From Tamil country to Kalapuya land

When we were kids, the world was explained to us in simple terms. And we believed in those explanations.

As we get older, even by middle school, we begin to ask questions that require a bit more detail.  The more we learn, it turns out that often we end up knowing less.

Way back in school, I forget what grade it might have been, we were taught that Columbus discovered America.  I suppose it was not only me who was naive enough to have bought into that, so were my classmates--even Vijay! 

Right then, we didn't ask the teacher, or ourselves, a simple question that much later in life I asked my niece's son when he told me about Columbus having discovered the country where I now live.  I asked him: "So, before Columbus discovered America, there were no people there? He was the first person to go to America?"

In the decades since elementary school, I have come to know more about America.  The first time I came to know that Washington and Jefferson and many others, too, were slave owners, I was crushed.  All that glorious language of "we the people" and "democracy" and more suddenly became meaningless. 

In this tad more informed existence, when I think about the genocidal killing of the people who were in the lands before Europeans arrived, I get intensely angry.  Slavery. Jim Crow. Chinese exclusion. Japanese internment.  America's past is immensely tragedy-filled, with tragedies caused by humans, and a sharp contrast to "Columbus discovered America" and everybody lived happily ever after of my elementary school days.

But, even the answers that I have now about America's past are incomplete.  All I know is that I know very little of it.

Jill Lepore will educate me.

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The nearly 800 pages that Lepore follows up with will keep me busy for a long time.   I need to do this. We all need to read and think about our past.  For people like me who have moved far away from where we were born and raised, there are multiple pasts, like learning about Tamil, that we need to understand.

The past is an inheritance, a gift, and a burden. It can't be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There's nothing for it but to get to know it.

And to get to know is what I have planned to do.