We Are The Stories We Choose To Tell: Notes To the Student Body On Indigenous Peoples' Day
In recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Stone humanities instructor Andrew Dyrli Hermeling addressed the collected Stone student body and asked them to consider what this day might mean when contextualized historically. Below, the full text of Andrew’s remarks to our students:
Here at Stone, we like to talk a lot about stories. How our Mods are stories and how our school years are stories.
We practice how best to tell stories and we think deeply about which stories are worth telling--worth remembering.
Within any community, holidays serve as signposts pointing to those stories that the community has deemed worthy of remembering. On Passover for example, the Jewish community remembers their deliverance out of bondage. During Ramadan, the Muslim community remembers the month during which the Quran was revealed to Muhammed. During Diwali, members of the Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and certain Buddhist communities remember how the Great Story of the Universe ends with light’s victory over darkness.
National communities also determine which stories are worth remembering. On July 4th, for example, we remember that our national story began with a philosophical commitment, that “all men are created equal,” that we equally possess certain “unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
But one of the powers of stories is that we are active participants in their telling. And we have the power to critique them.
Frederick Douglass reminded us of this, when he asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.”
Douglass saw the flaw in a holiday that celebrated something that was not true. (You too have perhaps noticed the flaw in celebrating equality while exclusively using only male pronouns.)
Depending on how your digital calendars are set up, you may have received a reminder of a story worth remembering today. And depending on the calendar, it is also likely that many of you were reminded to remember one story, while others were reminded to remember a very different one.
Nationally, the push for an official Columbus Day was rooted in the call to remember those who were being left out of the national story. At a time in the beginning of the 20th century when America’s immigrant population drew heavily from Roman Catholic countries—especially Ireland and Italy—many argued that Catholics were “un-American.” In response, Italian-Americans pushed for a holiday that centered an Italian as foundational to the American story. And I think we would do well to remember that anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant sentiment were not only a problem in this nation’s past but that it sadly continues to this day.
But Columbus Day is also a celebration of the beginning of a story that may be worth remembering differently.
Within the scope of the deep history of humanity, 1492 CE is incredibly recent. According to the archaeological record, the place we currently call Pennsylvania has been populated for 19 thousand years. Other sites around the Americas could be as much as 30 thousand years old. While today marks 529 years since Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, 529 years since European-descendent communities came to live in the Americas, those 529 years only represent around 2% of the human history of this place. And I think we’d do well to remember that by placing the beginning of our story at 1492, we are designating the vast majority of the human history of this continent as prologue.
The place where you are actively sitting at this very moment was populated by Iroquian-speaking people before the arrival of Europeans. Today, we generally know these people as Susquehannocks, although many English settlers called them Conestogas, which was in fact the name of their largest and last settlement. We don’t actually know what the Susquehannocks called themselves, a part of their story that has been forgotten.
Sadly, today we know much more about the end of their story than the beginning. Ravaged by European diseases and conflicts with their neighbors, both Indigenous and Settler, a community of people who had once numbered around 7000 had dwindled to just 22 people living in Conestoga town, just down the road from where you are sitting now. They no longer lived in traditional longhouses, but instead had opted for European-style cabins. They wore European-style clothes and made a living weaving baskets to be sold to the broader Lancaster Community.
However, in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, certain Pennsylvanians had grown suspicious of their Indigenous neighbors. During the Christmas season of 1763, a time of the year when Christians remember the beginning of their story, European-descendant members of Paxton Presbyterian Church marched from what is today Harrisburg and attacked the Conestogas as they slept, killed six of them, and burned down their village. Those Conestogas who survived were brought for their own protection to the Lancaster prison, a building that has since been replaced by the Fulton Theater. But the Paxton Boys were not satisfied with destroying the Conestogas’ homes. They broke into the jail, killed, and scalped the six adults and eight children that were there. Although eyewitness accounts vary widely, some note that the Paxton Boys struck at a time when the jail guards were attending Christmas services.
The celebration of Columbus Day asks us to remember what began in 1492, and the people responsible for it. The celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day asks us to remember those who were here first and the consequences of forgetting that.
So which of these stories should we be getting proverbial push notifications about? What stories are silenced when you replace that story with another one? What is our role, as students and citizens, in constructing and retelling these stories?
I do know that I will be spending this day remembering the Susquehannocks who were here before anyone who looks like me arrived. I am choosing to use this day to remember the names of those whose lives were taken here in 1763. These names are likely distortions of the victim’s true names, as they were transliterated and recorded in English by the Pennsylvania government, but I do think that we should endeavor to remember them as they knew themselves.
I am choosing to remember:
Sheehays
Wa-a-shen
Tee-Kau-ley
Ess-canesh
Tea-wonsha-i-ong
Kannenquas
Kyunqueagoah
Koweenasee
Tenseedaagua
Kanianguas
Saquies-hat-tah
Chee-na-wan
And especially the children:
Quaachow
Shae-e-kah
Ex-undas
Tong-quas
Hy-ye-naes
Ko-qoa-e-un-quas
Karen-do-uah
Canu-kie-sung
—Andrew Hermeling, Stone Humanities
See also: Head’s Address to the Student Body On the First Day of School; Simple Solutions Are The Best Solutions; On Asian-American Hate;