We all have things we hate.

I don’t mean things like “which way to hang toilet paper”.

Real hates.  Because “hate” is, after all, a strong word.  Or at least it should be, used to be.

We’ll leave aside war and violence for now.  Those are pretty much universally acknowledged as things worthy of hatred.

Harming or belittling of children, the wanton abuse of animals – these things, too, should be universally agreed as things worth hating.

But it is the liminal things between naivety, thoughtlessness, selfishness, and wilful ignorance which often lead me to say “God, I hate that”.

Stuff like able-bodied people using the parking place reserved for the elderly or disabled people.

Stuff like half-drunk jet-skiers destroying the peace of a blue and remote mountain lake.

Fast food bags thrown out of a car window along a country road.

But then, if you suffer from “busy head” like me, with too many random thoughts jostling for space, you might get irritated or annoyed at less obvious things.

Anyone else here notice the way so many people tend to select a “preferred reality” at some point in their 20s or 30s, and then stick to that “reality”, whatever new information might cross their path over the subsequent years?

Whether religion, politics, or taste in music?

Why do the things we like, the beliefs we hold, often become fixed for good in our 20s?

Are we lacking in curiosity?  Are we mentally lazy?

If you’re like me, always walking a tightrope between admiration for humans and borderline misanthropy, a frustration with this widespread human mental inertia can distill into anger.

And if we’re not careful, anger can metastasise into hate.

Hate is not good for a person, nor is it wise or saintly.  But hey.  A person can’t jump over their own shadow, can they?

 

*****

As a writer interested in the history of colonialist violence, I find myself confronting daily the immovable monoliths of a heavily abridged “official” American history, and a pop culture and national identity mediated through a corporate-owned mass media.

I see the fetishization of militarism, the ROTC and recruiting sergeants in high schools, and the constant, pervasive insistance that people in uniform are “protecting our freedom”.

These young men and women sent to the four corners of the world, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, are lauded in small town America, always greeted with a “thank you for your service”.

The USA spent roughly 20 years in Vietnam, and another 20+ in Afghanistan.  Roughly nine years in Iraq.  People remember these conflicts because of their relative recentness.

But a large section of Americans do not know, for example, why Iran hates their country.  The 1950s, and the UK/USA-engineered overthrow of a sovereign, freely elected government in Iran, is largely forgotten or ignored.

“They hate our freedom” is one of the more inane reasons offered for the decades-long poor relations between the USA and Iran.

Ask these people in uniform about The Barbary Wars.  The annexation of Mexican territory in 1848.  The occupation of Haiti in 1915.  The 1899 Moro War in the Philippines.

All of this and more is the reason that no substantive analysis- and enquiry-based history is taught in American primary and secondary schools.

Foundational myths are far more powerful than facts at binding people into a shared identity, collectively willing to sanction and support government policy.

 

*****

On a more local or micro level, distilled frustration also wells up and overflows whenever this writer sees the terms “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” used to describe someone’s remote ancestor of indigenous American ethnicity.

Such terminology is intended to disguise certain truths, in order to place a romantic gloss on older, darker aspects of American history.

Using the words “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” suggests some bygone age of intercultural amity, in which a woman of equal social standing was “courted” by a “white” outsider to her community – see the various incarnations of the Captain Smith and Pocahontas myth.

These words are meant to imply a 1950s-style of courtship, in which a love-besotted man approaches the family or tribe of said “maiden”, seeking her hand in marriage from her father, who is of course always a “Chief”.

The words “maiden” or “princess” are also intended to elevate the woman in question – a way to skate over the fact that, for most of American history, indigenous peoples were in fact treated much the same way as African-Americans.

Indigenous peoples were enslaved.  They were sold.  They were rounded-up in concentration camps and marched at gunpoint to dry and dusty places hundreds of miles from their rightful homelands.

And of course, they were killed in wars and slaughtered during massacres.

Their children were removed and placed into industrial schools, where they were abused physically and sexually, or beaten for speaking their native tongues.

And in a patriarchal society, no one was farther down the social ladder than indigenous women/women of color.

In the violent rough and tumble of Manifest Destiny, “non-white” women were often seen as little more than a labor resource, or a sexual commodity.

Almost everyone accepts that the disease, warfare, and land grabbing of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s saw the deaths of innumerable indigenous men.

What almost no one ever mentions is the countless number of indigenous women and children left to fend for themselves in the wake of these communal disasters, or the sheer number of children removed from their communities and sent to Indian boarding schools to be “assimilated” by force into “white” culture.

Not all indigenous women ended-up on reservations – perhaps not even the majority.  Many were forced into a life of back-breaking manual labor or menial drudgery as farm hands or washerwomen.   Some were forced into prostitution.  The “luckier” ones might become wife or “consort” to a frontier trapper, miner, or settler, enduring a hard life of endless childbearing, cooking, sewing, washing, spinning, weaving, cleaning, etc.

This writer has in fact read first-hand accounts in which men were quite open about bringing their Indian consorts (yes, that’s plural) west, making them walk alongside an ox-wagon for days, their feet tied with rope to the woman ahead or behind them…

This is not ancient history, lost in the mists of time.  Much of the foregoing (such as the Indian Boarding Schools) was still occurring in my own lifetime, and very much during the lifetime of my parents and grandparents.

*****

Everything was not horror.  Some inter-ethnic pairings and marriages were based on mutually agreed trade-offs, even affection.

Many indigenous women came to be held in high regard by their wider communities, often because of their expertise and skills in pottery-making, basketry, herbal medicine and midwifery.

Anyone with deep roots in colonial-era America has one of these women in their family tree somewhere.

Modern DNA testing will rarely show it, because the DNA of one or two indigenous women during the late 1700s or early 1800s will usually have been “shuffled-out” by now.

But these woman WERE there, they were real, and they were almost never an “Indian princess”.

 

Please note that the use of this photo is for showing a typical Old Mix American family.  It is NOT intended to imply any particular family’s direct link to the issues discussed in the above blog post.