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Civil rights historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries said Americans love nostalgia, not history.
Nostalgia is the stories about the past that make people feel comfortable with the present, regardless of whether they are true, Jeffries explained. But what is needed is an understanding of “hard history,” Jeffries said —such as slavery.
“If we’re caught up in the nostalgia and don’t deal with the hard history, don’t deal with those hard aspects of the ways we have generated and perpetuated inequality, then we are not prepared to address the issues today,” Jeffries said.
Jeffries, a professor at Ohio State University, gave a keynote address at the University of Southern Maine on Friday night about the nation’s inadequate commitment to teaching about slavery and its legacies. Joined by House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross and other local leaders, Jeffries’ speech was followed by a panel discussion highlighting some of the hard histories related to African Americans and the Wabanaki Nations that Maine institutions and people continue to not fully reckon with.
Teaching hard histories in Maine
In Maine, schools have failed to adequately integrate the required teachings of Wabanaki and African American studies into the K-12 curriculum.
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The history of the Wabanaki Nations — the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, Mi’kmaq Nation, Penobscot Nation and Passamaquoddy Tribe — became required teaching through a state law passed in 2001. However, the law has not been meaningfully enforced across the state, according to a 2022 report from the Abbe Museum, ACLU of Maine, Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission and Wabanaki Alliance.
African American studies became required teaching more recently, in 2021, and during public testimony before lawmakers this year, several people cautioned that that course of study would likely see the same fate without additional resources and accountability.
This spring, the Maine Legislature initially passed a bill sponsored by Talbot Ross to give teachers and schools more resources to ensure effective implementation of both courses of study, but the legislation ultimately failed after getting caught up in the funding process.
The event panelists emphasized challenges educators face when trying to teach hard histories such as these.
“Educators are afraid to teach it because they don’t want to teach it wrong,” said Brianne Lolar, the Wabanaki studies specialists for the Maine Department of Education.
For schools failing to comply with the 2001 law, Lolar also sees teachers hesitant to reach out, though said there is “no shame if you start now.”
Educators and administrators also fear legal repercussions or for their personal safety, said Meagan Sway, policy director of the Maine ACLU, pointing to heated school board meetings and lawsuits in recent years.
Before the Maine Legislature considered the African American and Wabanaki studies bill, during the first year of Maine’s latest two-year legislative session lawmakers debated a resolve to prohibit teachers from engaging in “political, ideological and religious advocacy in the classroom” as well as several bills that sought to give parents more say over what their children learn in school.
“The energy is being used in a defensive mode, instead of advancing and promoting a better curriculum,” Sway said.
For Talbot Ross, the next step that should be taken to address hard histories in Maine needs to be institutional change.
“Investment is essential,” Talbot Ross told the audience Friday evening.
Talbot Ross pointed to other failed attempts to benefit the African American, Wabanaki and other minority communities in Maine. Another bill she sponsored this past session to create a Maine Board on Place Names did not become law after Gov. Janet Mills declined to sign any of the legislation sent to her desk on the final day of session due to objections to additional spending and the Legislature passing bills past its deadline for adjournment.
Talbot Ross also highlighted the ongoing effort to legally restore tribal sovereignty to the Wabanaki Nations, which unlike the other 570 federally-recognized tribes in the U.S. are treated more like municipalities than sovereign nations under the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. Despite growing legislative and public support, lawmakers significantly pared back the third attempt at sweeping reform to avoid another veto from Mills, who signed into law a narrowed bill focused on criminal jurisdiction.
Lessons in hard histories
Jeffries said he’s learned a lot about hard history through his daughter. When she was in pre-K, he recounted how he taught her and her classmates about Martin Luther King Jr., explaining what life had been like for him in Jim Crow Georgia as well as King’s vision for the future.
Jeffries recalled what his daughter took away from learning that history: that America is damaged.
“America is in fact damaged, and it’s been damaged from the beginning,” Jefferies said. “That more perfect union that we are striving for and toward has never existed. It doesn’t mean that it can’t.”
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Jeffries encourages lifelong learning. Without it, he cautioned people often rationalize evil, create false narratives such as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy — which is a belief that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery — or engage in “purposeful historical amnesia.”
“We are never too young to learn this history,” Jefferies said, “and we are never too old.”
Moving beyond the idea that if people do not know the past, they will be doomed to repeat it, Jeffries said that sentiment assumes America has stopped doing all of the things in the past that have created inequality in the present.
“There is no end point,” Jeffries said, “We need to stop talking about, worrying about, repeating history. We need to focus on disrupting that continuum of hard history from past to present.”
The event on Friday was part of a series presented by Atlantic Black Box, in collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Maine Black Community Development, The Third Place and Portland Public Schools.
These events laid the groundwork for the Walk for Historical & Ecological Recovery (WHERE), a community-engagement effort with walks in seven communities across Maine designed to highlight the ways Indigenous, Black and settler-descendant populations are, or are not, represented in Maine’s commemorative landscape. The first walk will occur on June 22 in Portland.
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