After Reading ‘Donald Duk’
This book is a vision of ‘whitewashing’ at its clearest and worst. I thought the little bit towards the end was fantastic, where they remove the crosstie with the names on it, and replace it with the Golden Spike, and have Donald react to it as an active participant in his dream. I also loved the history teacher’s reaction to Donald standing up and correcting him about certain events that took place regarding Chinese people, as well as King Duk’s response to Donald regarding white people: “Not [all white people] … Just the liars.” (or something to that effect, I don’t have my book on me).
I also enjoyed the metaphor of the dream coming to life. This is what I think people need in order to connect to history: history has to come to life. In order to remember it, history has to remain alive.
An interesting tidbit I heard from one of my professors is the reason why Native Americans never had a writing system. They were prohibited from writing anything, or developing any writing system. Their reasoning was that if you wrote down history, there would be no need to remember it. The way they passed history down through generations would be through various forms of storytelling, meant to engage people with the stories as they were told.
Which is a bit of an extreme example for how to keep history alive, but it’s one way that people have done it. I think the key thing is making sure it’s understood that people in history were human beings, with all their ups and downs and ins and outs and strengths and weaknesses and so on. After that, there has to be some connection on a human level between the people of history and the people of today. History has to be made real before anything.