MULTICULTURALISM

Issues in the multiculturalism debate as framed by Professor Gregory Jay, Department of English, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee

Loewen's chapter 3 excerpt from Lies My Teacher Told Me:
"THE THANKSGIVING MYTH & ETHNOCENTRISM"

The civil ritual [of Thanksgiving that] we practice marginalizes Indians. Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best next to their almost naked Indian guests. As a holiday greeting card puts it, "I is for the Indians we invited to share our food." The silliness of all this reaches its zenith in the handouts that schoolchildren have carried home for decades, complete with captions such as, "They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!" When the Native America novelist Michael Dorris's son brought home this information from his New Hampshire elementary school, Dorris pointed out that "the Pilgrims had literally never seen 'such a feast' since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe."

This notion that "we" advanced peoples provided for the Indians exactly the converse of the truth is not benign.

The true history of Thanksgiving reveals embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Although George Washington did set aside days for national thanksgiving, our modern celebrations date back only to 1863. During the Civil War, when the Union needed all the patriotism that such an observance might muster, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday. The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until the 1890s did they even get included in the tradition. For that matter, no one used the term Pilgrims until the 1870s.

The ideological meaning American history has ascribed to Thanksgiving compounds the embarrassment. The Thanksgiving legend makes Americans ethnocentrism. After all, if our culture has God on its side why should we consider other cultures seriously? This ethnocentrism intensified in the middle of the last century. In Race and Manifest Destiny, Regmald Horsman has shown how the idea of "God on our side" was, used to legitimate the open expression of Anglo-Saxon superiority vis-a-vis Mexicans, Native Americans, peoples of the Pacific Jews and even Catholics. Today, when textbooks promote this ethnocentism with their Pilgrim stories, they leave students less able to learn from and deal with people from other cultures.

On occasion, we pay a more direct cost: censorship. In 1970, for example, the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoags to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. Frank James "was selected, but first he had to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to read it. James had written:

Today is a time of celebrating for you ... but it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People .... The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans .... Mossasoit, the great leader of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers ... , little knowing that ... before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags ... and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them .... Although our way of life is almost gone and our language, is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. ... What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important."

What the Massachusetts Department of Commerce censored was no some incendiary falsehood but historical truth. Nothing James would have said, had he been allowed to speak, was false, excepting the word wheat. Our textbooks also omit the facts about grave robbing, Indian enslavement, the plague, and so on, even though they were common knowledge in colonial New England. For at least a century Puritan ministers thundered their interpretation of the meaning of the plague from New England pulpits. Thus our popular history of the Pilgrims has not been a process of gaining perspective but deliberate forgetting. Instead of these important facts, textbooks supply the feel-good minutiae of Squanto's helpfulness, his name, the fish in the cornhills, sometimes even the menu and the number of Indians who attended the prototypical first Thanksgiving.

I have focused here on untoward detail only because our histories have suppressed everything awkward for so long. The Pilgrims' courage in setting forth in the late fall to make their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed. In their first year the Pilgrims, like the Indians, suffered from diseases, including scurvy and pneumonia; half of them died. It was not immoral of the Pilgrims to have taken over Patuxet. They did not cause the plague and were as baffled as to its origin as the stricken Indian villagers. Massasoit was happy that the Pilgrims were using the bay, for the Patuxet, being dead, had no more need for the site. Pilgrim-Indian relations started .reasonably positively. Plymouth, unlike many other colonies, usually paid the Indians for the land it took. In some instances Europeans settled in Indian towns because Indians had invited them, as protection against another tribe or a nearby competing European power. In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi-but neither is it exceptionally less violent.

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history. If textbook authors feel compelled to give moral instruction, the way origin myths have always done, they could accomplish this aim by allowing students to learn both the "good" and the "bad" sides of the Pilgrim tale. Conflict would then become part of the story, and students might discover that the knowledge 'they gain has implications for their lives today. Correctly taught, the issues of the era of the first Thanksgiving could help Americans grow more thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than more ethnocentric. Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous. The genial omissions and the invented details with which our textbooks retail the Pilgrim archetype are close cousins of the overt censorship practiced by the Massachusetts Department of Commerce in denying Frank James the right to speak. Surely, in history, "truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost."

To be anthropologically literate about culture contact, students should be familiar with the terms syncretism and cultural imperialism, or at least the concepts they denote.

Just as American societies changed when they encountered whites, so European societies changed when they encountered Natives. Textbooks completely miss this side of the mutual accommodation and acculturation process. Instead, their view of white-Indian relations is dominated by the archetype of the frontier line. Textbooks present the process as a moving line of white (and black) settlement-American Indians on one side, whites (and blacks) on the other. Pocahontas and Squanto aside, the Natives and Europeans don't meet much in textbook history, except as whites remove Indians farther west. In reality, whites and Native Americans in what is now the United States worked together, sometimes lived together, and quarreled with each other for 325 years, from the first permanent Spanish settlement in 1565 to the end of Sioux and Apache autonomy around 1890.

Even if no Natives remained among us, however, it would still be important for us to understand the alternatives foregone, to remember the wars, and to learn the unvarnished truths about white-Indian relations. Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God's chosen people. Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this-not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again. We must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge.

Excerpts from D'Souza's final chapter "America the Beautiful" that relate to this debate issue:

Multiculturalists have a different reason for objecting to American superiority. In their view, the United States cannot be morally superior because no culture is morally superior to any other culture. The multiculturalists hold that there are no universal standards by which cultures can be judged better or worse. All cultures are basically equal. This, of course, is the multicultural doctrine of cultural relativism. This doctrine was first articulated in the early part of the twentieth century and has been adopted by multiculturalists in the past few decades. Multiculturalists are committed to cultural relativism in large part because they see it as a weapon against racism. Racists are prevented from asserting the superiority of their culture because the very concept of superiority is denied at the outset. Cultural relativism also appeals to American intellectuals in general because they don't like approaching other societies with the assumption that their own way is always better. The presumption of cultural equality strikes them as a much fairer and more reasonable way to study other cultures.

As a methodological starting point, the premise of cultural relativism seems unobjectionable [but] I emphasize the phrase "in some respects." I am not suggesting that there is any absolute standard by which one can proclaim cultures superior or inferior. There is no set of norms in the Platonic empyrean by which we can objectively rank cultures. Nor is there any purpose in staging a cultural Olympics that awards general prizes for "superiority" and "inferiority." Certainly groups and nations are free to dispute the criteria by which progress and excellence are usually judged. The Amish, for instance, reject many aspects of modernity. They generally avoid cars and telephones, although I recently read that they have established a website to market their products. Even so, the Amish clearly value the solidarity of their community over the convenience of many of our technological contrivances. They have chosen to go their own way. And nobody considers the Amish "inferior" for this.

[But] one might also find some cultures to be superior to others in achieving universal aspirations. Do such aspirations exist? Of course they do. Anthropologist Donald Brown provides a list of them in his book Human Universals. One such universal aspiration is the desire to speak one's mind. In the West we call this the "right to free speech." But of course this "right" is not recognized in many cultures. In the late 1980s, the novelist Salman Rushdie made some satirical references to the prophet Muhammad in his book The Satanic Verses. The Islamic world was not convulsed with laughter, and in February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to punish Rushdie for his crime of blasphemy by killing him. Rushdie, heretofore known as an intrepid iconoclast and debunker of Western civilization, now begged the West to protect his life.

By denying that there are universal standards of human rights, multiculturalists become de facto apologists for tyranny. They are so concerned about one culture "imposing its morality" on another that they ignore the fact that such impositions are sometimes indispensable to protect human dignity. Early in the nineteenth century the British outlawed the ancient Indian practice of sati. This custom called for widows to be tossed onto the burning pyres of their husbands. The British also passed laws restricting child marriage, female infanticide, human sacrifice, and the caste system. In curbing these charming indigenous customs, the British were clearly imposing Western morality on their colonial subjects. But who today will dispute the results? Multicultural textbooks are strangely silent on these questions.

The doctrine that all people have certain basic rights does depend, I will concede, on a certain conception of human nature, one that ascribes a certain special quality or sacredness to humanity. There are other human aspirations, however, whose universality does not depend upon a philosophical premise of this sort. Recently I was visiting my family in Bombay, and I noticed that, on the outskirts of the city, a group of American anthropologists had set up camp to study the displaced peasants living in huts. As one scholar emerged from his tent, sporting his blue jeans and adjusting his zoom-lens camera, the peasants eyed him enviously. They eagerly told him, "We want your jeans! We want your camera!" Appalled at this suggestion, the anthropologist drew himself to full height and said, "But I am not here to convince you that our way of life is better. Oh no, I am merely here to study you. I believe that your culture is fully equal to ours. In fact, in some respect you are spared from the rat race, you are closer to nature, you are ecological saints." The peasants cogitated over these remarks and then repeated in unison, "We want your jeans! We want your camera!"

This example illustrates the point that in today's world there is a one-way movement from tribal, agrarian cultures toward modern, industrialized, American-style culture. Another way to put it is that people who go from wearing wooden shoes to wearing leather shoes will never go back to wearing wooden shoes. People identify America with triumph over necessity, with comfort, and with a longer life. Are there any societies that do not want these things? The very concept of "underdeveloped" nations, of nations seeking "development," shows that the poor countries of the world are unanimous about wanting to get richer. Until we can find cultures that prefer hunger rather than plenty, disease rather than health, and short lives rather than long ones, we have to acknowledge that material improvement is a universal objective.

Indeed, this is what Adam Smith said in his Wealth of Nations: "the desire of bettering our condition ... comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go to the grave." Moreover, given the things that people want, it is entirely reasonable to posit that some cultures (say, capitalist cultures with a Protestant heritage) are superior to other cultures (say, African socialist regimes or Islamic theocracies) in achieving these shared human objectives.

Cultural relativism collapses in the face of these universal aspirations. This was recognized by one of the Pied-Pipers of relativism, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. For decades, Levi-Strauss had emphatically insisted that so-called primitive cultures were just as complex and sophisticated as so called advanced cultures. Levi-Strauss labored ingeniously, in books like The Savage Mind and Tristes Tropiques, to show the equal value of these remote cultures. But then Levi-Strauss made an alarming discovery: the people in those remote cultures don't want to stay in those cultures. If given the choice, they would prefer to live as Westerners do rather than as their ancestors did. Once he digested this disturbing fact, Levi-Strauss gave up. In a stunning admission, he wrote, "The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being Westernized, but that there is too much delay in giving them the means to Westernize themselves. It is of no use to defend the individuality of human cultures against those cultures themselves."

This is a devastating blow for the relativist ideology. Equally crushing are the actions of the immigrants, who are walking refutations of cultural relativism. When immigrants decide to leave their home country and move to another country, they are voting with their feet in favor of the new culture and against their native culture. Leaving one's country is a serious step. It involves giving up the community in which you have been raised, abandoning your family, severing your relationships with relatives and friends. You are imperiling your entire place in the world by going from a place where you are somebody to a place where you are nobody. People do not make such decisions whimsically. So why would immigrants voluntarily uproot themselves and relocate to another society unless they were deeply convinced that, on balance, the new culture was better than the old culture? Anyone who actually believed the multicultural nonsense that all cultures are equal would never leave home.

D'Souza's case for the Unum: what more-so unites rather than divides Americans

Doesn't a nation require a loyalty that transcends ethnic particularity?

Of course it does. And fortunately America does command such a loyalty. The multiculturalists are simply wrong about America, and despite their best efforts to promote a politics of difference, Americans remain a united people with shared values and a common way of life. There are numerous surveys of national attitudes that confirm this, but it is most easily seen when Americans are abroad. Hang out at a Parisian cafe, for instance, and you can easily pick out the Americans: they dress the same way, eat the same food, listen to the same music, and laugh at the same jokes. However different their personalities, Americans who run into each other in remote places always become fast friends. And even the most jaded Americans who spend time in other countries typically return home with an intense feeling of relief and a newfound appreciation for the routine satisfactions of American life.

It is easy to forget the cohesiveness of a free people in times of peace and prosperity. New York is an extreme example of the great pandemonium that results when countless individuals and groups pursue their diverse interests in the normal course of life. In a crisis, however, the national tribe comes together, and this is exactly what happened in New York and the rest of America following the terrorist attack. Suddenly political, regional, and racial differences evaporated; suddenly Americans stood as one. This surprised many people, including many Americans, who did not realize that, despite the centrifugal forces that pull us in different directions, there is a deep national unity that holds us together.

In 1980, as a freshman at Dartmouth, I attended several meetings sponsored by the International Students Association. I enjoyed these meetings because it was an opportunity to eat good ethnic food. It was in these venues that I first encountered that most intriguing creature, the multiculturalist. The multiculturalist that I remember was a white guy who wore a pony-tail and a Nehru jacket. He was visibly excited to meet a fellow from India.

“So you’re from India,” he said. “What a great country.”

“Have you ever been there?” I asked.

“No,” he confessed. “But I’ve always wanted to go.”

“Why?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just—so liberating!”

Having had a happy childhood in India, there are many nice things I have to say about my native country, but if I had to choose one word to describe life there, I probably wouldn’t choose “liberating.” I decided to prod my enthusiastic acquaintance a little.

“What is it that you find so liberating about India?” I asked. “Could it be—the caste system? Dowry? Arranged marriage?”

My purpose was to challenge him, to generate a discussion. But at this point he lost interest. My question ran into a wall of indifference.

“Got to get another drink,” he said, racing toward the bar.

I tried the same experiment out several times, always with a similar result. And as I reflected on the matter, a thought occurred to me. Maybe these students weren’t really so interested in India at all. Maybe they were projecting their domestic discontents with their parents, their preachers, or their country, onto the faraway land of India. Maybe they were imagining India to be something that she was not: a land of social liberation, where the conventional restraints were completely lifted. While I sympathized to some degree with these aspirations, I also resented this exploitation of India for political ends. “You are entitled to your illusions,” I wanted to tell the pony-tailed guy, “but India simply is not like that.”

I mention this anecdote because it was an early indication of a phenomenon I was to investigate later, the phenomenon of bogus multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is a movement to transform the curriculum and the way that things are taught in our schools and universities.

What is needed, multiculturalists insist, is an expansion of perspectives to also teach minority and non-Western cultures. This is especially vital, in their view, because we are living in an interconnected global culture and there are increasing numbers of black, Hispanic, and Asian faces in the classroom. Multiculturalism presents itself as an attempt to give all students a more complete and balanced education, so that they can get the full picture.

Stated this way, multiculturalism seems unobjectionable and uncontroversial. The reason it is controversial is that there is a powerful political thrust behind the way that multiculturalism works in practice. To discover this ideological thrust, we must look at multicultural programs as they are actually implemented.

It is impossible to understand multiculturalism in America without realizing that it arises from the powerful conviction that Western civilization in general, and America in particular, are defined by bigotry and oppression. The targets of this maltreatment are, of course, minorities, women, and homosexuals. And so the multiculturalists look abroad, hoping to find in other countries a better alternative to the bigoted and discriminatory ways of the West.

And what do they find? If they look honestly, they soon discover that other cultures are even more bigoted than those of the West. Ethnocentrism and discrimination are universal; it is the doctrine of equality of rights under the law that is uniquely Western.

What I am saying is that non-Western cultures, and the classics that they have produced, are for the most part politically incorrect.

This poses a grave problem for American multiculturalists. One option for them is to confront non-Western cultures and to denounce them as being even more backward and retrograde than the West. This option is politically unacceptable. The reason is that non-Western cultures are viewed as historically abused and victimized. In the eyes of the multiculturalists, they deserve not criticism but affirmation. And so the multiculturalists prefer the second option: ignore the representative traditions of non-Western cultures, pass over their great works, and focus instead on marginal and isolated works that are carefully selected to cater to Western leftist prejudices about the non-Western world.

There is a revealing section of I, Rigoberta Menchu where young Rigoberta proclaims herself a quadruple victim of oppression. She is a person of color, and oppressed by racism. She is a woman, and oppressed by sexism. She is a Latin American, oppressed by the North Americans. And finally she is of Indian extraction, oppressed by people of Spanish descent within Latin America. Here, then, is the secret of Rigoberta’s curricular appeal. She is not representative of the culture or great works of Latin America, but she is representative of the politics of Stanford professors. Rigoberta is, for them, a kind of model to hold up to the students, especially female and minority students. They too can think of themselves as oppressed, like her.

This is what I call bogus multiculturalism. It is bogus because it views non-Western cultures through the ideological lens of Western leftist politics. Non-Western cultures are routinely mutilated and distorted to serve Western ideological ends. No serious understanding between cultures is possible with multiculturalism of this sort.

The alternative, in my view, is not to go back to the traditional curriculum focused on the Western classics. Rather, it is to have an authentic multiculturalism that teaches the greatest works that have been produced by Western and non-Western cultures. Matthew Arnold has a resonant phrase: “the best that has been thought and said.” That sums up the essence of a sound liberal arts curriculum.

A Speech Every American High School Principal Should Give
By Dennis Prager
7/13/2010: http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2010/07/13/a_speech_every_american_high_school_principal_should_give/page/full/

If every school principal gave this speech at the beginning of the next school year, America would be a better place.

To the students and faculty:

I am your new principal, and honored to be so. There is no greater calling than to teach young people.

I would like to apprise you of some important changes coming to our school. I am making these changes because I am convinced that most of the ideas that have dominated public education in America have worked against you, against your teachers and against our country.

First, this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity. I could not care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow or white. I could not care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships.

The only identity I care about, the only one this school will recognize, is your individual identity -- your character, your scholarship, your humanity. And the only national identity this school will care about is American. This is an American public school, and American public schools were created to make better Americans.

If you wish to affirm an ethnic, racial or religious identity through school, you will have to go elsewhere. We will end all ethnicity-, race- and non-American nationality-based celebrations. They undermine the motto of America, one of its three central values -- e pluribus unum, "from many, one." And this school will be guided by America's values.

This includes all after-school clubs. I will not authorize clubs that divide students based on any identities. This includes race, language, religion, sexual orientation or whatever else may become in vogue in a society divided by political correctness.

Your clubs will be based on interests and passions, not blood, ethnic, racial or other physically defined ties. Those clubs just cultivate narcissism -- an unhealthy preoccupation with the self -- while the purpose of education is to get you to think beyond yourself. So we will have clubs that transport you to the wonders and glories of art, music, astronomy, languages you do not already speak, carpentry and more. If the only extracurricular activities you can imagine being interesting in are those based on ethnic, racial or sexual identity, that means that little outside of yourself really interests you.

Second, I am uninterested in whether English is your native language. My only interest in terms of language is that you leave this school speaking and writing English as fluently as possible. The English language has united America's citizens for over 200 years, and it will unite us at this school. It is one of the indispensable reasons this country of immigrants has always come to be one country. And if you leave this school without excellent English language skills, I would be remiss in my duty to ensure that you will be prepared to successfully compete in the American job market. We will learn other languages here -- it is deplorable that most Americans only speak English -- but if you want classes taught in your native language rather than in English, this is not your school.

Third, because I regard learning as a sacred endeavor, everything in this school will reflect learning's elevated status. This means, among other things, that you and your teachers will dress accordingly. Many people in our society dress more formally for Hollywood events than for church or school. These people have their priorities backward. Therefore, there will be a formal dress code at this school.

Fourth, no obscene language will be tolerated anywhere on this school's property -- whether in class, in the hallways or at athletic events. If you can't speak without using the f-word, you can't speak. By obscene language I mean the words banned by the Federal Communications Commission, plus epithets such as "Nigger," even when used by one black student to address another black, or "bitch," even when addressed by a girl to a girlfriend. It is my intent that by the time you leave this school, you will be among the few your age to instinctively distinguish between the elevated and the degraded, the holy and the obscene.

Fifth, we will end all self-esteem programs. In this school, self-esteem will be attained in only one way -- the way people attained it until decided otherwise a generation ago -- by earning it. One immediate consequence is that there will be one valedictorian, not eight.

Sixth, and last, I am reorienting the school toward academics and away from politics and propaganda. No more time will devoted to scaring you about smoking and caffeine, or terrifying you about sexual harassment or global warming. No more semesters will be devoted to condom wearing and teaching you to regard sexual relations as only or primarily a health issue. There will be no more attempts to convince you that you are a victim because you are not white, or not male, or not heterosexual or not Christian. We will have failed if any one of you graduates this school and does not consider him or herself inordinately lucky -- to be alive and to be an American.

Now, please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of our country. As many of you do not know the words, your teachers will hand them out to you.

... As for what's inside, when the visitors start flowing in—the museum expects 4 million a year—they may be surprised by what they find. This is not a museum truly devoted to artifacts from the past, though it has plenty of them. It's not even much devoted to historical summary at all. You will search in vain for one of those wall-size timelines or for prominent wall texts on Little Big Horn or Chief Joseph. The people behind this place have decided to tell the story a little differently.

The major display areas are divided into three themes. "Our Universes" is about different forms of tribal knowledge, cosmologies and creation myths. "Our Peoples" deals with events that Native Americans see as crucial to their histories, like the establishment of the U.S.-Mexican border that abruptly divided Southwest desert tribes. "Our Lives" offers scenes and artwork from contemporary life, in which running shoes have replaced moccasins, in a world where some Indians live on reservations, some live in rainforests and quite a few live in Chicago. In each of the three sections, there are smaller display areas. Each one is devoted to one of 24 tribes, whose members present relevant experiences of tribal life. The exhibitions in these areas will be regularly rotated, a way of eventually representing many of the hundreds of tribes across two continents.

"It's not just a question of objects," says W. Richard West Jr., the museum's director, a Southern Cheyenne. "Native people don't see their own world in ethnographic terms." They also aren't interested in presenting their heritage as so many delectable glass-case curiosities or in having their history understood chiefly through the lens of their centuries of struggle with European settlers, however crucial that event may be. It's a history, after all, that begins some 10,000 years before the white man arrived and extends into the age of hip-hop and the Internet. "There was a tremendous 'before,'" says West, meaning before 1492. "There will be a tremendous 'after.'"

Many of the objects the museum possesses are not just objects. Some are regarded by Native Americans as living, spirit-infused things. The museum has even trained the staff to accommodate visitors who decide to make spur-of-the-moment offerings. It has also returned more than 2,000 sacred objects to tribes that said they were improperly seized by Heye's voracious collecting teams.

It is part of the evolving world of museums, operating under the influence of everything from theme parks to installation art, that presentations make ever more of their points through mood and metaphor rather than written information. This museum is no exception. One long, curving display case holds hundreds of guns and rifles, from finely engraved Spanish pistols to modern Glocks, to bring home the ways in which force has always been the final arbiter in dealings between natives and settlers. Would it be useful somewhere to have that old-fashioned timeline too? Jolene Rickard, a professor at the University at Buffalo and a Tuscarora Indian, who is a guest curator, doesn't think so. "There are other places where you can learn the exact dates of the Trail of Tears," she says. "It's less important to me that someone leave this museum knowing all about Wounded Knee than that they leave knowing what it takes to survive that kind of tragedy." The "tremendous 'before'" is still part of this place. But the "tremendous 'after'" is what the people here care about most.

A Speech Every American High School Principal Should Give By Dennis Prager 7/13/2010: http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2010/07/13/a_speech_every_american_high_school_principal_should_give/page/full/

A Speech Every American High School Principal Should Give
By Dennis Prager
7/13/2010: http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2010/07/13/a_speech_every_american_high_school_principal_should_give/page/full/