The Good and the Bad

     There's a quote making it's way around social media recently, that most of you have probably seen at least once. A well meaning sentiment regarding recent events, it reads "America is not what happened in Charlottesville, America is what Happened in Houston." It was referring to the recent clash of protesters and white supremacist groups in Charlottesville that became violent, and rescue efforts in Houston after the recent hurricane. While this sounds like a nice thought at first glance and I have no doubt it was written with good intentions, I disagree with it. In my opinion, that is not how history works. We don't get to pick out the parts that make us feel good and forget the rest. United States history is full of heroic moments that should make us proud, but it is also full of darker things that many people do not have the privilege of simply forgetting.
     In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the United States government attempted to "Americanize"many Native American youth, including Native Alaskans, by sending them to boarding schools. At these schools, many of them were stripped of their names and forbidden to speak their native language. If they did, they were often abused. The internet is strangely quiet about these events. When I searched for sources to help me explain this history, I found only a handful of academic articles that revealed the truth.
      The reason I have become aware of this history is because it is still alive. There are people here in Nome who were students in those boarding schools, so they know what really happened. They are honest about the fact that often, the people who were behind sending them to these schools and sometimes the people who taught there, were missionaries.
     Christians forced people against there will into a place that abused them for being who they were. People claiming to be missionaries were part of an attempt to forcibly strip Native Americans of their culture, because it was believed to be "savage". I don't like this fact at all, but it is still a fact. I do not get to ignore it, because it is all around me.
     This is not a fun "Jennie goes to Alaska" blog post. There will be plenty of those, but not today. As a writer, I cannot leave out the difficult parts of the story. I cannot skip to the end, where a missionary and the daughter of a man who was abused by missionaries served side by side at a food bank. First, I have to be honest about history. Because we must learn about history in order to make sure that we do not repeat it.

Students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania