History as We Leave It :: History Historical Essays

History as We Leave ItLiterary description always opens onto other scene set, so to speak, behind the this- populationly things it purports to depict. --- Michel Beaujour, Some Paradoxes of Description When I was precise young, my grandmother told me that my great, great grandfather came to northern Minnesota in the nineties and settled the small town we lived in, Askov. She said that he was a in truth brave pi 1er who tread across unknown territory, and no one had ever lived on that down before. I pictured my ancestors arriving here and determination nothing but animals that they had to fight away interchangeable they were the only deal around for miles until other people came to join them. Until they arrived, Minnesota was a land untouched, unconquered and uncivilized. I never heard of Indians, or that they had once dwell the land even my t for each oneers hardly mentioned them in elementary school. I theme they were just fictitious characters on Saturday morning cartoon s until I eventually in condition(p) that they were real and once inhabited the land. As illustrated in the story that my nanna told me, how we tell our stories invite an impact on the history we quit how we twaddle close to the Native Americans (or fail to talk about them) influences history and how we leave it. The most raw accounts of how people tell their stories is in personal letter where they feel free to use their own rowing and thoughts, thinking that their words rent little effect on the ones reading them or the world around them. Consider the excerpt from a letter written by Sophie Bost, a white settler in Minnesota during the Minnesota revolt in 1862 And then there are these Indians I would really like to know where they are after all the scare theyve given us . . . I dreamed night before last that my children were butchered before my eyeball . . . and I had taken them into my bed and was sleeping with an arm under each one, as comfortable as though I had been massacred myself. italics mine (Bowen 214) The words butchered and massacred show the fear she carried about Indians and exasperation about how she and her husband were going to protect their children. I do not doubt that living in those times must have been terrifying for anybody. In other words, Indians could just as easily have used the words butchered and massacred to describe white attacks upon them.