What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right
- He used the N-word and told racist jokes. He once said African-Americans were inferior to whites. He proposed ending slavery by shipping willing slaves back to Africa
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It was amusing at the time -- because we were 16 and collectively stupid -- but I had a classmate in 11th grade American History who was Lakota and Crow. This was in northwestern New England, where most of us believed we didn't have native peoples anymore. Witness the Abenaki struggle to get even state-level recognition. We treated it as a carnival sideshow curiosity.
This guy was the mouse in the back of the room until we got to Westward Expansion, then we could not shut him up. "Yeah, that's not really how that went." "Actually, what happened was ... " "That's not how my uncle the tribal historian tells the story." Finally one day he got so frustrated at all of us self-privileged white kids that he offered to demonstrate scalping, all he needed was a volunteer. (Lucky him, this was the early 90s, and he was pretty much laughed off. Today he'd be arrested for "making terroristic threats.")
My father used to participate in the yearly history pageant, celebrating the history of Lake Champlain. Because he gets a sunburn standing in the shade, he always got assigned to play an Iroquois warrior. To this day, he refuses to admit how howlingly racist the whole thing was. I brought home a history assignment on a "colonial hero" (who massacred an Abenaki village,) his face nearly exploded.
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