Dreamed 95/9/4 by Chris Wayan
I'm reading a riveting, appalling book: "Lies My Teacher Told Me," on why American history classes are so dull: because the history they teach is fake. The author, a historian, collated twelve high school history texts and then tells us what they censor or outright falsify.
Columbus was not only not the first, he wasn't even third. The book lists solid evidence for extensive pre-Columbian contacts ranging from the Phoenicians to the Vikings to the West Africans to the Bretons to the Japanese. The only difference was, Columbus had guns and big money behind him.
The North American population really was 10-20 million--or MORE--and decimated by imported plague. The death rate in New England was around 95%. This is not open to argument: contemporary sources are detailed, consistent and matter-of-fact about it. Later revisionists are morally and factually on a par with Holocaust deniers. The Europeans didn't clear wilderness, they took over cleared fields and farm towns. In the Caribbean, the evidence for millions living on Hispaniola before Columbus is quite solid; the number of people worked to death as slaves in the mines on that one isle alone may rival the Nazi holocaust.
The Iroquois contribution to U.S. democracy runs deeper even than I thought; the Iroquois apparently were the first to propose that the bickering colonies form a union and free themselves from the Brits!
I knew the Cherokee applied for statehood... but so did the Delaware, and Indian Territory. They elected and sent representatives to Congress, who were blocked by Southern whites. Any non-racist state or territory near the plantations was a deadly danger to the owners; slaves would have somewhere to run. And they did! In the South, exterminating the Indians was really all about keeping a buffer zone around slavery, preventing refugee camps and resistance movements from forming.
The slave policies of Revolutionary heroes varied, Jefferson falling in the middle. Some did free slaves; one admitted it was the right thing to do, but couldn't bring himself to do without servants--calls himself a hypocrite! They were quite aware of the moral issue--economics and personal greed and sheer habit, not a moral blind spot or unthinking racism, kept them slave-owners. I don't know if that makes them better than I thought, or worse; but certainly different.
John Brown, portrayed in my history classes as either impractical or half-crazy, was perfectly sane: he expected his slave-rebellion to fail and that he'd die, but accurately predicted his death would shift the slavery debate. Suddenly, Abolition via law was moderate--mainstream! He made Lincoln's election possible, triggered the war, and forced Emancipation.
Reconstruction wasn't nearly as corrupt as before or after; carpetbaggers and incompetent black legislators were Klan propaganda disseminated as fact by a new wave of racists culminating in Woodrow Wilson. This president, praised as effective and progressive in my schoolbooks, was an open white supremacist, and so warlike he outraged the entire electorate; his hand-picked successor lost by the biggest margin in history against a nobody--Warren G. Harding.
I stay up till two AM, hooked.
THAT NIGHT
It's the 19th Century, but not exactly the same century I recall from MY history books. I'm a revolutionary in the war to free us from Great Britain. Our country is large and sparsely populated. Australia or America? Many of us here are convicts and slaves...
One hero of the revolution is an old friend of mine, Silky--a talking black mare! She's fighting to end slavery of animals as well as humans. People are confused to hear a mare speaking but learn to take it for granted when faced with her daily. There have been other talking animals, scattered through history--they're just rare enough so that scientists (who have perhaps more status to defend than slaves and convicts) never conceded their reality. But if an exceptional mare can learn to speak and reason, how can humans oppress other animals who may have the same potential?
A long sea-voyage in a wooden sailing ship. London's in sight when...
IN THE MORNING
I wake to find I nodded off in my car, while stuck in a traffic jam! Back in the dreary all-human world.
I mourn for Silky--grieve because she was just a dream. Around me's the sterile, horrible reality.
Then I see a personalized license plate with a word on it from an earlier dream. So that dream was psychic! What do I mean, JUST a dream?
I check my memory--and find it's common knowledge here that rare individual animals ARE in fact born able to learn language. And Silky is a historical figure. Some doubt her, the way right-wing fanatics doubt the Holocaust; but her existence, due to the diplomatic swath she cut thru Europe, is massively documented. Real. She changed history in her own time, AND the treatment of animals for generations to come.
That grim world where everyone knows animals can't think--THAT was a dream!
And I wake...
NOTES
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