Re: What Are You Currently Reading?
Colin G. Calloway's
First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History. This is one of several books I am reading for an American Indians History class. This class does not 'help' me toward anything, but is one of those classes I wanted to take despite the strain it adds to my 'important' classes because the subject and professor are worth it.
In any case, this single volume history is a heartbreaking but also inspiring overview of American Indians from their first contact with Westerners to the current age. The nuance given to each Indian nation and their dealings with Westerners and other Indian nations gives them the 'flesh' I have been missing from other histories and media.
These less flattering lenses on the States ironically help instill a greater appreciation of it, both through understanding of how much 'little' and 'big' people both within and without the 'larger society' have accomplished toward the greater good despite the monumental amount of prejudice and indifference and evil, and in seeing the contours of the great ills that remain in need of correcting. As Senator Carl Schurz put it, "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right" (
29 February, 1872). Natives' stories are the stories of us all, and should hurt and heal all of us.