Racist degradation of petroglyphs is a teaching moment

[ad_1]

At the end of April, former congressman and presidential candidate Rick Santorum proclaimed in a speech, “We have created a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yeah, we have Native Americans, but frankly there isn’t a lot of Native American culture in American culture. His remarks sparked outrage from many in the Native American community. Santorum’s speech came a week after a white climber bolted to a petroglyph panel on the Sunshine Wall slabs north of Arches National Park, and a day before an unidentified part disfigured another with white supremacist phrases.

As an Indigenous person living in this country, I see these events as directly related. We have inherited an incomplete understanding of the history of the United States, and this understanding allows for egregious acts of dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. I know this because I received the same education as most white Americans who grew up in Kansas.

I vividly remember sitting on the floor next to my sophomores as we listened to our teacher read a book about the westward expansion and birth of Kansas. The story of the native children’s book was largely about the arrival of the settlers, how the natives taught them how to grow corn, and as these settlements developed, the natives moved peacefully to the Indian reservations. As the book continued it spoke of how the Natives drank raw buffalo blood – at that point my whole class turned their heads to me and uttered exclamations of disgust. The flood of embarrassment and confusion of that moment still haunts me today; that was not how my Navajo family lived.

After the reading, we were asked to write a few sentences answering: What kind of Indian would you like to be? But the teacher told me that I couldn’t write about being Navajo because that would be an unfair advantage. I sat down and cried, refusing to put a pencil on paper in protest as the class moved on to other activities. The teacher assigned me a suspension from school for the rest of the day or until I finished the assignment. I sat in suspension for the rest of the day.

We don’t choose which story we’re born into, or which side we land on. But we have a choice about our actions and beliefs after hearing the whole story.

As I got older, this moment helped me understand how American society as a whole relates to Indigenous peoples. The understanding with which many of my peers walked away was that Indigenous peoples were barbaric, if not sub-human, and that we voluntarily chose to resettle on reserves where we continue to live on government grants. End of the story. I have seen how education can be used as a tool of oppression and to advance societal beliefs about marginalized groups of people.

But I knew that the petroglyphs and ancestral Puebloan structures that surrounded my grandparents’ home on the Navajo Nation had a much different story. I have seen non-native peers experience these sites and come away feeling confused about the history they were taught versus what they experienced firsthand.

This continent has been a cradle of civilization for indigenous peoples for millennia. But very few Americans learn this story. From this cradle sprouted complex and sophisticated societies, which we pass through every day. Places like Cahokia Mounds, located just east of St. Louis, Missouri, were the site of one of the world’s largest urban centers. At its peak in 1100 CE, Cahokia was probably larger than London, exceeding 20,000 inhabitants. Today, this site sits just off I-70 between industrial and residential developments with little evidence that it is a Ununesco World Heritage Site. Until the early 1800s, most indigenous peoples had a higher standard of living and life expectancy than the surrounding white settler societies.

The history of the desecration of indigenous historic and sacred sites dates back over a century in the southwest. The arrival of Mormon settler communities in southeastern Utah coincided with an increased demand for artifacts and human remains from museums and universities around the world. In the 1920s, the University of Utah, for example, paid local residents of Blanding $ 2 per piece of ancestral Puebloan pottery. These economic forces, combined with deeply rooted racist views towards indigenous peoples, enabled the looting of ancestral sites to the point of stealing bodies from graves. We live with these legacies today: there is still a significant black market for artifacts stolen from public lands; in addition, there is a lack of resources for federal institutions responsible for protecting artefacts.

We don’t choose which story we’re born into, or which side we land on. But we have a choice about our actions and beliefs after hearing the whole story. This story is a story we have violently inherited as a country, and it is also a story that has been shaped by settler colonialism and racism.

It was no surprise to me, as a native, to see phrases like “WHITE POWER” scribbled on the petroglyphs of Moab. Part of me was actually happy to see it, because I knew it would help illustrate the connection between white supremacy and the dispossession of Indigenous people from their connection to the homeland.

Times like the degradation of petroglyphs in southern Utah can provide the fodder needed to make much-needed changes as a society to the way we respect Indigenous peoples and their histories. The impetus for this change should come from the outdoor community that supports Indigenous communities to ensure they can both access and protect our ancestral lands. This means fully implementing existing federal laws protecting these resources on public lands and empowering tribes and other indigenous-led organizations, such as the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, to be stewards of our own lands. The first step in rectifying this story is to collectively unlearn the story we have been taught.

Main photo: Daniel Flesher, Getty

[ad_2]