History as We Leave It :: History Historical Essays

recital as We Leave ItLiterary description always opens onto a nonher background set, so to speak, behind the this-worldly things it purports to depict. --- Michel Beaujour, Some Paradoxes of Description When I was very young, my gran told me that my great, great grandfather came to northern Minnesota in the 1890s and settled the small town we lived in, Askov. She said that he was a very prevail pioneer who tread across un grapplen territory, and no one had ever so lived on that bring down before. I pictured my ancestors arriving here and finding zip but animals that they had to fight away like they were the only people rough for miles until other people came to join them. Until they arrived, Minnesota was a land untouched, unvanquished and uncivilized. I never heard of Indians, or that they had once inhabited the land even my teachers hardly mentioned them in elementary school. I thought they were conscionable fictitious characters on Saturday morning cartoons until I e ventually learned that they were tangible and once inhabited the land. As illustrated in the story that my grandma told me, how we secern our stories defecate an impact on the history we leave how we talk to the highest degree the Native Americans (or fail to talk about them) influences history and how we leave it. The closely raw accounts of how people tell their stories is in personal letters where they happen free to use their own words and thoughts, thinking that their words have little effect on the ones reading them or the world most them. Consider the excerpt from a letter written by Sophie Bost, a white settler in Minnesota during the Minnesota Uprising in 1862 And then there are these Indians I would really like to know where they are after all the scare theyve given us . . . I dreamed night before last that my children were butchered before my eyes . . . and I had taken them into my bed and was sleeping with an arm under each one, as comfortable as though I had been massacred myself. italics mine (Bowen 214) The words butchered and massacred show the fear she carried about Indians and pettishness about how she and her husband were going to protect their children. I do not doubt that living in those times must have been frighten for anybody. In other words, Indians could just as easily have use the words butchered and massacred to describe white attacks upon them.