An elephant in the room of American History.

Ok — this is perforce a short really long version (because I couldn’t take the time to edit to something short and sensible), but it seems important to me that I put it down while it’s fresh. And since I’m cooking dinner, I figured I could take the few minutes and do that without feeling too guilty.

For reasons I won’t go into, I was at one point today surrounded by people with an interest in American history, and more specifically, the history of where I live. The conversation was largely about immigrant populations that made America.

Except that it wasn’t. It was about the immigrants who made an America. To be fair, it is the America of the textbooks. But I didn’t grow up east of the Appalachians, or the Mississippi, or even the Rockies. There were lots of immigrants in my part of the country before the Revolution, but then, that’s not America. Well, it is now, but.

Suddenly, it really hit me how different the American history narrative is from anything I’m used to.

The American history narrative only works as the history of a nation. Not only that, but it only works as the history of an Anglo-centric nation.

The textbooks I use for East Asian history are histories of areas AND of the peoples who formed kingdoms, empires, and eventually modern nation states. Histories of European nations are also like that. In those histories — and I supposed in that particular sort of historiographical paradigm — we have to deal with really difficult and hard-to-define ideas: what is nationhood? what exactly is ethnicity? what do we mean by the history of Germany, or France, or China? Is it where the people who identified as Germans or Franks or the French or Chinese (which Chinese? Han? but there are non-Han in China, and they were both Chinese and not…)

But in American history, it’s as if there is a curtain. Good revisionism has forced the inclusion of Native Americans, but the history is still one written in ways best played out in cartoon graphics. There is a continent, and there are natives. White people from Europe show up, but only the British count; the Dutch are bought out, and the French exist as foils for the British settlers. They are there only to be driven back to Canada, as if they were not only invaders of Native American lands, but of British lands as well. Slowly, the borders move west. The Louisiana Purchase is added. We got it from France, you know. It’s a big honking piece of territory, parts of which were inhabited by actual French people. Who spoke French. Presumably, they had some influence on the places they settled. Well, duh! Hello, New Orleans! cajuns! (with some explanation of Acadia, if you’re lucky) weird legal traditions that aren’t English Common Law!

Because, well, their traditions aren’t part of America, really. They’re foreigners, even though they might have been born here. In America, the place. Not the nation. Which is a place.

Skip ahead to the Mexican-American War, and Gold Rush. Watch as Americans — real Americans, who include immigrants from other parts of Europe — move west. See the horrors of the clashes with Native Americans — on the plains, mostly. And in parts of the southwest. But there’s not much on the Pueblo peoples (unless they fought back, nor until they were forced onto reservations). And there’s almost nothing about the remaining Native Americans in California, except as survivors of Spain’s imperial endeavors. But the Spanish cultural influence, and then the influence of Mexico (also Hispanized), are glossed over. The areas are part of America, but they weren’t American. The people and the culture that could not be categorized as Native simply stopped existing. America was there now, and they were not part of America’s history. They were foreigners — not even immigrants — to be absorbed or ignored.

Or at least it seems that way to me. The American history narrative is one that grudgingly allows Native Americans a place, although only in relation to Europeans. But those parts of the country that developed differently, that had different cultural influences? We can ignore them, and their heritage, because, well, they weren’t American till they became part of the nation.

Given my expectations for dealing with areas where many different populations and cultures have lived and often influenced each other for a couple of millennia, I really have a hard time getting my head round this sort of narrative.