In Which Carmen Reads an Amazing Book
Sep. 9th, 2005 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xaaraI just finished Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues. It made me laugh. It made me cry. It made me laugh while I was crying.
It made me wish that my ancestors had come to North America and taken part in the destruction of American Indians so that I could have something to apologize for instead of something to watch unfold in my history books, in anthologies of poetry, through the hands of old Indian women, through the lenses of countless white cameras. But I don't even have that. I don't even have the power to say, "I'm sorry we fucked you up, fucked you over, burned your crops and killed your buffalo and salmon and cut down your trees and watched you get rashes and die and destroyed your villages and raped your women and cut you down with bayonets in the snow." I can't even say that. I wasn't there. My ancestors weren't there. I bear no responsibility.
And yet I feel, somehow, that the color of my skin marks me as one responsible for this. I'm white, and Catholic by birth if not by current practice. White Catholics endured atrocities at the hands of many generations of Romans, and then later visited these same atrocities on others. Humans don't learn. We boast of our overwhelming ability to expand our knowledge, to understand the world bits at a time, to create and sustain, to discover, to foil barriers and frontiers. But we don't learn from our mistakes. We lose our histories; we mistell our legends; our languages are left to wither and die.
We have a word for this; we call it progress.
It made me wish that my ancestors had come to North America and taken part in the destruction of American Indians so that I could have something to apologize for instead of something to watch unfold in my history books, in anthologies of poetry, through the hands of old Indian women, through the lenses of countless white cameras. But I don't even have that. I don't even have the power to say, "I'm sorry we fucked you up, fucked you over, burned your crops and killed your buffalo and salmon and cut down your trees and watched you get rashes and die and destroyed your villages and raped your women and cut you down with bayonets in the snow." I can't even say that. I wasn't there. My ancestors weren't there. I bear no responsibility.
And yet I feel, somehow, that the color of my skin marks me as one responsible for this. I'm white, and Catholic by birth if not by current practice. White Catholics endured atrocities at the hands of many generations of Romans, and then later visited these same atrocities on others. Humans don't learn. We boast of our overwhelming ability to expand our knowledge, to understand the world bits at a time, to create and sustain, to discover, to foil barriers and frontiers. But we don't learn from our mistakes. We lose our histories; we mistell our legends; our languages are left to wither and die.
We have a word for this; we call it progress.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 12:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 08:39 pm (UTC)I'll read it. Soon, hopefully.