The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [49]
“Five minutes, as fast as you can. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling or anything. Just get your gut reaction down. Give America’s dead old hero a piece of your mind.”
He took a sip of lukewarm coffee from his mug and watched them hunch over their keyboards. Even Alex, who had started the morning with attitude and a touch of anger he hadn’t seen before, was hunting for letters on his keyboard with two middle fingers extended as if he was giving the bird to the world.
“Time’s up,” he said. “Now quickly scan through what you wrote and pick a sentence or two you wouldn’t mind sharing with us. Someone want to start us off? Sharon? Thanks for volunteering.”
Sharon held her long braid of black hair against her cheek and cleared her throat. “‘What kind of hero makes mothers so scared they kill their babies to protect them from people like you?’”
“Ouch. Yes. Columbus will have trouble answering that one. Who else? Juliana?”
He was surprised to see the girl volunteer. She was a junior, cute, and painfully shy. She had said less than a hundred words to him since school started, and she hadn’t turned in a single assignment.
She held her hands over her mouth, looked down at her computer screen, and after what felt like several minutes of silence read in a hushed voice, “‘Dear Columbus, in all my years of school I remember only one name in history. That name belonged to you. I thought you were a brave hero, but the first words you wrote in your journal about those Native peoples? You thought they would make good slaves! Is this why you have your own holiday? Does our country celebrate you because you taught kass’aqs how to treat us Natives? Are you a hero in history because you showed the world we didn’t matter? The Native people should have taken their children and run when they saw you coming.’”
The girl stopped reading and held her hands over her mouth, tight, as if she couldn’t believe what she had just read. Alex began clapping his hands and the other students followed his lead.
“That’s good stuff,” Alex said. “Mine sounds stupid compared to that.”
“Beautifully done, Juliana. Thanks. Anyone else?”
Jack raised his hand. “I don’t want to read, but what Ju-Ju wrote made a question in my mind.”
“What’s that?”
“If our history books lie about Columbus and kids are taught he’s so great and did all these great things, what else do we need to learn about? What about here? What kind of stuff happened here when outsiders came to the Delta? I don’t even know, man.”
The class responded to Jack’s comments with nods and a general raising of their eyebrows.
He took another long sip of the lukewarm coffee, just to let the question linger for a moment. He’d hoped the Zinn piece would stir their minds, but he didn’t expect them to turn the question upon their own history of contact.
“Well, what do you know?” he asked them. “What do you know about your own history?”
They stared back at him for only a second or two and then began to lower their eyes.
“Do you mean our culture?” Sharon asked.
“Yes and no. I mean, what have you guys learned about your own history? How long have your people been here on the tundra? What was life like before gus-sucks and when they arrived? What happened when they came, or since then?”
They shrugged.
“Why you care about this stuff?” Jack asked. “This just a trick to get us to like school?”
“Good question, Jack. That’s critical thinking, my man. Question everything. Even question why someone like me is trying to teach you something. The truth? Well, I want to learn about this stuff too,” John said.
“Why do you care?” Alex asked.
“I guess because my grandmother was Alaska Native,” John said.
“Cool,” Sharon said, and her classmates nodded approval. “Was she Yup’ik?”
John shrugged. “I don’t know. My grandfather never told me,”