History as We Leave It :: History Historical Essays

History as We Leave It Literary description always opens onto another scene 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 grandmother 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 brave pioneer who tread across unknown territory, and no one had ever lived on that land before. I pictured my ancestors arriving here and finding nothing but animals that they had to fight away — like they were the only people around for miles until other people came to join them. Until they arrived, Minnesota was a land untouched, unconquered 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 just fictitious characters on Saturday morning cartoons until I eventually learned that they were real and once inhabited the land. As illustrated in the story that my grandma told me, how we tell our stories have an impact on the history we leave; how we talk about the Nativ e Americans (or fail to talk about them) influences history and how we leave it. The most raw accounts of how people tell their stories is in personal letters where they feel free to use their own words and thoughts, thinking that their words have little effect on the ones reading them or the world around 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 they’ve 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 â€Å"butchered† and â€Å"massacred† show the fear she carried about Indians and exasperation about how she and her husband were going to protect their children. I do not doubt that living in those times must have been terrifying for anybody. In other words, Indians could just as easily have used the words â€Å"butchered† and â€Å"massacred† to describe white attacks upon them.