It’s tempting to post and re-post all the wonderful anti-Columbus
memes going around the internet today.
Columbus with a big bloody “X” scrawled across his face. Cartoon Indians on the shore watching the
Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria looming on the horizon, saying to each other, “They
better have their documents! No illegal immigrants here!” and so on.
But when I walked in to my office this morning, all I could
see was this poster.
I found it in a local antique shop years ago, but never had
the guts to hang it in my office until this year (maybe being a full professor
has something to do with that). After
all, I teach first years; what would they think, walking into Professor
Miranda’s office for the first time and seeing a full-blown massacre of whites
by savage Indians? Any chance of them
taking Native Lit with me somewhere down the line would probably go straight
down the tubes, I figured.
Now, I’m not so sure.
I’m not so sure first years would run screaming from the room (no one
has yet, but more on that later), and I’m not so sure I don’t want to have a
conversation with any of my students about this incredible poster.
For one thing, most students never seem to actually catch on
that a massacre is happening at all.
They see the Holy Fathers rising beneath the IHS starburst (first
three letters of the Greek name for Jesus Christ, which the Latin Church has
traditionally rendered IHS as Iesus Hominum Salvator) surrounded
by blond-haired, blue-eyed angels, and seem strangely comforted.
True, the “massacre” (and by now I hope you realize I’m
using this word sarcastically) is at the bottom of the frame, and much darker,
both in coloring and in tone. Easy to
miss, to mistake as just foundational mass, nothing important.
If my students looked more closely, they would see these
images:
A wooded settlement out in the wilderness. Log cabins.
A beautiful lake. And angry,
nearly-naked, tomahawk-or-club wielding Indians cracking Catholic priests’
skulls open, burning one priest at the stake (with a handy iron kettle nearby,
presumably to make Priest Stew afterwards).
Across the lake, more Indians set fire to what looks like a primitive
church, with another Priest standing outside, arms outstretched, beseeching
heavenly intervention.
Funny how we are in the fifth week of the semester and not
one of my students, first year or otherwise, has noticed the juxtaposition of
these two scenes, or at least, never commented on them. Maybe my students are more concerned about
the difference between a skeleton outline and a rough draft. Maybe they think, Professor Miranda is REALLY religious! Maybe sitting next to this poster, framed on
my office wall, makes absolutely no impression on them at all. Yet these same students comment on other
artwork in the office – a student broadside of “Ironing After Midnight,” a
Seafair Indian Days Pow Wow poster, the photo of Robert Latham Owens, first
(and only) Native to graduate from Washington and Lee (Valedictorian, 1877; Law
Degree, 1908), my collection of chapbooks and handmade books and so on. Even the actual steel shovel with Seamus
Heaney’s poem “Digging,” hand-lettered on it by a creative student, which is tucked away in relative obscurity, gets an appreciative nod now and then.
Why not this picture?
I warn my students that if they aren’t uncomfortable or
disturbed by the materials we cover in my class, I’m not doing my job. In fact, it is my job to bring this material
to their attention, help them engage with it, learn how to read it in multiple
ways, and figure out the significance of both the material and their
discomfort. Over the past 13 years I’ve
been teaching at universities, student evaluations have raked me over the coals
for this, but they have also thanked me.
At this point, the “thanks” are beginning to weigh in a little
more. I must be getting better about
being, as one student accused me, “A Native American Feminist!”
Oh, besmirch my name!
I love it!
So on Columbus Day, I am looking at this poster with new
eyes. I am trying to see why the
righteous resistance of Native peoples to colonial and religious invasion is so
hard to take. I am trying to see why
fighting back against a terrorism that was grounded in greed, racism and fear
is so damn hard for people to recognize as resistance, rather than “massacre”
by “savages.”
Surely, the way 2/3rds of the poster is taken up by the
priests being elevated to sainthood – all that light and glory, angels and rays
of heavenly beneficence – has something to do with this unusual blockage of
vision. Whoever painted this poster –
and I don’t know the origins or artist – knew what they were doing. They were telling a story we all know by
heart. In short, the poster is meant to
serve as a visual metaphor: the colonizers as goodness, rising above the
savages even when the savages seem most likely to resist, and crushing that
resistance with the sheer weight of a story told over and over again in the
dominant voice, using all of the power gained by believing in that story, no
matter how false. No matter how
self-serving.
The poster tells a story full of heroics, sacrifice, and lies. My job is to point out the holes in this
story. Starting with this one: resistance to terrorism is not a massacre. Innocence is not always represented by the guy
in the white hat - or, in this case, the halo. And anger is not
always a bad response to injustice.
Once again this year, I will post anti-Columbus memes on my
FaceBook page. Once again, I’ll lose “friends”
or get comments like “get OVER it already!” from people who consider themselves
otherwise sane human beings.
I’ll deal with it all.
Just more “microaggressions” to fuel my Bad Indian engine.
But this year, I’m going to look over at the poster next to
my desk, and smile. They say beauty is
in the eye of the beholder. I say,
resistance is in the voice of the storyteller.
Hello, my name is Deborah Miranda. I'm not just a storyteller. Counter-narrative is my game, and if you send your children to the university where I teach, they will not emerge unscathed. Beware. Critical thinking happens here.
