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.And they have a bad habit of refusing to read certain assign-ments.My pastor, an older woman student announces cheerfully, toldme just not to read the chapter on Marxist literary criticism.One 104 The Making of Historywoman student seems particularly disturbed; discussions of feminismseem to leave her close to nervous collapse.She calls me at home, al-most hysterical, to explain why she s missing classes, paper deadlines,readings.Well, says a colleague, you ve heard that she s the productof a polygamous family, right? A few radical sects of the LDS church,she tells me, have gathered in remote communities of southern Idahoand northern Utah, practicing polygyny with full knowledge of mostpublic officials.Why didn t I know this?And more.Because our assigned composition textbook providesa review of Thelma and Louise, I arrange to have the class view thefilm.It requires two class periods to see it, meeting an hour each time.During the second meeting, I m startled when several young womenwalk out huffily during the Geena Davis Brad Pitt sex scene.Subse-quent office hours find women in tears who concede that they can tso much as peek at an image of (gasp) liberated female sexualityalso startling.But I m even more startled when I realize:No one walked out during the rape scene, in the first part.Then too, there are the students born and raised around here whoare not LDS, and are sick to death of persecution.I ll spare you theirstories about growing up in a place where 70% of your schoolmatesparticipate in a restrictive religious community, and refer you to asuccinct study of the question, the film SLC Punk! Apparently, wheneveryone around you is conservative as hell, kids have to rebel tosome desperate nth degree.At the bottom of one of my course evaluations, under the institu-tional prompt to suggest changes that would improve this course, ayoung man writes, in caps:GO BACK TO YOUR RADICAL-INFESTED CITY AND STAYTHERE.So as I say, I m developing a fairly nasty bias, and now have nochoice but to tell you that two of my very, very closest most intimatefriends and favorite people on earth are MormonEtc., etc.In that fall 1995 class Literature of Revolution without thetitle all of the students are, as usual, light-skinned, and most arelight-eyed and light-haired.I find that their responses to poems andstories by African Americans are predictably reflective of the domi-nant national media coverage of blacks.There is no specific hatred of How It Came to Me 105blacks in the commentary, even though our classroom is 16 milesaway from the national headquarters of the U.S.Militia Associationin Blackfoot.Hailing predominantly from rural areas, these studentshave little experiential reason for more than a bemused irritationwith the black community s apparent inability to overcome (institu-tionalized) poverty.Those people, one student proclaims, mostly runin gangs and destroy themselves with their own rage.They shouldgrow up and knock it off, grab hold of their bootstraps.Forget theslavery of the past it s history.Hmm, I think.Not so much racism here as classism.If AfricanAmericans weren t endlessly portrayed in the media as poor, the con-versation might be different.It s when we do the section on Native American literature that thecolors fly.Resentment is thick: several students grew up in farm fam-ilies who lease cropland from the nearby Shoshone.Their landlordsare inordinately unreasonable, often piddling away the lease moneyon booze.Most students seem to know someone off the reservationwho s only part-Shoshone but who nonetheless receives free medicalcare on the rez, plus free money from tribal settlements for landtreaties and all of these folks seem to be boozers undeserving of anendless stream of taxpayer support.We don t get free tax money todo whatever we want, one student complains.The government buildshouses for them not for us and look what they do to the houses.They trash them.It s a trash heap, the whole place.After we read Mary Crow Dog s (and Richard Erdoes s) LakotaWoman, we view Michael Apted s documentary Incident at Oglala,which is about the 1975 Pine Ridge killing of two FBI agents and thesubsequent federal conspiracy that, as many of us believe, continuesto perpetuate Leonard Peltier s political imprisonment.It s my inten-tion to expand a discussion of truth, to ask whether there s a differ-ence between FBI truth and Lakota truth, whether our culturaldifferences make it impossible to understand Peltier s refusal to ex-pose the man who really killed the agents.Peltier s Ojibwe Lakotaidea of justice differs from wasichu justice why is this? And howtrue is Apted s film, which uses a number of fictional devices to per-suade the viewer of Peltier s persecution? Is objectivity possible?But we never get to this discussion.The students argue back andforth about who was right.Why won t Peltier just tell who did it?asks one.Why won t Mr.X come forward to save his friend, to tellthe truth? Peltier s guilty of other charges anyway, he was there that 106 The Making of Historyday, he probably did something, maybe he really did do it after all ajury did convict him.A few students try [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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