| To: Retort From: GS Geoff responds: “Having visited several museums and monuments to the Jewish Holocaust, I thought that there should be such a museum in Sacramento (near Sutter's Fort) to what happened here. But that would, of course, be impossible since it would hold up a mirror to what we (European immigrants) do not want to know about ourselves and our own history. As Monbiot says, it's what one might expect to have happened to history had the Nazis won. But there is another reason, I think, and that is that the Jewish Holocaust must be kept uniquely horrific for the political purposes it serves. When I asked a Jewish friend of mine why there is no museum to the vastly greater slaughter of native Americans, she candidly said: "It's because we are white and we have the money to build our own museums." She did not say that those museums and monuments serve to justify what Israel perennially does to its own indigenous population while claiming that it is the victim. Thus history is written (and not.)” Gray's comment is myopic, highly offensive, and wrong. OK, so he got the idea in his head that there ought to be an Indian museum in Sacramento like the Holocaust Museum in DC. There is, of course, the National Museum of the American Indian in DC, which is chock full of displays and information about the Native American genocide. There are other major Indian museums in Illinois, New Mexico, and California, not to mention hundreds of museums maintained by tribal governments on reservations, each one of which devotes substantial resources to telling the story of what happened here. These museums merit acknowledgement and support. Instead, Gray renders them to nonexistence and impossibility, obviously preoccupied with a political agenda of his own, which would pit one genocide against another in some perverse ideological game. Gray quotes a "Jewish friend" to explain the absence of Indian museums. But there is no absence, and he clearly asked no Indians. American Indians certainly don't share Gray's weird take on the Holocaust Museum. Ask them. I work with tribal governments and have heard nothing but praise for the Holocaust Museum, because the latter is not, as Gray fantasizes, devoted exclusively to the destruction of European Jews, but in fact approaches the phenomenon of genocide as a perennial _expression_ of evil, with much to say about the genocides committed against American Indians, Armenians, Rwandans, etc. Anyone involved in this work knows that educators, scholars and curators move around between the Holocaust Museum and other related projects, and study of the European Holocaust provided a scholarly framework for reinterpretation of the American Indian experience, responsible for the very resurgence of attention to the Native American Holocaust, of which we speak. The same kind of competitive idiocy occasionally cropped up in discussions about how to memorialize the institutions of black slavery and the Underground Railroad. Always, such a tendency was destructive and reflective of the same racism/antisemitism we are supposed to be combatting. Yeah, I know, antisemitism has become cool in "intellectual" circles on the left. Perhaps we should build a monument to that atrocity. If Gray seriously wants to establish some monument or museum, I suggest he talk to American Indians. They are still around y'know. It would also be interesting to introduce Gray to some of the most well-known American Indian leaders in the country, because he would find, probably to his dismay, that a large number of them are half-Jewish. It's funny in a way that Gray should try to use the Holocaust Museum to make some point about the differential treatment of "whites" and American Indians. That distinction, as it exists in Gray's mind, did not characterize the perpetrators of either the European or the American genocides. The nazis did not regard Jews as "whites," which was an important point in their justification of extermination. And most interestingly, the 19th century U.S. frontier fighters did not generally regard Indians as a "race" distinguished from Semites. Indeed, the most common theories of American Indian origins, prior to around 1870, were that the Indians WERE Jews -- descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, or early offshoots of Noah's lineage, or relatedly that they were wandering Hindus, Egyptians, or Greeks. These theories, supported by the fact that many North American Indians had very light skin and some had beards, are enshrined in the Book of Mormon, and were not dispelled until scholars like Ephraim Squier and John Wesley Powell insisted on the indigenous character of North American works. In short, racialism of the whites versus non-whites variety was almost entirely a twentieth century phenomenon. To the extent that Europeans claimed superiority earlier, Jews were clearly on the other side of the divide. GS |