Native Americans were doing great before Europeans came along. They prowled the great outdoors, suffered from fewer diseases, hunted, foraged, roamed, and lived generally wild lives. Must have been great — in my opinion at least.
But alas, such an eden couldn’t last forever. When Europe arrived to sack and rape the new found territories, the Natives couldn’t have been less prepared. I’m sure the Native Americans didn’t have a word for genocide, but it’s the only one that comes to my mind.
It became an age of fire and disease, spilling over the once peaceful, the once beautiful lands. And now many of them are gone. Those that still live here mostly keep to their reservations. It was a great wrong, a terrible and dark thing to do to a people, and it was something the Europeans never really made amends for.
So when this history of mass murder and land snatching is denied, it stings anyone who knows the real story. And Chiitaanibah Johnson knows the dam story. She came from a long line of Native Americans, and when her college professor tried skewing history, Johnson became angry.
The professor stated that, “The Native Americans were killed off by complete accident. You heard that right. Diseases brought over by Europeans, warfare amongst themselves, bigfoots, all of it. They just got really unlucky.”
Johnson confronted her professor right in the middle of class, arguing that YES, in fact the Natives were killed off deliberatly and systematically, barbarically by immigrants who pillaged and burned her very heritage.
Sadly none of her classmates came to her defense. No one agreed. No one clapped. No one even whispered. Which gave her professor all the power in the world — the maniac “dis-enrolled” her from the class, told her to get out and threatened her with expulsion.
So she took to the media. And here we are…
Teaching a class on Native American History is probably a very touchy subject. There isn’t really a right way to handle the subject, only a gentle way, and a whole lot of wrong ways. And understating the severity of the violence and brutality unleashed upon the Natives by European immigrants is definitely a wrong way.
The university responded with a notice that NO teacher has the right to “dis-enroll” a student, and Johnson needs not worry about expulsion for the confrontation.