High Country News publisher Greg Hanscom has invited me, along with other former as well as current subscribers, via a mass blast email to participate in the latest installment of what will probably be "wrongful wokeness." It's an invite to the latest installation of an online kaffeeklatsch with its editorial staff. Here's the details:
Our next topic is one that has put HCN on the map in a big way in recent years: a deep reckoning with the history of Western lands, and the Indigenous nations from which they were taken. I’ll be talking with Nick Martin, the head of our Indigenous Affairs Desk, whose recent essay about the ancient footprints discovered in White Sands National Park cast the story in a much different light than we saw in other news outlets, and intern Brian Oaster, who has reported on the nomination of the first Native official to be head of the National Park Service.
My response?
At the same time, will you also report on how American Indian tribes were never "always there"?
Example: The Sioux were only moving west of the Missouri in any numbers at the same time Lewis and Clark were moving up.
Example 2: The Navajo did not enter the Southwest until only about a century or so before Coronado.
Example 3: The Apache also didn't arrive in the Southwest until about the same time, pushed out of Texas by the Comanche, who in turn were moving from elsewhere.
None of this is to excuse Anglo treaty-breaking. None of this is to say that being "woke" is necessarily bad.
It IS, though, to say that: A. Being uninformedly woke and B. Being tribalist (pun not intended) or twosiderist is not good either.
And, if you click that tag of "wrongful wokeness," you'll find plenty of previous HCN examples.
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