I am a historian by academic training and a craft brewer by profession. In viewing the videos at the beginning of Module 1, I can only respond with what I know...history as it is written and dictated needs to be rewritten. Right now, it is written from the perspective of white academics. I am a mostly white academic and professional. The material in the videos posted is largely omitted from the history books, not adequately taught to our children, largely unknown. I had the fortune/misfortune to learn about the inequity of indigenous people from a young age. My mom's side is Menominee. We learned about how my great-grandmother hid who she was and had to pretend she was white to not be killed in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and NE Wisconsin, how she wore make-up to lighten her complexion after seeing members of her tribe killed in what I am told was a debate about their rights to spear fish (among other things). When I was in college, I lived near one of the BIA Boarding Schools that had since closed (Mount Pleasant, MI) and worked for a few years at the casino run by the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. Hearing accounts from the elders on how they were torn from their families, stripped of their culture and their language, and forced to assimilate to the ways of white people sickened me. Knowing that this continued into more recent times with the adoption of indigenous children into white homes saddens and angers me. This and the other things I watched and have sought to learn about the injustices to people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized peoples show me just how incomplete our history is in terms of documentation. We have so much more to add to the books, so many things that were left out, so much that was omitted for political and societal and biased reasons.
