A sign in Riverside Park in Laurel, Montana commemorating the Nez Perce’s “Trail of Tears.” In September 1877, a band of Chief Joseph’s tribe encamped near the spot (Photo by Darrell Ehrlick of the Daily Montanan).
I suppose if Yellowstone County Commission Chairman Mark Morse can make a plea to use public property as detention camps, using the power of his position as justification to speak for all county residents, then I’d ask our Congressional delegation to consider this perspective from another longtime county resident.
I urge our all-Republican delegation of Reps. Troy Downing and Ryan Zinke, along with Sens. Tim Sheehy and Steve Daines to remember Yellowstone County’s decidedly mixed history of how we’ve treated those who didn’t look like the majority or speak the same language. And please counterbalance Morse’s enthusiasm with the respect due to the county’s rather ignoble past, and I would ask sincerely not to add to the trauma of this county’s history.
Put simply: If there must be round-ups and raids, which seems wholly unnecessary in a place like Montana which doesn’t have a single immigration court or judge in the state, then literally for God’s sake and ours, not here, not in our town. We have borne witness to what happens when we attack the strangers, and we have also stood proudly against such measures. This is our history: There is a sizable number of us who don’t want a land that is already filled with historical sorrow to be burdened with a new chapter of agony.
Since most of you are not from Yellowstone County, and even the one person who was born in Montana in our Congressional delegation was from one of the northern counties, not Yellowstone, I wanted to remind you of the rocky relationship this place has had with “the others” and beg you as a historian and writer not to add to that history, which while not proud, nonetheless needs recalling at moments like this.
The Rims which provide that same backdrop for the Metra were also nearby the place the Apsaalooké people’s grief-stricken families jumped off the cliffs as a sacrifice to save their tribe and other family members during an epic smallpox outbreak in the 1830s — this valley and city surrounded by eternal markers of suffering, misery and uncertainty. Surely, that history alone would be enough for reconsideration.
But, there’s more in this place.
My own last name was changed because my great-grandparents were fearful of the angry mobs who terrorized neighborhoods in places like Billings, Laurel and Red Lodge, hunting people they thought were suspiciously foreign, or not enthusiastic enough about America’s entry into World War I. Some were run out of town. Some were marched through city streets by torchlight. Others were imprisoned in Deer Lodge.
Even though I spent a large chunk of time in Laurel, where my grandparents lived, when we had gatherings, reunions and picnics at Riverside Park there, I have always had an uneasy feeling because I remember them telling me about a time when it was used as a housing camp for prisoners of war during World War II. A few relatives recalled speaking the low Volga German with the Germans who had been captured. They remembered the barbed wire and the army outfits, a haunting and eerie thing for a child who remembers the incongruity of a playground being where these people were forcibly held, a world away from the place they knew as home.
The Hispanic community in Yellowstone County has a rich and vibrant history, including an annual fiesta celebration that is more than a century old here. I fear for those wonderful community members whose own family roots run just as deeply here as mine.
And, keep in mind as our leaders contemplate using county property as a round-up facility, that not so long ago, this was the same community that rallied when Jewish families were being targeted. I am and was a member of the church that had its windows shot out for putting up a Menorah. I worry that using MetraPark to round up people is the opposite of what the community began with the “Not In Our Town” movement.
We have stood proudly as we’ve welcomed the stranger, something commanded repeatedly in the Bible, which our President apparently reveres so much he cannot cite a favorite book or verse, but has no qualms selling it as a tchotchke.
We do not accept that our taxpayer-funded property will be used as the place where we rounded up immigrants, just because they were foreigners and strangers. Morse’s enthusiasm to demonstrate his Trump bonafides and loyalty shouldn’t stain this facility and place, which sits in the heart of the largest Montana city, as a tool of punishment and dehumanization.
If the leadership of this country is literally hellbent on such a program, not here. Consider this an objection from the great-grandson of those who came here to harvest crops and found their way into citizenship, grateful for their new homeland. It is indeed time for the next generation to welcome our brothers and sisters.
And speaking of that, let’s not play clever word games that literally whitewash the reality of what is going to happen. This is no detention, like a teenager who has been acting poorly. The reality of the situation is that if we deport many of these men, women and families, they may go back to a country that will imprison, torture or even kill them. This is no detention as much as it could be the prelude to a death sentence.
And I as a resident of Yellowstone County want no part of that.