You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.
For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits.
—Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 1994, pp. 100–101.
***
In the passage selected above from his 1993 Reith Lecture “Speaking Truth to Power,” literary critic Edward Said addresses the normative, corruptible academic—“you”—while exposing a contradiction in “balanced” scholarly approaches to situations of injustice like the U.S.-Dakota War. Possessing the knowledge of history and international law required to engage moral judgment with some level of confidence, the ethical scholar would ideally remain principled and advocate for social justice, even if this meant going against the wishes of the very institution paying her salary. In this scenario, the scholar would be acting as a public intellectual, refusing to allow his work to be enlisted in the service of power. But as Said emphasizes, strong temptations like career advancement, awards, and prestige can induce the scholar “to turn off one’s moral sense” and take up seemingly apolitical stances deemed respectable for their being nonthreatening to the institution (p. 86). Stated bluntly, the contradiction pits one’s moral conscience against personal gain. All scholars more or less “succumb” to this kind of ethical compromise, according to Said (p. 87). Chapter 3 revealed several examples in the Conflict and Remembrance project with students adjusting their moral voices to survive if not succeed in classroom discussions framed by “balance,” and instructors basking in public acclaim while remaining largely silent about regional genocide.
Juxtaposed with the epigraph from Chapter 3—“It is unconscionable to teach about Minnesota history without keeping the suffering of the victims of genocide at the forefront of the conversation” (Waziyatawin, 2008, p. 76)—Said’s picture of the normative, corruptible scholar suggests a developing indictment of the classroom pedagogy under analysis so far in this book. I do not mean to use these epigraphs lightly, however, or arrive at judgment too quickly. Instead, I want to take time in this chapter examining how the epigraphs might not fit for interpreting what I saw and heard and sometimes participated in in the J-term classroom. As you may have wondered, I too sat in the circle on January 24. I do not remember exactly what I said when the sweetgrass came my way and I put my pen down to speak—something about needing radicalism for social change, I think, building on references previously made to Waziyatawin’s “radical” proposals. I hedge here, knowing I could have said more in this and many other J-term exchanges. Hoping to complete my study and eventually a book, I too succumbed at times and turned off my moral sense.
Enacting my own polite form of white justice as fairness, I felt I lacked the requisite knowledge to talk back with confidence, to somehow combine the conflicting roles of educational researcher and public intellectual. Indeed, things moved so quickly in the classroom that I often doubted my emerging judgments. Much of this chapter involves then my attempts to triangulate and see if the epigraphs fit, that is, whether the suffering of the victims of genocide had more or less been forgotten in the rush for social goods like respectability that Edward Said argues work against the passionate intellectual life. To this end, I devote this chapter to finding out more about Dr. Lenz’s personal approach to this history of genocide and then to questioning others about the enactment of what I was taking to be a neutral (yet biased) pedagogy when I sat in the classroom. First, I move back to my first interview with Dr. Lenz nearly two weeks before the wreath-passing session when I asked her what would keep a Holocaust scholar from taking up a “radical” position on this episode in Dakota/white history. I then return to the second round of wreath-passing discussion on What Does Justice Look Like? and subsequent interview data from Dr. Lenz to better understand the classroom politics of race that unfolded. Next, I take my questions to the students in the last focus-group discussion to find out whether they thought Dr. Lenz had enacted a neutral pedagogy on regional genocide, and if so, why. The chapter ends with a portrait of instructional silence on genocide shaping student orientations toward their public-history work.
Dr. Lenz as Preservationist
From my twenty years as a dean, I would say that faculty in general are a conservative lot. Yes, by and large, they’re Democrats and they maybe lean a little left in their personal politics, but very often in terms of their scholarship and certainly in terms of their role within the institution, they’re conservative, and I mean conservative in kind of a good sense, in the sense of preservation, of maintaining tradition, um, so making change in higher education is very hard precisely because faculty pull against it very often, um, and here I’m thinking about things like curriculum, committee structure, relative role of president and faculty within a liberal arts college, those kinds of things. (Interview, January 12, 2012)
Faculty are interested in maintaining the status quo for those things and, um, and I (.) in general think that’s a good impulse because it prevents having these sort of radical swings in higher education, but, um, I think that often dominates the scholarly world as well, so if you write something that’s going to be viewed as radical, it’s much harder to get it published. (Interview, January 12, 2012)
Fresh off the publication of a new book and poised to win the college’s faculty achievement award for scholarship that May, Dr. Lenz spoke confidently about what it takes to succeed in higher education. According to Dr. Lenz, staying true to disciplinary tenets increases one’s odds of publishing and thus one’s chance of securing a role, if not a prominent one such as hers within the institutional structure. Once there, the institution’s status quo gets maintained through conservative acts of preservation. Important to the scenario she provided, I believe, is her focus on perception—what’s “radical” doesn’t have so much to do with whether or not critical inquiry reveals the radicalism to be a legitimate response to a situation of injustice, but, rather, whether the politics is “viewed as radical,” as she put it, presumably by others in the academy. Waziyatawin’s book, which was published by an alternative press and calls for the dismantling of some long-standing Minnesota institutions as part of reparations the state should make for its history of oppressing Dakota people, would likely lie outside the bounds of the institutional scholar’s “good impulses.”
The acts of separation occurring in this interview—the primary one between politics inside and outside the institution, and the secondary one between “good” scholarship and “radical” scholarship—speak to a fundamental dilemma facing intellectuals working in higher education in the post-civil-rights era, namely, how to connect classroom praxis explicitly and meaningfully to sociopolitical struggles going on in the larger society, especially when higher education, including small liberal arts institutions like St. Lucia (Ohmann, 1987), has not been as insulated from external politics as Dr. Lenz suggests. Indeed, my thesis regarding discourses of balance and neutrality creeping into shape respectable classroom pedagogy run counter to the insular view. In ways I pursue in later chapters on the regional white public pedagogy, my thesis can be said to simply provide a situated example of a nationwide trend toward “value-neutral” education that has gained considerable ground since 1968 with American society’s conservative restoration (Apple, 2014; Shor, 1986). What I hope to make clear in this reading of Dr. Lenz’s responses is that the preservationist identity and its conservative habits fit well with white-justice-as-fairness discourses and run counter to critical social justice as expressed by Waziyatawin and critical educators like Edward Said (2000) and Henry Giroux (2000) who advocate for educators taking sides and engaging as public intellectuals in efforts to help effect anti-oppressive institutional and societal change.
The Biased Enactment of Neutral Pedagogy
I return to the What Does Justice Look Like? discussion first to re-examine the importance of Dr. Lenz’s passing of the wreath in silence. Recall from Chapter 3 that just before the wreath came to her, Tom, Mitch, and Anna had made a conservative move in the discussion expressing a white defense of property. Their defense simultaneously distorted understanding of Waziyatawin’s message. At this point, Dr. Lenz offered no comment and simply passed the wreath on to Lori who fortuitously redirected by reminding peers of what Waziyatawin had actually written about her motives for decolonizing Dakota homeland. Four of the next five speakers extended Lori’s thoughts, commenting on respect, oppressor/oppressed relations, and the need for social change. The first round of discussion closed on this liberal note but not without balanced qualification. The final two speakers reiterated a need for change, but they also reaffirmed the authoritative classroom position that Waziyatawin was radical or “extreme” as they happened to put it just then.
In Dr. Lenz’s socially symbolic act, the silent wreath passing attempts to resolve an unresolvable contradiction, i.e., the critical educator trying to educate within a self-imposed frame of balance and neutrality. By naming this a contradiction, I take the words educate and pedagogy to mean not just informing people with facts but going further according to what the respective Latin and Greek roots of the words denote—to lead. As critical educators working with this understanding observe, “education is inherently directive and must always be transformative” (Macedo, p. 25). Following this understanding of what it means to educate, “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (Shaull, p. 34, emphases Shaull’s). I argue that the former effect of conformity into the logic of the present system takes place as the wreath passes silently through the instructor’s hands. Continuing to look into classroom talk will help explain the contradiction better and show how the teaching of the J-term could come across as politically unbiased, as the students took it, despite its clear bias for and against certain ways of knowing and being.
To be as fair as possible, there are undoubtedly elements of good classroom practice involved in the teaching and learning described. Dr. Lenz did not try to tell students what to think while holding the wreath. She stayed true to the structure of the (questionable) ceremonial frame and did not interject. She allowed assertions to hang so that students would have time to think about them. She provided space for all voices to be heard and, perhaps best of all, allowed for peers to guide and learn from one another.
Yet in follow-up discussion, Dr. Lenz offered no queries or introspection into what had been said. An air of honor and mutual respect prevailed regarding student comments, perhaps in keeping with the imagined “Native-American pedagogical approach” explained in Chapter 3 (Fieldnotes, January 12, 2012). Having students speak only while holding the wreath and thus avoid dialogue on What Does Justice Look Like?, Tom and Mitch’s white defense of property passed unacknowledged as a white defense of property, that is, the ideology’s role in the history was never made explicit. Similarly, the implicit acknowledgment of genocide driving Alan’s call for social change also passed without naming genocide. In the end, both unexamined arguments amounted to equally valid perspectives. By not helping students unpack their assumptions or questioning to take stock of the political implications of what had been said, Dr. Lenz could be perceived as having presided with disinterest over the co-construction of meaning that unfolded, this despite having set narrow frames loaded with interest. For this reason, I characterize the classroom pedagogy as politicized (Giroux, 2000) in that it failed to openly acknowledge its own politics against restorative justice.
So, while Dr. Lenz provided space for students to struggle and learn from one another within the pedagogical boundaries set, as all good teachers do, she enacted a key dynamic identified in What Does Justice Look Like?, that Minnesota educators quickly resort to the principle of equal validity for all perspectives when commemorating the U.S.-Dakota War. In the J-term forum, no perspective would be privileged over another, from the threatened white landowner (Tom and Mitch) to the identifier of historical oppression who says it’s wrong to do nothing in the face of injustice (Alan). Here, the sense of “equity that appeals to Americans” would prevail, as Waziyatawin (2008) has observed (pp. 75–76). When it comes to perspectives in the white public pedagogy, the balanced educator’s role is to facilitate them from a site of institutional power, to “give” perspectives time to speak, to present or display perspectives in balanced fashion all while masking one’s own perspective and presuming to withhold moral judgment.
My purpose here is not to argue that Dr. Lenz actually lacked morals or was one who fully enacted the role of the balanced (yet biased) educator. My purpose rather is to better understand the contingencies and contradictions involved in a situated classroom balancing act. On numerous occasions, Dr. Lenz had expressed deep knowledge of and objections to colonial oppression. She had once drawn analogies, for example, between U.S.-Dakota War commemorative displays and Holocaust memorials in Germany, noting Minnesota’s shortcomings (Fieldnotes, January 12, 2012). On another occasion, she had agreed with Alan that Minnesota military officials had been free to engage in drumhead justice1 in the 1860s knowing there would never be any future scrutiny by a third (non-U.S.) party. “The subtext here is empire,” Dr. Lenz explained. “No one was watching, like Alan said. There was only us, carrying out acts of colonization” (Fieldnotes, January 12, 2012). On the day of the What Does Justice Look Like? discussion, Dr. Lenz made an analogy to the politics surrounding the Armenian genocide, explaining how narrow financial interests have kept some countries from formally acknowledging it (Fieldnotes, January 24, 2012). She pointed out this same day that the students had been witnessing first-hand from recent Dakota speakers the kind of factionalism Waziyatawin discusses in Chapter 5 (2008, p. 121), agreeing with the author’s assessment that the effects of divide-and-conquer tactics asserted through the Indian system in the nineteenth century are ongoing. “There’s the concept of ‘colonization of the mind,’” she explained, “where the oppressor inserts into the mind a sense of inferiority that will justify the oppression” (Fieldnotes, January 24, 2012). None of these statements could have been made without awareness that she and the class were studying a history of large-scale violence and oppression.
At the same time, Dr. Lenz never disclosed reasons for her clear bias against What Does Justice Look Like? nor did she ever let students know in a straightforward way whether or not she actually thought genocide had occurred in Dakota homeland. The latter point was always inferred. As she explained in our final interview together, disciplinary experience, specifically peer-review feedback, had taught her that “Holocaust” needs to be reserved for the genocide of Jewish people under Nazism (Interview, April 27, 2012). Dr. Lenz told me she once used the term in a manuscript she had co-authored about a memoir by a Catholic survivor of a German concentration camp during World War II. She said she learned “a really hard lesson” when two Jewish reviewers wrote back to say that the primary source in question “was not a Holocaust memoir because the woman was Catholic, not Jewish.” Dr. Lenz explained, “I was really initially devastated by that and I really fought back against it, and then I gradually came to understand” (Interview, April 27, 2012). From this, I understood Dr. Lenz to think Waziyatawin was stepping on disciplinary toes as well as ethnic toes as she felt she once had done by applying “Holocaust” as a frame of reference for understanding another genocide. While Dr. Lenz granted that she personally “would use the more broad term genocide to what happened to American Indians,” she said “in the case of the Dakota,” the term Holocaust “just seems inappropriate” (Interview, April 27, 2012). Here, I must digress; even Kenneth Carley (1976), the holder of the “fairly balanced perspective,” uses the term, albeit in lower case to denote the destruction of Dakota society in the wake of the uprising (p. 81). At any rate, trying to preserve “Holocaust” in this way seems inevitably to imply a disparaging message for Dakota people. As historian Peter Novick points out in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), “A moment’s reflection makes clear that the notion of uniqueness is quite vacuous […] and, in practice, deeply offensive. What else can all of this possibly mean except ‘your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary’” (p. 9).
Dr. Lenz was quick to agree in our follow-up interview that semantics like Gary Clayton Anderson modeled when drawing a hard line between ethnic cleansing and genocide (analyzed in Chapter 5), could make one diminish the violence by rendering it abstract. Yet semantics mattered deeply to her too given the terms (“hard lesson,” “devastated”) through which she recalled being disciplined as a Holocaust scholar. Recounting this conversation helps to show how taking up a neutral and balanced position in the classroom involves much more than merely repeating a dominant discourse circulating in a larger contextual frame or public pedagogy. In the given case, constructing balance by privileging certain texts and resigning others to the “fringe” involved personal conceptions of what is appropriate and inappropriate, disciplined and undisciplined, professional and unprofessional for scholarly practice.
Wreath Passing: Round Two
Sometimes shock-and-awe campaigns don’t work. People don’t understand that mentality. You need to find a common starting point. I rage against extreme rhetoric. I like how the literature in this class has been balanced. If this was all we read about the Dakota War, a lot of whites would be turned off.
Tom brought the question of ancestry to bear on Jennifer’s comments—“This book wouldn’t unify Minnesota. People like my dad would be like, ‘Oh, so you hate me? Well I hate you too.’” Jennifer allowed that What Does Justice Look Like? “is essential to the dialogue,” but added, “I don’t think this book would be a good starting point.”
“Is there a book that would be a good start?” Dr. Lenz asked.
“I think the Carley book would be a good starting point,” Jennifer said. “You have to understand the meat of the topic first. The people of Minnesota need the ABCs first, then this.”
Here, Dr. Lenz took a slightly liberal tack, noting Carley’s “datedness” and telling of her recommendation to the editor of the Minnesota Historical Society Press that “a 2012 version of something like Carley, a good introductory text” was needed.
Encouraged perhaps, Steven brought discussion back to What Does Justice Look Like? “I agree in some ways with Jennifer,” he said. “It was maybe extreme with the rhetoric, but there’s something important she’s saying about the genocide of the Dakota people.”
Dr. Lenz took this cue to begin discussing narrative strategies from Chapter 2, the genocide chapter, drawing attention to analogies the author makes between the treatment of the Dakota in the 1860s and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. Dr. Lenz opened by nuancing the phrase “extreme rhetoric” recently introduced by Jennifer—“One of the things she does that can lead to alarming rhetoric is that she’s borrowed tropes from genocide literature to talk about what happened to the Dakota. What terms does she use this way?”
From there students identified key terms used by Waziyatawin—“Holocaust,” “ethnocide,” “concentration camp,” “forced death march”—but all within the Carley = balance / Waziyatawin = imbalance frame renewed by Dr. Lenz with “alarming rhetoric,” a phrase sounding at once dismissive of claims about genocide in 1860s Minnesota and ambiguous as to whether such “alarming” terms should be applied even in Germany. Nevertheless, “alarming rhetoric” can be traced as a discursive frame for Waziyatawin undergoing various iterations from the “radical, provocative book” of the first day of class, through instructions the previous Friday to prepare for discussion of this “most radical,” “out there on the fringe” book, continuing on through student talk in the first round of wreath passing to include forms like “polarized,” “impossible,” “eye-for-an-eye,” and “extreme”—terms working in unison to reveal “radical” as a kind of ideological wreath being passed from instructor to students and back again, all for the purpose of reconstructing Waziyatawin’s outré status.
Troubling for me as a scholar of race was the lack of guidance for students struggling with questions about ancestry and descent, keeping in mind Fields and Fields’ (2012) definition of racism as the ideology surrounding ancestry-based double standards (p. 17). Already I have shown examples of a politics of descent at work in the classroom, from Christina, who confessed having difficulties positioning herself as a J-termer because of her Mexican heritage, to Tom and Mitch who both evoked their fathers as potentially territorial landowners. Although students did encounter alternatives to the political obligations that ancestral group identification seemed to suggest—primarily through various political and spiritual messages conveyed to them by Dakota authors and speakers—the day-to-day classroom proceedings, beginning with teacher talk and constructions of frames of understanding, provided little to no guidance for how to identify and resist politics of descent that seemed to come naturally.
In the second round of wreath passing to the prompt, “What suggestions [for justice] would you make different from Waziyatawin’s?” students again offered each other advice while brainstorming ways of overcoming racial injustice. Alan said, “we need to get rid of the reductive view of land, start having discussions about the land and natural things that unify and heal people.” Lori said, “I believe we’re all spiritual. We need a spiritual education to see that we are all kind, equitable, and that we all have a sense of justice in us.” Tom defied his private conservative politics by making the only reference to the advice Waziyatawin (2008) presents to non-Dakota allies (pp. 91–94). “Truth telling has to be done first,” he said, explaining that this needed to happen in classrooms every year in everyone’s education. But even this ended with a move toward sameness and unity—“This is isn’t just a Minnesota problem. Every state has its history of genocide.” Holly spoke next, saying, “We should stop discrediting anyone’s opinion. If you know about this, then you should be able to have a voice. Waz’s opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s, anyone in this class. Accept people and quit labeling, like white and middle class. I’m here and you have to give me a chance.”3 On the one hand, this plea worked as an act of resistance, encouraging even Dr. Lenz to listen more carefully to Waziyatawin, but it strongly affirmed white justice as fairness on the other, rendering all opinions on 1862 of equal moral validity.
Amid these calls for unity, equity, and relativism came expressions of ancestry-based malaise and fear. Anna said, “I’m just sitting here, feeling inadequate. I’m not Dakota. I don’t have an idea about what needs to be done.” Mitch echoed her sentiments—“I don’t know where to start. I’m not Dakota either.” Stephanie wrapped up the round by identifying the need to transcend the politics of descent, but from a troubling position of fear—“I reacted a lot like I did when I read Malcolm X. Once he said he thought all white people are devils. I felt the same about Waz’s anger. We have to get over the points where we say ‘your ancestor did this to my ancestor.’ We have to come together as a new generation.” Dr. Lenz followed by saying that a Holocaust survivor once said, “‘We can forgive, but we can never forget.’ Hate can be corrosive and at some point you have to try to let the hate go.” Angry descendants of slain white settlers were not mentioned. It sounded like advice for Waziyatawin.
Focus Group: The Students Critique and Endorse Instructor Neutrality
I think that both John and Professor Lenz have done a fantastic job with (4.5) ((sighs)) with how they approach the course and the readings that we have done, and they have not pushed- I don’t feel like I have had an agenda pushed on me, like pro-Dakota or pro-settler. You know, like Professor Lenz was saying today, you have an option to go, you know, speak to someone that thinks it’s not a genocide and who is not sympathetic to the Dakota, and then you- we have a speaker that’s coming that is going to- or we have a reading- a reading that is more sympathetic, so I feel like I’m kind of getting a very balanced approach. (Interview, January 18, 2012)
Jennifer’s assessment did not change. In a follow-up interview, she told me she was “extremely positive” about the J-term and the success of the museum exhibit (Interview, April 26, 2012). Her enthusiasm and centrality to the course had enabled her to take a part-time job working for Harwell at BLCHS later that spring.
I found the neutral instructional stance toward regional genocide difficult to grasp, even after my first interview with Dr. Lenz. It continued to feel elusive at the end of the course for all the little critical turns she made guiding classroom talk and for all the straightforward things she had said about distant genocides while teaching. As seen in my eventual attempt to have her clarify her stance in our last interview in late April, Dr. Lenz granted only that she “would use the more broad term genocide to what happened to American Indians.” Whenever the framing of genocide threatened to zoom in geographically and include the Dakota people, however, things tended to grow unclear. Classroom teacher talk readily touched on genocides in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Rwanda. Rarely did it touch directly on southern Minnesota, and when it seemed like it might, things began to feel a little inappropriate.
Students on the other hand were often crystal clear about what they thought. I have shown a couple of examples suggesting a classroom-level political spectrum. Jennifer, the self-proclaimed radical, told me forthrightly though with some anxiety, “I think that it was a genocide;” Tom, the settler descendant who had “seen this thing” that was his hometown heritage and who flaunted his veteran status and the Ron Paul bumper sticker on the cover of his laptop, had no trouble saying that what happened to the Dakota people in the 1860s amounted to genocide. I had heard no students take issue with the claim. Moreover, many had spoken against anything smacking of genocide denial expressed outside the classroom in public lectures and field trips. Had Dr. Lenz and Mr. Harwell been as neutral as it seemed on this issue? If so, were students as pleased as Jennifer seemed to be about balance guiding their learning experiences on this situation of injustice that was 1860s Minnesota?
I brought this question up in the last focus-group discussion attended by seven J-termers just before the final class meeting, three days following the wreath-passing session. Midway through the focus group, Mitch had taken issue with regional lay historian Corrine Marz who had delivered her lecture that same week on the war’s aftermath. She had used the occasion to promote artwork on the cover of her booklet The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862–1864 (2005). In the last focus group, Mitch wondered about that title and Marz’s use of the term “internment camp” in her speech. He told the group about having taken his question to the author herself who told him, as Mitch paraphrased it, that she was “all for people calling it […] what they want, what they feel.” Mitch continued, “She said that she kind of shies away from concentration camp because it like has references to World War II, and I was like, ‘okay,’ and then she like started- she just like kept going on and on and on about like all these different facts ((mutual laughter)) […] but um I was talking to Holly right afterwards and Holly, you know, brought up a good point that like maybe instead of calling it whatever you want, you should call it what it is” (Focus group, January 27, 2012).
On this point, Holly seemed to have argued for something a bit different than on Tuesday that week when she had told the class that they should stop discrediting others’ opinions and that Waziyatawin’s opinion was just as valid as anyone else’s. I reminded Holly about this right then in focus group and she said she still thought anyone should be able to have a voice, including Corrine Marz; yet looking back, the principle of equal validity for all perspectives—white justice as fairness—seemed to weaken a bit in this case where the history was being sanitized outside the classroom. Importantly, Harwell advised using “internment camp” over “concentration camp” in the museum-exhibit work and edited student work accordingly, receiving no call-it-what-it-is pushback from Holly or her classmates, at least as I was able to capture. Such conflicting moments of conviction as Holly’s attest to the situated aspects of student ambivalence during the J-term. In Holly’s case, witnessing a politicized presentation about the Fort Snelling concentration camp outside the confines of professor-student power relations provided occasion to voice resistance.
I took this opportunity in the focus group to ask whether the students thought the J-term instructors had been “calling it what it is” in their teaching. I brought up the wreath-passing session and recounted briefly with students a few of the terms Waziyatawin applies in her history—genocide, concentration camp, forced death march. I then talked about the question of the warrant for these terms being left up in the air.
Perhaps a striking thing for readers is the point of caution from which I initiated this part of the discussion, speaking to my participation in the co-construction of classroom authority in the focus groups. Explained early in this chapter, I nearly always chose the role of careful educational researcher over public intellectual in my fieldwork meaning that I tried to refrain from inviting critiques of the teaching for fear of undermining the instructors’ work, although I did ask more about critiques when students brought them up; thus, the “danger” in raising this type of critical question which felt safe enough to do on this final day of the course.
Striking for me in this exchange is the students’ awareness of the sources for instructor neutrality on a fundamental situation of injustice and then their eventual endorsement of that neutrality. First, Steven begins by sighing (line 6) and repeating with disapproval that the J-term instructors “would try to get out of the yes or no” (lines 8 and 12). Having just moments before shared the view that silence surrounds the question of domestic genocide because it challenges “America’s ability to exist,” Steven suggests here that core beliefs about national identity are at stake in his instructors’ tendency to equivocate. According to this view, Lenz and Harwell are sacrificing educated independent thought to orthodox group interests, supporting this chapter’s epigraph by Edward Said. Perhaps sensing that this is an overly harsh critique of them personally, Steven offers an explanation in institutional practices—“the academic realm” implies a certain “position” for professors where “strong opinions” have no place (lines 15–16). Steven has, of course, witnessed this firsthand in the displacement of Waziyatawin’s highly educated “strong” opinion. Sarah then extends Steven’s analysis to Harwell as a representative of the historical societies, attempting to erase all personal implications with niceties—“I don’t mean to be mean to John” (line 26); “I think he’s (.) um wonderful” (line 27); “I think he has a very enlightened perspective” (line 28). After careful pause, Sarah then identifies the source of neutrality in “these institutions that um- but yeah he works (.) on (.) you know (.) things that are probably not savory to (.) just like anyone at MHS” (lines 28–30). With great caution, which includes a peculiar reluctance to even name certain “things” that public historians at the Minnesota Historical Society must work on, Sarah nevertheless identifies taste as a key factor determining what gets said and what does not get said about state history at such institutions. With the phrase “not savory,” Sarah implies that regional genocide is an inappropriate topic for public professionals like Harwell, a picture reminiscent of Lori Sturdevant’s need to keep the public call for extermination out of her column, as discussed in Chapter 3.
At this point, Anna introduces two notions that turn the exchange away from a critique of the instructors’ or even the institutions’ responsibilities to break their neutral stances on a situation of injustice: (a) the risk of indoctrinating people, and (b) Dr. Lenz as an equal learner or peer with students when it comes to the question of regional genocide. As Anna puts it, “I don’t think she would ever say definitively say yes, because part of it is they might not want us to just all say yes because, ‘Oh, my professor told me to,’ but- and they want us to make our own opinion, but I think part of it is she is still thinking through this as well” (lines 35–38). Indeed, Dr. Lenz had run these ideas together herself in our first interview when I asked her if she had any worries about sparking public controversy—“for me as a scholar and teacher, um, it’s about basic human courtesies, and sending the signal in various ways that you can muster that you’re open to different perspectives, you know, that you don’t have an orthodoxy that you’re trying to prove, that you’re a learner” (Interview, January 12, 2012). Here, “muster” says a great deal about the arduous self-silencing work a seasoned scholar like Dr. Lenz must perform in maintaining the unbiased but white-friendly “neutral” position, e.g., send courteous signals to let people know their perspectives are equally valid however misguided they may be; set aside theoretical or interpretive knowledge that could smack of “orthodoxy”; hide critical knowledge that could position one foremost as an educator, or an unequal learner who directs students and leads.
Embedded in Dr. Lenz’s position as equal learner lay more contradictions than I have space to unravel. Beyond being a career Holocaust scholar who had spent two and a half years planning the J-term course, beyond calling herself a “neophyte” and imagining the students as having essentially started from a zero point of knowledge, she recalled to me “a conversation with Germans once in which I told them that I was teaching the Holocaust, and without batting an eyelid, they said, ‘Why don’t you teach the genocide that occurred in your country?’ And that was twenty-five years ago that I had that conversation” (Interview, April 27, 2012). Despite Dr. Lenz’s decades grappling with both the facts and politics of genocide, a period longer than most of the J-term students had been alive, endorsement of her neutrality on the topic was won with Anna’s powerful contribution to the focus-group discussion suggesting that Dr. Lenz should not be indoctrinating students and that she was an equal learner to them (lines 35–38). The equal-learner argument even turns Steven toward a positive view of the neutral pedagogy (lines 49–52) and away from the biased institutional interests he so incisively began to critique.
As in the first round of wreath passing, Christina’s contribution to the focus-group discussion deserves special consideration, again for the sensitivity she shows to questions of ancestry and descent from her minoritized perspective. Just before she speaks, Anna introduces a third important idea to the conversation, the question of the instructors’ prior knowledge (lines 38–40). Despite this, Christina continues to develop the position of Dr. Lenz as an equal learner, imagining that Dr. Lenz has only now started going back to consider the meaning of “all these terms” Waziyatawin used in her book (line 43), what Dr. Lenz referred to as “the tropes of Holocaust” which I quoted starting out the exchange (line 4). But Christina seems to be juggling the question of Dr. Lenz’s prior knowledge to which she returns at the end of her comment (lines 47–48). As if trying to reconcile the inherent contradictions, she raises the idea that learning about regional genocide must begin with listening to Dakota people as Dr. Lenz had done with the students during the J-term—“meeting with Glenn and Gwen and um Sandee” (lines 44–45) and “immersing herself […] as much as we are in this” (line 46). At best, Christina’s comments suggest the impression that genocide study is discipline specific, and that scholars who study distant genocides do not need to know or can afford not to know about genocide that occurred close to home. At worst, Christina’s comments suggest the impression that knowledge of genocide against the Dakota is primarily governed by communities of descent or race, i.e., only the Dakota people possess the knowledge whereas the white academics most likely to know cannot really find out in the segregated white spaces where they normally commune.
As Christina had learned from observing the experts at work, racial divides overshadow scholarly practices like reading from a wide range of sources without fear, openly pursuing analogies to canonical genocides, and looking to modern international law in an effort to make sense out of the history. The persistent marginalization of What Does Justice Look Like? carried an implicit message about the unreliability of available relevant sources. After all, even this work by a Dakota author was “really out there on the fringe” for some Dakotas. Other similar classroom moments supported such notions as when Dr. Lenz warned students off David Stannard’s American Holocaust (1992)—“[Gary] Anderson and others discredit the author as a crazy man” (Fieldnotes, January 12, 2012).
Importantly, Christina’s idea about Dakota genocide as descendant-specific knowledge evokes an important way that observance of the local racial divide played a behind-the-scenes part shaping silences about genocide in Minnesota during the J-term. As Dr. Lenz noted in our last interview, the course had involved for her, “a lot of unfamiliar ground because I had had almost no contact with the Dakota community ahead of time” (Interview, April 27, 2012). Among that community was a prominent Dakota genocide scholar from the region whose work she had known about “for a long time,” as she explained it, by contributions he had made to an annual genocide conference she had once participated in, although not at the same exact time (Interview, April 27, 2012). In order to prepare, then, for the kind of course and museum exhibit conceived—ones that would stick closely to events of the six-week war which always highlights violence against settlers—certain avenues of inquiry and cross-racial dialogue would be open and others would remain closed.
Neutral Education’s Effect on Student Work: A Prime Example
a deeper understanding of why there’s still so much tension between the communities in part because of the way that it’s explored and explained even in a classroom setting, um and not really talking about- I mean I understand that it was- like in the J-term course it was about the war itself, but the professors even said that there was so much more to it, that they were going to look at what took place before and what took place after, but I don’t think- I don’t feel like we really explored what took place after, um as much as we could have. (Interview, April 27, 2012)
Among what took place after were the forced recruitment of Dakota scouts to help hunt down their own relatives, years of genocidal massacres on Dakota villages, the destruction of food resources to cause future starvation, and a campaign of terror carried out in the name of state security. Glimpses of this history have been shown in Chapter 2.
And I understand the Minnesota Historical Society and anything pertaining to what takes place within Minnesota isn’t as interested in what takes place, even if it’s a group of people who lived here, once they leave because it’s not Minnesota history. But for the Dakota people, it’s their history and for those of them that still live in Minnesota, that’s something that every time it gets pushed aside creates a deeper divide between the like general public and their community. (Interview, April 27, 2012)
The “general public” and “their community”—this was a moment when euphemisms that unconsciously support the racial divide also seemed to tell the truth as ways that racial divide is constructed were being made visible. Like Christina, Lori had learned important lessons about white silences and their role in ongoing racially divisive social practices.
As discussed in Chapter 2, Lori advocated strongly for the equal validity or goodness of all perspectives and for applying those principles to the past. Rephrasing her philosophy in this interview brought her back to a positive assessment of the course and museum-exhibit work despite the story of deepening racial divides she had just told me—“I think if anything, I developed a more balanced perspective of um (3.5) kind of- (2.0) both the Dakota people and the settler- um- that they’re- they’re people. They’re all people and they all made mistakes, and they all did right things, and they all just cared about their well-being, their families’ well-being, and it unfortunately clashed” (Interview, April 27, 2012). After participating daily in the course with Lori and conducting two extended interviews with her, I read the pauses in this statement as places where she was thinking carefully about maintaining her philosophy of equal validity and fairness for all despite the contradictory evidence of ongoing injustices she had just explained.
Conclusion
Pulling into the harbor of mutual respect and equality for all, even the oppressors, was never a straightforward affair for J-termers. The journey often entailed revealing insights into history, white racial identity, education, and the students’ ambivalent positions navigating these contested waters. In this vein, the final focus-group discussion about instructor neutrality continued beyond the extended passage highlighted above, eventually ending in another collective endorsement of the instruction but not before going through another critical phase. There, Sarah acknowledged that “no class can be taught without a bias, so by- almost by trying to remain neutral, the bias is kind of like just sneaking in.” She then amended this to say she did not think this exactly applied to the J-term—“I don’t think Professor Lenz and John are trying to remain neutral on this. I think they’ve brought their own experiences into us as a class even though they wouldn’t say, ‘Yes, this is what I think.’”
But it is precisely on situations of injustice that one must say what one thinks. From critiques of the teaching offered by students like Sarah and Steven emerge an image of an educator who has gone public with a situation of injustice, yet refused to engage as a public intellectual (Giroux et al., 1988; Said, 1994) who would voice opposition to commonsense white discourses constantly raised to “counterbalance” critical-social-justice education on 1862. To have done so would have perhaps meant being a rude host to speakers like Corrine Marz or being perceived as an indoctrinator by some of the students, audience members, and historical-society representatives. On the other hand, doing so might have meant finding different, unexpected successes with critical audience members, opening new possibilities for reframing public understanding of Minnesota history. Finding success in the J-term project as it unfolded, however, meant not only collaborating with historically colonial institutions established by the Ramseys and Sibleys of the world which benefit greatly from corporate backing today, but interfacing with these institutions’ ideology and making the official discourses of white justice as fairness “our” own.
In Reflections on Exile (2000), Edward Said makes the point that American society’s present situation wherein “consensus and orthodoxy” hold such strong sway requires that intellectuals take oppositional stances publicly to advocate for those who are underrepresented politically and whose voices are generally unheard in the public sphere (p. 502). While the potential for controversy may prevent many from teaching or speaking publicly about the U.S.-Dakota War, that same potential invites others to take it public, most prominently Dakota public intellectuals like Waziyatawin, Gwen Westerman, Sheldon Wolfchild, and many others, each in his or her own way. This should never be represented to white students as descendant-specific work, for it is not. The public teachings of these and other Dakota educators, as I have witnessed it, does not voice opposition for opposition’s sake. Nor does it commemorate to remind a “general public” of where it has been historically. Rather, it raises inappropriate and even embarrassing questions at critical moments for people whose pride in their own sense of freedom, democracy, and justice usually goes unchecked. This is how the intellectual confronts real orthodoxy like white “neutrality,” “objectivity,” “fairness,” and “balance” rather than uncritically reproducing it.
It may seem unfair to hold the public intellectual as theorized by critics like Edward Said and Henry Giroux up as a kind of bar for Dr. Lenz. After all, she and Mr. Harwell did go public with the U.S.-Dakota War. For this, they were commended for their bravery. They succeeded in creating a site of cross-racial dialogue. Yet curiously, the students came away not knowing what their teachers actually thought about a central issue controversial for whites, whether their “ancestors” or state founders had committed genocide. Even Sarah, the only one arguing against the idea of the instructors’ neutrality, admitted that they would not actually say what they thought. For Dr. Lenz, described on a St. Lucia website as one whose focus is social justice and who investigates important and difficult issues with “tenacity,” the reluctance to take a position in the classroom or in public remains an unresolved and perhaps unresolvable contradiction.
I still think it’s valuable to know what your professors think though. I mean, last year’s social justice conference, there was a workshop right in here actually, and it was- I don’t even remember what the workshop was really about. I only remember that the guy who was leading it talked about when he was in school back in the sixties, and he referred to it as a time when professors professed. And that stuck with me very powerfully because I don’t know that that happens anymore. Um, and there are benefits of that [neutrality] but I think it also creates kind of like an artificial dynamic between professors and students because they can’t be themselves in front of us. And I think there’s so much value in getting to know someone, and so yeah if you have an opinion I want to hear it. We can talk about other perspectives and stuff, I don’t know, especially professors that I respect a lot. I want to know their opinions.
- 1.
A summary form of military justice conducted under a sense of urgency in the field as a response to suspected crimes or offenses committed during action.
- 2.
All student and teacher comments that follow from this session are reconstructed from fieldnotes taken by the author on January 24, 2012.
- 3.
Waziyatawin was commonly referred to as “Waz” in the classroom for uncertainty about (and lack of effort in learning) how to pronounce her name.
- 4.
Glenn Wasicuna was the Director of Dakota Studies for the Tiospa Zina Tribal School for the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate reservation at the time of this study. Dr. Gwen Westerman is a professor of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Lenz and Harwell consulted Mr. Wasicuna and Dr. Westerman when planning the course and both spoke during the St. Lucia lecture series. Recently deceased (2016), Sandee Geshick was a member of the Lower Sioux Indian Community often consulted by state media outlets reporting on the U.S.-Dakota War in 2012. Lenz and Harwell took Ms. Geshick on as an advisor after the first lecture on January 4. She eventually helped edit the museum exhibit before it went to production.