moïse appointed prime minister just before the assassination claimed the right to lead Haiti, pitting him against acting head of state Claude Joseph, whose government has so far managed the response to the killing. Head of the Supreme Court, Judge René Sylvestre, who could have been Moïse’s successor, died of Covid-19 last week. No-one is certain who is in charge, when the next election will be, how to get a handle on the proliferating violence.
Repeat: no good guys. No easy solutions, either.
Music is a medley of Haitian musical styles from a recent performance at the Kennedy Center.
Montages are from my 2020 art series Setting Sail.
Esther Bejarano z”l, one of the last survivors of Auschwitz’s girl orchestra, died this weekend at age 96. A life-long fighter for remembrance and against authoritarian regimes, she was a controversial figure in Germany to which she returned in the 1960s, critical of Israel’s politics and Zionism, something that (non-Jewish!) Germans would not tolerate as can even be seen in the varied reactions to her death. An active member of the German Communist Party (DKP), she taught many generations, mine included, about fascism and resistance, about the twin evils of silence and forgetting.
The Holocaust survivor taught us that to fight against authoritarian movements you have to be familiar with their play-books. When you see tricks from those books popping up all over the place, you know where to turn your attention. I was reminded of that when I read last week about the new law in Texas that prohibits abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy, when you can detect the fetus’ heartbeat. One of the key clauses in this bill involves reliance on citizen informants, who can sue doctors and clinics if they detected “illegal” abortions, with an award for each successful lawsuit of a minimum of $10.000. All the gory details of this new law, and the implications of its attempts to switch enforcement from state to citizens can be found in this New York Times article.
Photographs are from sights and objects found in public squares in small Texan towns
I want to focus here, though, on the psychology of denunciation in our current political situation. When I think about informants my immediate thoughts turn to either Nazi Germany or the former GDR where 189.000 citizen informers fed the STASI with reports of real or assumed behavior of neighbors. In both cases, the betrayal of Jews, people with anti-Hitler sentiments, or prohibited sexual orientation in the 1930s, and the denunciation of anti-socialist, pro-western ideologies in the post-war GDR, led to extreme punishments, even death sentences. Actions had existential consequences and yet people flocked to tell on their neighbors.
Of course, Germany is not an isolated case. Think Argentinian security structures during the years of dictatorship, or look at the North Korean neighborhood watch system, that every single citizen is required to belong to. A self-policing citizenry helps an authoritarian regime, providing otherwise impossible access to private information and saving resources that would have to go to hired enforcement.
But what are the citizens’ motivations that lead to this collaboration? There is a bunch of scientific literature on the topic, but also literary case studies of individual cases, particularly of women who in this regard switch from the role of victim quite often to the role of perpetrator. Personal interest to settle old scores, jealousy, elimination of competition, attention seeking, trying to vie for favor with the state, fear and, yes, money, all contribute to the eagerness to denunciate. Seen from a different angle, women in particular, who are usually overall less free to act, more oppressed in authoritarian regimes and traditional societal and family structures, can experience agency.
And women will know about other women’s bodies. And no bodily issue is more about religious identity and revenge against a world that has seemingly left White evangelicals behind, than abortion.
Denunciations are nothing new in American history. As early as 1657 we had a New Hampshire law that incentivized locals to become informants on Quaker activities (and penalized anyone housing them) by offering hefty sums of money. In the early 1950s, with the United States in the grip of McCarthyism, the state encouraged a culture of denunciation, where thousands of Americans were accused of communist involvement or sympathies and subsequently publicly shamed, marginalized, persecuted or prohibited to pursue their chosen careers. Never mind that there often was no evidence, no right to respond, no legal protection.
Here and now, though, the extremes of polarization have made enmity personal. People are not just scared of some nebulous commies taking on the US, eager to protect the nation. People are seeing their own personal beliefs and circumstances under attack, their religious beliefs ridiculed, their relative societal status in decline from within. That makes motivation to get back at those around you, perceived to be the enemy, all the more personal, justifying to be vicious. Being active collaborators in this battle for religious. political and cultural dominance also creates an increased sense of in-group cohesion. It’s us against them, and if we can manage, let’s have them rot in jail. Down to the Über driver who transported the woman to the abortion clinic. I predict a deluge. As does the Texan government whose trick book is not coincidentally taking its tricks from regimes that they long to emulate. Hardening polarization, they know, will keep them in power by motivating and accepting extreme measures.
At least Esther Bejarano z”l is spared to have to live through a repeat of history. May her memory be a blessing – and an obligation.
Music depicts her performances in the last years with the Hip Hop Band Microphone Mafia. She was in her nineties. I stand in awe.
I’m coming back to the topic of truthful accounting of history because it matters. Any form of society that wants to function justly, equitably and ethically – I can think of none right now, but we can aspire – needs to look at the way things were historically handled, if only to rectify mistakes in pursuit of the desired state. And it irks me to no end, that the white-washing of history, the refusal to acknowledge bad plays or bad actors, is not exactly a monopoly of the bad guys (yes, you know who) but is happening as well in quarters that really should know better.
Some years back it was the rehabilitation of fascist film maker Leni Riefenstahl by no other than German feminist powerhouse Alice Schwarzer, refuted by Susan Sonntag, who pointed to the continual thread of fascist ideals across Riefenstahl’s life and work. Three years ago the Berlin Museum of Photography added to the “quiet absolution” of the famous artist.
Today’s case in point was brought to me by the successful, feminist OnThisDay She Twitter account, which offers daily blurbs about women that have been neglected by history. Tania Hershman, a British poet, runs the account with Jo Bell and Ailsa Holland, all co-authors of the book On This Day She: Putting Women Back into History One Day at a Time, which came out this spring. It features 366 stories about mostly forgotten women. So then, what do you make of this:
A dazzling feminist and sports icon, lover of Josephine Baker, close friend of Jean Cocteau, darling of the Paris intelligentsia? Punished for her identity? You’d think so. But why killed by the Resistance?
The tweet prefers not go there.
It turns out that Morris was alleged to have become a Nazi collaborator, said to have accepted a personal invitation by Hitler to attend the Berlin Olympics. She was accused of spying for German intelligence and of passing Allied military plans to the Germans, giving the names of members of the French Resistance to the Gestapo and of actively participating in the torture of prisoners, particularly women prisoners as well as having made huge profits from the black market sale of fuel confiscated by the German army. After a secret trial by the Resistance, she was killed by British commandoes and French partisans.
Here is another site which lifts obscure people from history, that goes even further. Rather than omitting crucial accusations, it pushes them aside along the line of, “but she was such a bad ass…”
Morris joined the Reich, performed acts of espionage against the French government throughout the late 30s, and when France finally fell to Hitler in 1940 Violette Morris became so ferocious in her tactics rooting out the French Resistance that she was known as “The Hyena of the Gestapo”. Rolling through town with psychotic thugs named One-Armed Jean, Jo the Mammoth, and Le Sanguinaire (“The Bloodthirsty”), this former boxing champ realized she had a hell of a knack for beating confessions out of prisoners – which, incidentally, is kind of the Gestapo’s thing anyways – and armed with nothing more than a whip and a zippo lighter she destroyed Resistance cells and British SOE spies anywhere she could find them. Which is admittedly pretty impressive, even though I don’t exactly have any love for her ideology. (Bolded by me.)
So… yeah, it’s kind of a bitter finale because this chick goes from Jimmy Johnson to Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS in the course of like 2 paragraphs, but it turned out that by-and-large the Nazis tended to get what was coming to them, and that’s exactly how it went down with Violette Morris. She became so notorious in her counter-espionage tactics that the SOE organized a special mission to take her out of the picture, and on April 26, 1944 – just a month or so before D-Day – British Commandos and French Resistance partisans ambushed her and opened fire on her supercharged sports car with a dozen or so machine guns, whacking her out in slow motion Sonny Corleone-style. She was buried in a potter’s field and is now basically almost universally-despised by everyone in France. Which, honestly, should probably count as bonus points somewhere.
As it turns out, we have no proof either way, Violette Morris being a nasty piece of work, or the victim of false accusations conveniently targeting a rebellious woman ahead of her time (or her sports competitors.) A 2019 book, “Femme qui court” (“Woman Running”), by Gérard de Cortanze, a Jewish author whose grandfather participated in the Resistance, argues that numerous historical sources and archival material relating to the Nazis revealed no proof for her collaboration. Since the Resistance trials were not documented for safety’s sake, we have no evidence from that corner either.
I think I’ve made my point, though. Just because some person scores on whatever identity board you count on – degree of badass, daring lesbian life style – does not mean you should not mention the darker side, or, worse, shrug it away. You should do full scholarship to be truly informed about your idol, and you need at least mention that there are competing versions of the full actions embraced by the historical figure. Something that is never done while white-washing.
Selective myopia is not going to serve us well.
Music hails from the Paris of the 1930s and 40s, photographs from Parisian flea markets that allow glimpses into the history of the population.
Well, I lived to tell the tale. For a moment, though, I thought I’d succumb to a heart attack. Here I am, early morning in my chair at the window overlooking the pear tree, scrolling though my emails on my iPhone. All of a sudden something like a cannonball approaches, hitting the window right next to my head with a loud enough boom that the dog starts barking at the three-fire-alarm level. Not one, but two sizable birds, one clutching the desperate other, tumble downwards after impact, leaving in their wake a cloud of soft, small, white feathers that drift slowly like snowflakes over the butterfly bushes onto the ground.
All the way down there, the bigger one, a hawk, finishes what he started, hacking the mourning dove to death. High on adrenaline I manage to get a picture on the iPhone, then start yelling at him, if only to prevent the poor dove to be torn to pieces – which I would have to remove bit by bit… Then I run down, hissing at my dog to stay inside, and pick up the poor bird to dispose it where the puppy can’t get to it.
Upon my return, the hawk sits among the leftover feathers, wondering where breakfast went. With me still standing there, just a few meters away, a couple of crows swoop down and start to chase him. That was the end of it.
Except in my head. I could not stop thinking about the symbolism of hawks and doves, of war and peace, of the demise of the latter, no matter how much I tell myself about the necessary ways of food chains in nature. What is a woman to do? Why, distract herself with questions that can be answered, in contrast to the ones about warriors seeming to rule, forever.
Where did the hawks and doves connotation come from? It turns out it was coined, about 200 years ago, by a Congressman in this country, John Randolph.
“In the run-up to the War of 1812, Randolph described those clamoring for military action against Great Britain in the name of American honor and territory as “war hawks.” The term had talons and caught on. He was especially thinking of Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, members of his own Republican party.“
Of course I had to look up that war as well, and found bitter-sweet convergence to my last blog’s claims about the variability of historical narratives. Historian C.P. Stacey summed it up:
“..the War of 1812 is ‘an episode in history that makes everybody happy, because everybody interprets it differently’. Americans believe they gave their former mother country a good drumming, Canadians pride themselves in turning back ‘the massed might of the United States’, and ‘the English are happiest of all, because they don’t even know it happened’. These competing perspectives are the result of the different functions the Anglo-American conflict served in their respective nations’ historical master narratives.”
“The war provided Americans with a set of symbols, heroes, and legends on which to build their national identity. Aside from giving a boost to American westward expansion and growing political support for a large standing army and a sizable navy, federally sponsored internal improvements, and a national bank, the war also produced symbols of national identity such as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘Uncle Sam.’” (Ref.)
What was it all about? Well, who would have guessed, economic competition and trade disputes at a time when England was busy trying to fight Napoleon, the British blockading sea ports and trying to prevent American westwards expansion, capturing American ships and forcing some 15.000 American soldiers shanghaied at sea into their own military forces. Hailed as a second War of Independence here in the US, it eventually catapulted General Andrew Jackson into the presidency. He was an expansionist who opposed the abolitionist movement and is most infamously known for his pivotal role in signing the Indian Removal Act, which forcibly removed most members of the major tribes of the Southeast to IndianTerritory; these removals were subsequently known as the Trail of Tears.
And our friend John Randolph, he of the hawks and doves? Not really our friend, even though he did oppose the war of 1812. He was pro-slavery with a passion, with ardent speeches during his many years in congress. In 1825, he talked for several days in opposition to a series of measures proposed by President JohnQuincyAdams; Randolph argued these measures would give advantage to the emerging industrial powers of New England at the expense of the Southern states. This series of speeches was the first Senate filibuster. I repeat, not our friend.
Makes me grieve the dove, the doves, all over again.
But, of course, life goes on.
This is actually two doves, one drinking, shown from behind, the other looking on.
Meanwhile, in the old countries, Russia was fighting off the French, and this 1812 Overture is the eternal reminder….
If you had asked me some months ago what Critical Race Theory is, the likely answer would have been, “Huh?” These days, there isn’t a news outlet that doesn’t engage the term on a daily basis, with emotional appeals to ward off the Right’s attacks on racial reckoning, or accusations of Leftie indoctrination of blessed little school children (let’s equip teachers with body cameras so we can control if they are indoctrinating!, let’s pass state laws that prevent school curricula from teaching CRT,) or scholarly treatises that try to explain why this or that approach to teaching history must not/must include this or leave out that.
I figured we could use a most basic description of the issues in order to understand where the roots for the mobilization of the current hysteria about the evil of Critical Race Studies lie. And I mean basic. The long versions from which I summarize, can be found here and here.
Critical Race Theory is a body of work that is anchored in legal scholarship, with three complex principles under constant evaluation (certainly not found in any primary school curriculum!) The debate established three main principles: that there is a Constitutional Contradiction, an Interest Convergence, and the Price of Racial Remedies. The Constitutional Contradiction, scholars argued, describes the framers’ choice to privilege the rewards of property over justice. Interest Convergence refers to the demonstrable fact that Whites will promote racial advances for Blacks only when they also promote white self-interest. The Price of Racial Remedies assumes that Whites will not support civil rights policies that may threaten white social status.
More generally, these days we see a lot of scholars, historians and journalists engage in Critical Race Studies, which basically try to teach us why the undeniable inequality, the ongoing differences in experienced violence and trauma for Blacks is not just an outcome of racist acts committed by some biased, racist people. Instead, they argue, the roots for the differences in lived experiences between Blacks and Whites, lie in systems that perpetuate the original power differential and beliefs in the supremacy of one race over the other – systems that include parts of our culture and the way it teaches history, parts of the social infrastructure that allows those on the top to stay there and prevents others to get a leg up, and institutional set-ups that perpetuate a certain order.
According to the Right, slavery, racial subjugation, segregation and inequity did (or might have) existed, but that’s a thing of the past. We now have – at least theoretically – equality before the law, they say, and so any differences in economic or educational attainment, in longevity or susceptibility for diseases etc., is due to personal choices, engagement, or absence thereof. No need to bring the subject of racism into the classroom, where it makes white children feel bad, raises ugly memories of a Civil War, and subverts the origin story of this proud country from individual freedom and initiative to a nasty tale of the original sin of slavery.
Not so, counter the progressives, we have an ongoing process of racial discrimination that can only be changed if we tackle the origins and point to the continuity built into our institutional systems, from prisons to schools to banks. We are at a cross road. The rising awareness of parallel lives in our society, embodied most dramatically in the killings of Blacks by police in recent years, have alerted and concerned enough people that a more truthful debate about our history can begin and should be carried into the schools.
History is mobilized, then, for political purposes, on each side. That is nothing new, of course, except that the dominant class, those in power, always had a monopoly on what and how history was taught, at least officially. With the ability to access other sources, for both students and teachers (who, for example, can benefit from the NYT’s 1619 project’s syllabi) that exclusive right is now under attack. Having lost other battles in the culture wars,(the majority of Americans now thinks positively of same-sex unions, for example,) CRT is the perfect new bogeyman that can whip the base into a frenzy, race having always been an attractive issue for conservatives to mobilize around, given how it can be used to stoke white resentment. Nothing more threatening than losing control over what your children think, or how critical thinking is encouraged in the first place.
Of course, if you intentionally and repeatedly misrepresent and distort the facts of what the engagement with our racist history in schools implies, if you lie about the present-day existence of racism and its systemic roots, you do not just undermine any possible objective discussion, but you endanger the entire democratic project that the founders tried to establish.
That said, making history culpable for the present, singularly dwelling on it instead of looking how to fight for a better future is to be avoided. As Frederick Douglass said in his Speech for the 4th of July: “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”
Or as Princeton historian Matthew Karp put it (from whom I also borrowed above quote):
“The past may live inside the present, but it does not govern our growth. However sordid or sublime, our origins are not our destinies; our daily journey into the future is not fixed by moral arcs or genetic instructions. We must come to see history… not as “what we dwell in, are propelled by, or are determined by,” but rather as “what we fight over, fight for, and aspire to honor in our practices of justice.”
And while we’re at it, one of the most accessible books about how the history of slavery is transmitted these days, is Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed. Written at times poetically, always absorbingly, it is a must read. Review can be found here.
