To the Editor,
NY Times,

I realize that this is too long for any kind of answer to your OpEd page, however I wanted you to understand just how inaccurate Professor Diggins piece was. There have been several articles of late on the OpEd page that have depicted our people and our history inaccurately. It is my experience that inaccuracies are seeds that eventually harm the young. As we cannot afford such a luxury, I write the following to at least answer one of these articles. The form of this piece is as a dialogue between the professor and myself.

I write this that we may all "stay strong" in the truth and this is the truth as was taught to me.

Ray Evans Harrell

May 15, 1996
HISTORY STANDARDS GET IT WRONG AGAIN
By John Patrick Diggins

John Patrick Diggins, is a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Professor Diggins is currently writing a forthcoming book on the immigrant artist Max Weber. He wrote the current OpEd piece for the NYTimes 5/15/96

Ray Evans Harrell is librarian of the Nuyagi Keetoowah Society (Cherokee Scholars Society) in New York City.

STATEMENT:
As a member of the Keetoowahs (traditional Cherokees) I am bound by our covenant not to be political on Native Issues, however, as the librarian of our Society I am forced to challenge inaccuracies about us when they occur. This is in no way advocating any political program or agenda other than the true telling of the story about our people. We are not connected to any Government or Native American political organization. We are solely a scholar's service organization serving the traditional Cherokee people in the New York City Metropolitan area. We exist as guests of the Iroquois people and as a 501c-3 not for profit religious organization are pledged, as an organization, not to support any candidates or group for office in any government.

Many of the following issues are too complex for so simple a venue, I admit this and apologize however, complexity does not in any way excuse inaccuracy.

**JPDiggins said in the NYTimes on 5/15/96 as he responded to the National History Standards statements about current historic trends:

In the beginning," wrote the British philosopher John Locke, "all the world was America." In our "beginnings," write the authors of the National History Standards, all of us belonged to pre-Columbia America and Islamic West Africa, and the earliest American settlers were "deeply affected" by the "great convergence" 'of Europeans, Africans and Native Americans. Locke believed that America would escape the very conditions of oppression that the standards hail as our "beginnings."

**REHarrell replies:
I support your right to question the historic revisions of the textbooks taught to our children in the schools. Accuracy should not be a political but a scholarly issue. I do not however support your scholarship on many of the issues that you raise.

Three Questions:

1. Did Locke invent the idealistic promise of America while the Dutch, French, English, Spanish and Swedes lived with, were fed by, guided across, traded with and were clothed by hundreds of different national cultures with all all of the political intrigue one would expect in such a "stew" of invasion, conquest and plagues? Was he aware of the complexity, or was his America a common device used by European philosophers, politicians and artists for their fantasies with their fabulous, newly foraged wealth?
   
   
2. After Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru and John Smith in Virginia, was there an influx of new materials, foods, art and philosophy in Europe that had an other than Old World origin? Materials that are other than the gold that everyone was spending, after melting down what Albrecht Duerer called amazing works of art, (especially the Spanish).
   
   
3. Were there negotiations that went on between the Native inhabitants and the Europeans that could be construed as more than the stereo-typical movie fur trapper "grunt and kill" dialogues?

**JPD said:

Locke had America in mind when he first articulated the doctrine of rights, natural and inalienable, criticized slavery and patriarchal authority, defended women's right to divorce and to inherit property, and formulated a labor theory of value as the basis of ownership.

**REH replies:
Among traditional Cherokees prior to the adoption of the non-traditional progressive government in 1828 the following relationships to Locke's values were: DOCTRINE OF RIGHTS, GIVEN BY THE CREATOR.
(100% agreement in principle, but would you be comfortable with Locke's puritan rights? The Puritans lost many of their citizens to Indian adoption and when "rescued" refused to come home to those "rights." I wonder how Locke would have felt about Blake?)

SLAVERY
(the existence of chattel slavery was rare until the mimic-Washington Government was formed in 1828)

PATRIARCHAL AUTHORITY,
(Patriarchal authority was a product of the 1828 revised government.)

WOMEN’S RIGHT TO DIVORCE AND INHERIT PROPERTY.
(In traditional Cherokee households today women still are the property owners and divorce is simply putting the man's shoes at the door. Amongst government Cherokees the rule is the same as European American society.)

LABOR THEORY OF VALUE AS THE BASIS OF OWNERSHIP.
(I'm not that much of an authority on Locke's theories of value but I am aware that what is and is not of value is a constant source of litigiousness amongst European American folk, for example: Does intrinsic value exist? Artists say yes technologists insist that all value is extrinsic.)

Locke defined the Natural State as:

"Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature."

If we had to choose between being a "Natural" Locke man or a "Natural" Hobbes man I would say that we fall pretty close to Locke. We fought more than one battle with South Carolina and the Georgia penal colony over these very issues. I dare say the past and present governments of the U.S. are not as close to Locke's "Natural State" as we were prior to 1828. We disagreed with Locke on two issues 1) Our women had full equality with the men and 2) Our communities had a social contract that included the right to follow whatever path the Creator had given. My question is this, did Locke meet any of those Scotsmen who were brought to Cherokee country and married Cherokee women?

**JPD said:

No sooner is the Lockean background to the Declaration of Independence mentioned in the standards than the discussion turns to slavery, after which students are asked to "show how the ideas that inspired" the American Revolution "influenced the 20th-century revolutions in Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam." That revolutions made in the name of Marxist-Leninism (the Mexican excepted) are cited as products of the American Revolution can only mean that historians are as confused about endings as they are about beginnings. Will students subjected to such "standards" know anything of the origins of the right to have rights and of the philosophical foundations of the Declaration and the Constitution?

**REH asks:

1. Was Locke the first to articulate these ideas or was he effected by his exile in 1683? Did any of that effect come from those native abductees who were learning the European languages to be used as guides on return voyages?
   
   
2. Would you agree that history is written by the powerful and shaped to the ends of their own linguistic traditions?
   
   
3. Would you agree that history is told differently in different cultures in Europe?
   
   
4. Would you agree that the theories of America and of Marxist-Leninism come from the European Extrinsic Utilitarian Intellectual tradition? Economics as a science etc.....
   
   
5. Do you know if any of the "Founding Fathers" had a relationship with any indigenous people? Or were they like Schlesinger’s Andrew Jackson, who never knew a Cherokee?
   
   
6. Did American Historians have any stake in "putting a good face" on their cultural efforts when recording them in print?

**JPD said:

They will know everything about various figures rescued from oblivion. Students are asked to "appraise the survival strategies employed by Native Americans such as Speckled Snake, Red Eagle, Sequoyah, Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh, Osceola, and Black Hawk."

**REH replied:
I don't think that it is a bad thing for the children to know that the first psycho-linguist in history was Sequoyah, or that the Osage were the wealthiest and most culturally educated people in America in the early twentieth century. That this people who had opera singers, artists, businessmen and ballerinas went to their opera house in Pawhuska, Oklahoma while down the street J. Paul Getty and Clark Gable, among others, "rough-necked" in the oil fields and entertained themselves in the local bars and houses of ill repute while trying to become "Guardians" to one of "them welthy Indins." European Americans even today, still depend upon immigrants, especially Europeans for the authenticity of their basically European derived artistic culture. Dennis MacAuliffe foreign editor of the Washington Post states that the Osage were the most elite wealthy in the world but that didn't keep them from being declared incompetent and given court appointed guardians who promptly murdered half of them. What was 300 murders became 60 in the "official history" of the time. When Angie Debo wrote about it in her doctoral thesis for the University of Oklahoma "And Still The Waters Run" they refused to give her a degree. Later, when the pendulum had swung back, her book was published by Princeton University Press. President Carter gave her a medal.

As for the other native names, they were all honorable men who served their nations in war. It would serve the political scientists to study the art of negotiation as practiced at Onondaga for centuries and the poetry of the great Texcocan Nezahaulcoyotl. Unfortunately all, but seventeen of the thousands of books in Mexico remain today. And those seventeen were re-written for Spanish consumption. These few of our writings have suffered the same fate as the "Lilith" (Jewish women's writings) at the hands of the religious authorities. She was reduced to "folk tales" and banished from the canon. We get listed in the Museum of "Natural" History. Archeology, however, can be quite an embarrassment, almost as much as finding a world that spiritual leaders say can't exist.

**JPD said:

The standard's non-Western orientation and its cavalier treatment of the cold war aroused a storm of controversy when the document appeared in 1994. While professional historical associations endorsed the standards, the Senate, more in touch with the American people, voted overwhelmingly to condemn them. Recently they have been revised, and some historians who had once been critical now support them. Yet the standards still rest on assumptions that are dubious if not preposterous. The most glaring contradiction is that its authors seek to inculcate political values characteristic of the Western world that cannot be derived from what they would have students learn about the non-Western world.

**Reply:
I quote from the American Indian Historical Society's statement to the California State Board of Education, March 1968:

"Everyone has the right to his opinion. A person has also the right to be wrong. But a textbook has no right to be wrong, or to evade the truth, falsify history, or insult and malign a whole race of people. That is what the (old) textbooks do."

**JPD said:

"Knowledge of history is the precondition of political intelligence," the standards announce. If, as the standards assert, "by studying the choices and decisions of the past, students can confront today's problems and choices with a deeper awareness of the alternatives before them," how, then, will this "deeper awareness" take place? Knowledge of pre- Columbia America and 16th-century Africa, in which there existed no such freedom of choice, has little to do with the "political intelligence" essential to modern citizenship. When dealing with early history, the standards ask students to examine "cultural and ecological interactions" such as tribal customs and food gathering. While it may be a good thing to have students understand other cultures, such an exercise has nothing to do with political freedom. Cultures, as the anthropologist Ernest Gellner cautions, are not our "choice" but our "fate."

**Reply:
I don't know what to do with this paragraph. You seem to be negating the possibility of learning. Do you mean to suggest that people can't learn beyond and add to their culture?

On a couple of things in the middle, I cannot speak for the Africans but your scholarship on pre-Columbian America is out of date agitprop. American Democracy has more in common with Frank Lloyd Wright at its core than with all of those Greek and Roman columns in Washington. Frank Lloyd Wright's relationship to his art came from the same springs that we drank from. If you believe America is more related to the theocracy at Athens and the entertainment of ancient Rome than to the school system of Tenochtitlan and the agricultural science of all native peoples then it becomes clear why we are getting worse instead of better.

**JPD said:

Can there be freedom without change? Can there be progress when there is only repetition? The Mexican author Octavio Paz questioned whether the pre-Columbia world could even be regarded as historical.

**Reply:
There is no life without change. There is no evolution of consciousness without some kind of freedom. Why do you continually call us "foragers," when you are the one's running around the world collecting things? We have a different knowledge of what it means to "develop". Where is your pedagogy? The seeds of our's are contained within all of those spirals, circles and ceremonials that helps us understand the knowledge passed down to us.

1. Imitation is the beginning of learning.
2. Analysis is the warfare of learning.
3. Dialogue is the reason for learning.
4. Teaching is the fulfillment of learning.

Repetition's purpose in all of the above is Mastery of skill. Skill gives you the tools to think with and to begin your journey. The first fallacy of basic pedagogy is:

"I tell you therefore you know." How many lecture courses are "taught" at CUNY? You should bring the students to the gateway of their own knowledge. Only after they know that will they have any context to understand or evaluate a political statement about history.

I can't read the mind of Octavio Paz on this quote. Nahuatl is an incredibly complex process language more akin to the Physics of David Bohm than the Newtonian concepts that concretize European languages.

Until Bohm "discovered" his concepts within the Algonquin languages he thought that a new language would have to be invented to encompass quantum realities. The European languages are not up to the job. Historical reality is involved in both the linear and the layering of process. It is unfortunate but Europeans seem to prefer the mechanical, technological to more organic holistic solutions to these problems. If you throw away the Nahautl or the Algonquin then you just have to reinvent them again except without their long historical success. Can the simplistic robot equal evolution of a live language? We say that science struggles to simplify while art recognizes the complexity of reality and struggles to express it. In that manner all Indians are artists. Is this being non-historical?

**JPD further quotes Octavio Paz:

"Meso-American civilization negated history more completely" than even ancient China, he wrote. "From the Mexican high plateau to the tropical lands of Central America, for more than two thousand years, various cultures and empires succeeded one another and none of them had historical consciousness. Meso-America did not have history but myths and, above all, rites."

**Reply:
This is romantic jargon. To say that the Mayans and Nahuatl had no historical consciousness is beyond answering. It is much more complex than that. Issues of complexity are crucial to the modern world. The Asians train for it by learning Western abstract musical skills while European Americans place the meaning of life in consumption. If they can't historically figure that out, then they are doomed to go the way of Quetzalcoatl and the Nonohualcans or thirteenth century Spain. Our society will splinter and the most rigid, dominant group will win, but after winning they will decline because the world is now a society and information will destroy provincialism.

What is the purpose of history if not pedagogical and what is the best pedagogy but that which draws from the student their own energy and creativity passed down to them from the beginning of their time. Today's new fashionable political philosophy is tomorrow’s "kitsch." Have you never been embarrassed by your acceptance of the formerly "new" concept? I have. A great deal of what I was taught in school and believed, is "kitsch."

In the churches, on my reservation, the old people used to sing enthusiastically:

The Native peoples of the Americas lived an artistic life in their language and living. The relationship of European artists to their work is similar in many respects to the Native person's relationship to life. But this is a much longer discussion.

Remember as John Locke said: "Distinct species are not a fact of nature, but of language; they are distinct complex ideas with distinct names annexed to them." Just because we have different positions in relation to language does not mean that we do not speak. That is the old Greek idea of the "barbarian" who simply makes sounds with no meaning. That person doesn't exist and neither does the "ahistorical" person. The complexity of this issue is however far more than this simple note can encompass.

**JPD said:

No doubt the "convergence" thesis was concocted so that the national history standards could deal with far more than traditional white America and thereby represent its present diverse ethnic population. Yet the disparity between the standards' announced goals and its contrived means suggests the extent to which ideology has replaced pedagogy. "Without historical knowledge and inquiry," the standards proclaim, "we cannot achieve the . . . fulfillment for all our citizens of the nation's democratic ideals." Yet the standards have students begin the study of history immersed in past cultures whose people perpetuated undemocratic rites and other systems of submission.

**Reply:
Having grown up on a reservation and been trained in the traditions of my people as well as in the traditions of the performing arts of Europe, I have no idea of what you are talking about. I have personally experienced the democratic ideals of individual growth, egalitarian purpose and freedom of choice as well as community commitment to the nurture and growth of every single individual as an ancient polity of our people. On the reservation we had the rule of unanimous consent. This eliminated all tyrannies and built community dialogue. If you want to see somebody have a breakdown, try using the rule of Unanimous Consent on Wall Street.

**JPD said:

Rather than having "converged," America broke free of the very immobile environments that the standards would have us regard as our roots. Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber demonstrated the genius of "American exceptionalism." Freedom flowered in America because of two unique and possibly unrepeatable conditions: the absence of feudalism and the presence of a Calvinist-Lockeanism that bred the Protestant ethic and the "spirit" of capitalism as well as natural rights: our "everlasting heirloom."

**Reply:
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in "Democracy In America" that

"North America was inhabited only by wandering tribes, who had not thought of profiting by the natural riches of the soil: that vast country was still, properly speaking, an empty continent, a desert land awaiting its inhabitants."

Is this is the kind of history to which you are referring? The regular old Parkman "hunter/gatherer" soon to be forgotten pseudo scientific definitions? Sooner or later this stuff will take its place beside the "science" of Gallatin, Schoolcraft and Morton. A more enlightened stance, I believe, can be found in the West's Judeo-Christian tradition of the "Yahwist Prophets." Their recognition of the difference between the "agitprop" of official structures and the histories of "God" that demand truthfulness is not a bad model to emulate.

I feel certain that amongst the Mexica, when "Tlacaelel" destroyed the histories of Tenoctitlan prior to his "official story," the "Tlamatanime" (society Elders for whom a lie was a capital offense) shook their heads and muttered that this bode poorly for the future. As Benjamin Lee Whorf points out, our view of the past is linguistically different from the Western view. The past is manifest, how can you rewrite that which is already manifest?

Here are some of the shards of that manifested past:

Even Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's Museum of Natural History admits that 60% of the best foods that are found in the world, native scientists developed from the wild. The cotton shirts, you wear every day, was developed prior to Columbus. Many of the foods like Amaranth the greatest vegetable nutrient, was nearly ruined by the Europeans lack of understanding of our agricultural practices. When the Europeans refused to use the digging stick, being in love with their metal plow, they ruined the agriculture of Vermont/New Hampshire. The Abenaki had warned them about the stones. The obsidian scalpel used in contemporary eye surgery was used by native surgeons before Columbus. Modern scientists are still confused by those skulls that are found to have been operated on by native doctors and then healed. Native practices around medicine and the arts are still confusing to the concrete linguistic world of the European.

These "wild wandering peoples" that de Tocqueville demeaned and that L. Frank Baum (of Wizard of Oz fame) advocated murdering on the day after the massacre at wounded knee, were a people who had lost whole towns and cities to plagues and then encountered the same human waves that the Chinese used to demoralize American troops in Korea. They were in shock and barely functioning. They had lost 23 out of 25 relatives and were in a constant state of grief. At the turn of the century there were barely 500,000 of us left, down from many millions at the beginning of contact with no encrease in birth- rate in 400 years.

I quote again from the American Indian Historical Society 1968 statement to the California State Board of Education:

"There is a difference between a book for general readership, and one accepted for classroom use. In the first case, the individual has a choice, and this choice we must protect. The student has no choice, He is compelled to study from an approved book, and in this case, we have a right to insist upon truth, accuracy, and objectivity."

Ray Evans Harrell
mcore@soho.ios.com

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