Editorial: Avoiding history

If you were going to teach Iowa history, you might begin about 1,500 years ago with the Mill Creek people who lived along the Little Sioux River near Peterson. Their archeological remnants are the oldest found around here. We don’t know what happened to the people. A megadrought about 1,300 years ago may have driven them from Northwest Iowa to what is now North Dakota, and they may have become the Mandan people.

Then you might fast-forward 1,000 years and look into the Ioway people, among the Oneota nations (including the nearby Winnebago) that many believed migrated south from the Great Lakes near Green Bay. Oneota burial sites comprise the Effigy Mounds State Park in northeast Iowa. The Ioway were prominent from Des Moines to Storm Lake. They called the land between the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers “Our Place” in maps from the early 1800s. The Ioway were agriculturalists who lived in permanent settlements in what is now the buckle of the Corn Belt, sustainably farming corn, squash and beans, and living on generous supplies of elk and bison.

Then you might look in about 1830 as westward European settlement was driving the Sac and Fox west. The Ioway tried to accommodate them. They were pressured, too, by other tribes as White settlers steadily took their land. In a treaty signed at Prairie Du Chien, the Ioway agreed to establish themselves at the corner of Kansas and Nebraska along the Missouri River at what is now White Cloud (named after the great Ioway chief Mahaska). They were supposed to have hunting and fishing rights here in perpetuity. We never learned any of this in school. We never learned how Iowa got its name until we sought it out: It is a Siouxan word for “sleepy people,” as the Ioway lived prosperously and generally peacefully until outside forces disastrously intervened.

And you still won’t learn this story in school, depending on how a new state law signed this week by Gov. Kim Reynolds plays out. The law bans teaching “critical race theory,” anything that essentially suggests that our nation or state are systemically or foundationally racist.

The facts are indisputable, if difficult. Dig into it in an eminently readable book by Storm Lake native Martin Case, published in 2018 by the Minnesota Historical Society, titled The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land Became US Property. Under the new law, since the book documents how Native Americans were defrauded, hunted and murdered by the government and its agents, it probably could be banned from Storm Lake classrooms or at the University of Iowa.

Or the writings of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Waterloo native, graduate of West High School and the University of Notre Dame, whose “1619 Project” in The New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. She also is a MacArthur Fellow. It was her work that gave rise to the bill Reynolds signed. Her history tells how the United States was built on a racist foundation with the first slave boats. There remains plenty to wring out of the system, to wit: Black farmers whose land was expropriated, finally are getting their claims heard by the USDA while some White farmers are complaining it is discriminatory; Georgia is making it tougher for Blacks to vote after church; a criminal justice system has Black men crowding our prisons and dying at the hands of police; Native people continue to suffer endemic poverty, lack of access to health care, and restricted opportunity. In a perverse proof-in-point, Hannah-Jones was denied faculty tenure at the University of North Carolina — her post-graduate alma mater —  after pressure from cracker donors.

Fortunately, the Iowa law is so squishy and vague it shouldn’t be that hard to introduce the diligent and honest work of either Case or Hannah-Jones into our classrooms. If a teacher gets sued, there will be a sufficient defense fund to argue the case in court — and if facts absent politics are the basis of justice in this state, the teacher should have no worries.

It’s a shame. It’s embarrassing. The fact is that we have been there before and never quite left. We were taught that the Spirit Lake Massacre was conducted by savages. We were not taught that 75 Dakota people were poisoned by the White fur trader Henry Lott near Livermore, which led Inkpadutah to attack the Gardner family in retaliation. But it happened. It helped to set the stage for the Dakota War with the US Government, which concluded with the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato — the largest mass execution in American history.

Most of us still don’t know better, because a subtle racism in Iowa swept those truths into the dustbin of history. Reynolds’s signature brings it out into the open. The government writes the history and teaches it to the children. If you never tell them about how Iowa was established as a territory and a state, or why Hannah-Jones’s father fled the South for Waterloo, then you can believe there is no problem. Yet facts are stubborn and will find their way. At some point Iowans, whose forebears fought to defeat slavery and feel its weight on society today, will demand we get our history right.