Very shakey moral high ground

 Listening to '1-A' on NPR this morning and thinking, not surprisingly, that the United States has a really short memory when it comes to history. As a society we're really good at shoving unpleasant facts deep into the memory hole. The topic of the hour is Chinese mistreatment of the Uyghur minority within China. It is undoubtedly a horrible situation. The Chinese have established "re-education" centers, moved Uyghurs from their traditional homeland and forced them to take jobs elsewhere, they've tried to prevent Uyghurs from speaking their native language and separated children from their parents. Where, one asks, could they have possibly gotten inspiration for such mass indoctrination and attempted acculturation?

Genocide of native peoples? Indoctrination efforts? Boarding schools for the children? Persecution for practicing their traditional religion? Relocation to areas far from home to work in factories? Locked in internment camps as a possible threat to national security? The irony runs deep. 

One of the news items earlier in the morning was a brief report on the Secretary of Interior explaining the latest (as in, the immediate future; Biden still has to sign the bill) addition to the National Parks system, a site in Colorado that during World War II served as a concentration camp for Japanese-Americans. Amache National Historic Site is located in southeastern Colorado near the town of Granada. It is only one of multiple sites around the nation where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during the war. We were at war with Germany, too, but I don't recall ever hearing about German-Americans being forced to leave their homes in Milwaukee, St. Louis, and elsewhere after being given barely enough time to pack a suitcase, but maybe no one in government wanted to risk losing breweries.  

A slight digression. The bill to designate the internment camp as a national historic site met with almost zero opposition. It was one of those rare examples of Congress coming close to passing a bill unanimously. One loud exception: Mike Lee, the asshole Republican Senator from Utah. He wants absolutely no land added to the National Parks (or maybe to the Department of Interior in general) so had said the only way he'd vote for it was if Interior agreed to put an equivalent amount of land, something like 1 square mile, up for sale to private ownership. Amache was already in public ownership; it was simply being transferred from state to federal management. Of course, Lee is still seething over President Biden restoring the boundaries for Bears Ears National Monument in Utah (also all public land, both before and after the boundaries got modified, because everything included in both versions of Bears Ears was owned by the Bureau of Land Management). Lee caved after the senior Senator from Colorado leaned on him.

In any case, I could see the U.S. lecturing China on human rights and suppressing indigenous and minority peoples if it was couched as "We did something similar and we realize now it was a huge honking mistake, a major blot on our legacy, and one we've learned to regret," but, nope. It's more like that whole demonizing the Japanese never happened. Almost 80 years after the fact the country is now willing to preserve a few crumbling buildings and put up a few books on sticks, but it's not going to get mentioned in policy discussions or lecturing other nations on proper behavior.

Ditto the re-education efforts, the removal of children from their homes, and all the other efforts to change the Uyghurs. If a person is thinking about it all pretty quickly calls to mind phrases like "Indian boarding schools." The book pictured above, The Ledgerbook of Thomas Blue Eagle, is both one of the most beautiful illustrated kids' books a person can read and one of the most heartbreaking. Thomas Blue Eagle is a teenager removed from his home on the reservation in South Dakota and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. The book is the boy's journal. He's homesick, he misses his family, he gets punished whenever he forgets and speaks his native language, the school cuts his hair and changes his name, and in general they try to get him to forget he's Lakota. But he copes, he adjusts, and he looks forward to being able to go home for a visit soon. And then he dies from tuberculosis, as did massive numbers of other students in the boarding schools. It's definitely one of those keep the box of Kleenex close when you get toward the end books.   

More recently, there was the Urban Relocation Act in 1956. . . I know people who got persuaded to leave their rural homes and move to Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, or other cities in search of a better life. Native Americans were assigned social workers in the cities who would help newcomers find a place to stay and businesses that were hiring. Fred Dakota, former tribal chairman for the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, told a story about going down to Chicago in the late 1950s and getting hired by a company that made sporting goods like bows and arrows. He'd get pointed out to plant visitors as being "a real Indian" as if he possessed some special expertise when it came to manufacturing arrows. (He didn't last long in the city. He came home to Baraga County, became active in Native politics, and is remembered now as the father of Indian gaming. The Chinese government had better hope the Uyghurs don't have a Fred Dakota because the Uyghurs will eventually end up owning the country.)

In any case, the goal of urban relocation wasn't to end rural poverty or lack of opportunity; the implicit goal was to separate people from the reservations, get them to become embedded in a dominant white culture, and gradually depopulate Native communities, thus relieving the burden on the Bureau of Indian Affairs and treaty obligations. Granted, no one was forcibly removed from their home and told they now worked in a factory a thousand miles away, but is financially coerced cultural assimilation that much better morally than forced assimilation?

You know, when an ethically dubious government program happened recently enough that people who participated in it are around to talk about it, that's not exactly ancient history. You don't have to be real smart to recognize why the Chinese consider American hand wringing and lectures about human rights to be rather meaningless.