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(2016
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2016 (Index to # 1 samples) #1: Long Essay: learning, challenges, issues |
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Austin Green
Part
1: Essay 1
Peeling Back the Real History
Once I hit
high school, I remember a recurring theme I saw over and over again. I still am
seeing it now in college. What you already learned wasn’t the truth, here is the
actual truth. Information I learned from not only school, but from pop culture
as well. Things told to me as fact then explained, casually, as if it were no
big deal, that the truth was actually completely different than what I knew. By
now, it does not even phase me to hear “Oh that thing you learned growing up?
Not true. It’s actually the opposite of that.” The information we have been
covering in class so far this semester just makes me question, over and over,
why not just teach things “the way they really were.” It’s the battle of which
America to teach—the dominant culture or the multicultural? We need to know both
to understand the progress of our country. Which is the truth? Can both be true?
We see this in Columbus’s Letters, John Smith’s A General History of Virginia,
De Vaca’s La Relacion, and others.
I’m not sure exactly what grade we are taught that Columbus discovered America,
and that he was this great explorer we named the country after. Someone who
should be admired and celebrated for being the first to “find” America! It was
definitely grade school. From then till now, in college, we’ve learned pretty
much everything originally told to us about Columbus was fiction, just a story
to tell little kids to get them to understand the idea of an explorer, and
someone “finding” a country. It had to be someone, why not Columbus? It’s a
National Holiday, something has to be told to the kids.
In reading Columbus’s Letters, two passages stuck out to me the most. The first
was “I gave them some of everything I had—cloth and many other things—without
receiving anything in return, but they are
a hopelessly timid
people…
they are
so unsuspicious and so generous with what they possess, that no one who had not
seen it would believe it. They never refuse anything that is asked for. They
even offer it themselves, and show so much love that they would give their very
hearts.”
This is in the first letter he writes, where he contradicts himself almost
immediately. He mentions how great it was of him, to give the natives some of
everything he had, without receiving anything in return, but then talks of them
never refusing anything they were asked for. This shows me that these letters
are already not trustworthy. An unreliable narrator in a story is fine. I am
okay with it, I like it if done well. When dealing with historical documents
though, it’s kind of scary. We are using this document (and others like it) to
learn about our history, to tell the story of our country. If the author can’t
be trusted, then it’s hard to believe anything they say can have real merit in a
historical sense.
The first
lines of the second letter, mentioning Indians, made a point to note that they
wouldn’t sell or trade the gold hanging from their necks, and that the seacoast
had gold and mines. Keep this in mind for the
other passage that was really interesting to me, which was near the end of this
same second letter. “I did not sail upon this voyage to gain honour or wealth;
this is certain, for already all hope of that was dead.
I came
to your highnesses with true devotion and with ready zeal, and I do not lie.”
Here Columbus is building himself up as some sort of martyr. All he did was not
for honor or wealth, which is odd considering how the letter began.
The
next surprise was one I originally learned not from school, but from movies.
Everyone my age has seen the Disney animated movies that were released when we
were growing up. Likely, they have all seen them multiple times. Disney’s
Pocahontas told the tale of John Smith and Pocahontas, and their love and
adventure. Except wait, it’s 99% made up. I know it can be looked at and
questioned to think of this as a true story. It’s by Disney, they made Peter
Pan. But when I was young, it was absolutely presented as a true story. This was
what really happened, in animated form. In reading John Smith’s General History
of Virginia, we are told in the notes before even starting “Smith
was 27 years old, app. 15 years older than Pocahontas in her early teens, so
don't go there . . .
they
didn't.” Granted I was already told this sometime during high school, the fact
that it was written here shows how hard the animated movie permeated our culture
and became “historical fact.”
Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relacion has probably been my favorite read so far.
Again though, we have to deal with the narrator being somewhat unreliable, as he
is the one telling his own history. This was the first exposure I had to this
story, which might be why I was able to enjoy it more than the previous ones. I
wasn’t going over a mental checklist of what I thought was right, and what was
actually happening. As someone form Galveston, I thought it was interesting to
actually see a piece of the islands history that was pre-1900 storm. The storm
was pretty much the furthest back we ever got in any of my classes growing up
(beyond the wide generalizations like Indians lived there). “To this island we
gave the name of the Island of Ill-Fate [“Isla
de Malhado”; a.k.a. “Island of Doom”; i.e. Galveston
Island].”
This gave what I felt to be at least a somewhat real, believable look into what
life would have been like for explorers at this time.
I wonder how
accurate the Indians portrayed in both A General History of Virginia, and La
Relacion, as well as
Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison,
really were. We see these (or selections from these) presented as captivity
narratives, and are told from the point of view of the captive. While the
meaning behind why each of them were written differs, I’m again brought back to
the fact that we cannot know for sure how reliable these narrators are. We don’t
know if they are embellishing details to make themselves looks braver or
stronger, or leaving out details that show them to be weaker or otherwise badly.
Were the same “savage” Indians who were “being
ready with their clubs to beat out his brains” in A General History of Virginia
the same ones making the Native American music we heard in class?
Why are we
told one thing, then told another? Shouldn’t we just be told from the start what
the truth is? Maybe we are told one thing knowing that other teachers down the
road will explain the real truth. I think this is the case. Maybe we just need
to be eased into history, and the quickest way to do that is to give us easy,
simple versions first, even if the truth is a little clouded. This explanation
is the best I can come up with, but I feel even this just strongly supports the
dominant culture. It says, “This is more important, learn it first.” Even me
thinking it easier bows down to the dominant culture. I’m not sure it’s a fight
anyone can win. All one can do to try is to learn more.
