Origin Stories: Mine and Ours

Photo by Askhan Forouzani on Unsplash

“Were you conceived out of wedlock? The email question, from a cousin who was gathering family history, startled me. My parents were no longer alive, but I had grown up believing that they had eloped, married civilly, and later married in the Church. So it would depend on what counted as wedlock . . .

Gradually I realized that my cousin’s story was true. Learning it reshaped my understanding of my parents, but not in the way they must have feared. Far from condemning them, I felt fondly amused, but also of course deeply compassionate.  My mother, pregnant and unwed in mid-century America, would have been shamed. The pregnancy — and the early marriage — also cost my father.  His twin brother married six years later, having finished college. He became an engineer while my father worked as an airplane mechanic. (He eventually got his degree, and did well.)

I never bothered to find out whether my parents had really eloped, whether they were civilly married before I was conceived. It no longer matters.

Facts that do matter, about the early years of my country

Over the last decade or so, I’ve come to realize that North America has always been multi-cultural. The Inuit lived differently from the Penobscot, and they from the Navajo. Among the 600 or so indigenous societies some were violent, some peaceful; some hierarchical, others not; some hunters, some farmers. They were also far more sophisticated than I had realized. They lived, for instance, not in wilderness, but on land they had changed – thinning forests in the Northeast, managing fires in the Southwest.

The Europeans, when they arrived, were also diverse. France and Spain were monarchical; they came for riches (gold, fur) and to convert the Indians. England was moving slowly toward democracy. Its colonists, too, wanted riches – at least the Virginia contingent did – but rather than converting the native people, most wanted to displace them.

With the Europeans came enslaved Africans, themselves from various cultures.  As many as 30% were Muslim; others practiced various forms of polytheism.

When the English colonists separated from their mother country and established a separate government, they drew up a constitution drawing from European ideals, possibly also learning from Native American democracies.  (Our federal structure resembles the Iroquois Confederacy.) The new United States did not recognize the enslaved or the indigenous people as citizens (and in fact full citizenship, including the right to vote, was restricted to white propertied men). Gradually – this part of the story is familiar -- the country expanded geographically, by force, by purchase, by settlement; slowly also deepened morally, lurching toward a truer and more universal democracy.

New facts, enriched narrative

I had grown up with a simple narrative, of stalwart pilgrims and pioneers, gradually hewing a country from wilderness. I thought of my country as a set of laws and a fundamentally European culture. Non-Europeans were in the picture, but only as background.

These groups have moved to the foreground, joining the European settlers who created a filigree of laws and culture over land already populated. As the settlers’ power grew, the indigenous were killed, displaced, and confined. Meanwhile, the labor of enslaved Africans was crucial in constructing a new country. The desire to keep them subjugated shaped much of our laws and customs.

As the European filigree filled in across the land, a mosaic emerged.

But if our story is one of oppression and exploitation, it’s also about successful resistance and minds that gradually opened. “My fellow Americans” are descendants not just of the original colonists but also of the enslaved, of the indigenous, of waves of immigrants. Each of these groups fought for inclusion, courageously and steadfastly, usually with help from some descendants of those early English. The filigree, filled in, has become a mosaic.

New narrative, new insights

Learning all this has changed my vocabulary.  “Plantation” has become “forced labor camp.” “Pioneer” has become “colonial settler.” Some of my positions have changed, too. I have begun to doubt, for instance, birthright citizenship. It was essential after the Civil War, to enfranchise the formerly enslaved, but that need is long past. On the other hand I’ve become more sympathetic to reparations.

Is there room in this new picture for blame, or shame, or pride? Feelings like that are inevitable, but not always well-founded. I still appreciate the courage and perseverance of the original European settlers, deeply shadowed as it was by moral blindness.  I am not to blame for the terrible wrongs that were done. But those wrongs have given me advantages – the Europeans who framed our legal system and shaped our culture favored people like me. I therefore have some responsibility for making things better.

I also now see that all history is revisionist: When historians write for one another, it’s because they’ve found new information, or a new way to frame what was already known. (Science works the same way.) So the story is never finished. That does not mean that all opinions are equal, nor that everything is unsettled. Every attempt to add to or reframe the story needs to be defended, and is subject itself to revision.

Above all, I’ve come to think of my country as people, united by geography and a braided and conflicted history, in cultures that both differ and overlap, under laws that allow us to live together in peace.

Americans carry in our genes the history that shaped our country.

I’m about to have my DNA analyzed.  I expect English and French ancestry, probably also some indigenous tribe. Possibly Irish. Maybe some African. In other words, I’m descended from early colonists and explorers, from the people they dispossessed, possibly from those they the enslaved, and certainly from immigrants. I carry in my genes the history of our country.

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Afterwords

Books that helped me understand:

• The Moor's Account Novel, written in the voice of an enslaved West African, a Muslim. He accompanies Spanish explorers of the Gulf Coast, as they encounter a number of Native American societies, some friendly, some hostile.

• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States A lot of this history can only be called genocide. From this book I learned the phrase colonial settler.

• The Warmth of Other Suns The Great Migration, told through the stories of three Blacks who moved north between 1916 and 1970. I had thought I understood Jim Crow. I had no idea.

At times the Indians were morally ahead of the settlers: The natives of Pennsylvania, one of whom had been murdered by English settlers, insisted that the killer not be put to death.

A historian comments: The new questions that lead to a revised account of the past often arise from our present concerns; these can distort the story. E.g., the concern to acknowledge the agency of American Indians — they were not just victims — can understate the extent of the killing and dispossession they endured. The past has patterns unfamiliar to us; it is a foreign country. If we make it speak only our language we lose history’s complexity.