This blog is stumbling along at about the pace I expected. Anyway, the country has gotten much worse since last September when I wrote that I was going to start “bearing witness,” and it recently culminated with the summary execution of a Minnesota woman by ICE thugs a few days ago, and the Trump administration’s unsurprising lies about “self-defense.”

Last October, I actually wrote a thing that I never put up here, I can’t remember why. It seems worth putting up now, though. It’s about the Right’s war on history, which they characterize as a war on “political history.” I thought as long as we’re mourning the assassination of US citizen Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathon Ross, before she’s forgotten forever by . . . non-political? history, I may as well finish what I started last fall, which I wrote when a Canadian friend told me about something called “Orange Shirt Day.”

Its official name is the National Day for Truth & Reconciliation, it’s celebrated (if that’s the word) every September 30, and it recalls Canada’s historical crimes against its First Nations. It’s been observed since 2013 and became a federal statutory holiday in 2021.

The specific history remembers the Canadian Indian residential school system, in which children were removed from their families to be raised in Christian schools and assimilated into White Society. Children’s clothes and other belongings were taken, they were dressed in uniforms, their hair was cut, and they weren’t allowed to speak their own languages. Needless to say, any practice of indigenous religion was also forbidden. Beatings were common. So was sexual abuse. Illness spread quickly in these schools—tuberculosis, especially—medical attention was often non-existent until much too late, and the mortality rate was much higher than in the national population.

Canada picked up this practice from, surprise! the US. Indian schools lasted from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, though the last Indian school in Canada wasn’t shut down until 1997. The practice of wearing an orange shirt on Truth & Reconciliation Day comes from a story told by Phyllis Webstad, a Northern Secwepemc woman, who at age six had a brand new orange shirt taken from her and never returned when she was put in an Indian school. This didn’t happen in 1898 or 1915. Or in the 1930s, or in the 1950s. It happened in 1973. Phyllis Webstad is nine years younger than I am.

It’s ironic that last fall’s Orange Shirt Day came only five days after former Fox & Friends co-host and current US Secretary of, um, War? Pete Hegseth, declared that the Medals of Honor awarded to the soldiers who took part in the Wounded Knee massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota people would not be rescinded, as the descendants of those executed had been demanding for years. There was a difference he said, between “being politically correct and being historically correct.” Which is sort of true and sort of not.

First of all, “correct” history isn’t a thing. Unless you’re talking about correct facts. Either hundreds of Lakota, including women and children, were killed at Wounded Knee, or they weren’t. That’s a fact, and it’s pretty verifiable. Whether it was correct to reward the men who killed them is not a fact. It’s a (very heated) discussion.

History isn’t a list of facts. There are always a million facts. But every history/story has only so much time and space, so we’re always making a judgment call about what’s important—what to leave out and what to leave in. You can’t tell a story about What Happened without making this decision. This is how history works and why historians argue all the time.

Here are some facts from American History:

• Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas in 1492. He claimed to have discovered a “New World.”
• In 1773, a group called The Sons of Liberty dumped 342 chests of tea from British Ships into Boston Harbor. They called it The Boston Tea Party.
• On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Army launched a surprise attack on the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii. The next day, the US declared war on Japan, joining the Second World War.

Here are some other facts from American History:

• Slavery existed in the US from 1619 until 1865.
• Indians have lived on reservations set aside for them by the US government since 1851.
• The US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Pretty much all of these facts are common knowledge. People don’t argue about whether they’re true. They argue about which ones are the most important. Regarding the second three facts, I grew up hearing, more or less, that slavery was a regrettable era in the Southern US that ended with the Civil War; that reservations are . . . sad?; that the atomic bomb ended WWII and prevented greater loss of life than if the war had gone on.

Here are some facts from American History that I didn’t learn in school:

• In 1921 in Tulsa, OK, a White mob burned down 35 blocks of a wealthy Black neighborhood, destroying homes and businesses after a Black man was accused of assaulting a White woman. It was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US history. (There’s that word again.)
• California governor Leland Stanford oversaw a “War of Extermination” against Native Californians in the early 1860s. Between 1845 and 1880, the Native population in the state declined from around 150,000 to around 18,000.
• After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt oversaw the mass internment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans—about two thirds of whom were American citizens—into ten fenced camps.

These facts are all just as true and verified as the ones I learned in school. But they’re what I guess Pete Hegseth would call “political” history.

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Cut to a German movie called The Nasty Girl that I remember seeing way back. The ’90s? Maybe. It’s based on a true story of a high school girl who wrote an essay called “My Town During the Third Reich.” Which she expected to be a story of heroic resistance to the Nazi regime. Which, surprise! was not accurate. At all. It turned out (surprise!) that in the early years of the Reich, almost everyone in the town was complicit one way or another with the Nazis. All the Jews living in the town were expelled, and locals took their houses and property, just like in the rest of the country. Her town wasn’t an exception. Another inconvenient fact she uncovered was that there had been a number of concentration camps near the town, which (surprise!) everyone claimed to have no knowledge of.

Naturally, this girl’s essay did not receive local praise. It was a little too “woke.” There were rocks thrown through windows. There were death threats. There was a bomb, actually.

Ok, so . . . woke. “Woke” is called “Woke” because it’s about reading history anew, with one’s eyes opened a little wider. Looked at in a new light, noticing new things that actually happened but were somehow missed in the telling. There’s a reason I didn’t learn about the Tulsa massacre until I was in my 60s. I knew about the Trail of Tears a little earlier on, but it certainly wasn’t taught when I was in school. Nor was Roosevelt’s Japanese internment during World War II (Interestingly, the President who offered an official apology to Japanese-Americans for this colossal injustice was Ronald Reagan, that Woke old RINO.)

In the meantime, Florida passed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which basically says any history that brings up past injustice in the US need not be taught, because it makes us White folks feel bad. This kind of thing happens in lots of countries when people don’t like to be reminded of things, when the history they’ve learned has to be adjusted. It’s very upsetting. Suddenly you don’t know who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. Just who am I supposed to believe? But that’s the thing—an event either happened, or it didn’t. A woman was either shot in the head by ICE, or she wasn’t. US citizens have either been illegally detained and sent to foreign prisons or they haven’t been.

Do we remember them in fifty years? It all depends on who’s here to tell the story. It all depends on what we think, in 2076, is “historically correct.”