By Barbara Remmem

I have always been very proud that I grew up in the community of Hoquiam, where racial discrimination was not an issue. Even though my community was predominately white, I was confident that anyone of any color or race could move here and enjoy the same rights and freedoms as the rest of the community. I never learned to be a racist or to discriminate against others. Or did I?

When we were children growing up in Hoquiam, my father took us for our first trip to Taholah on the Quinault Indian Reservation. As we neared our destination, he told us that you could always tell when you were close to the reservation by the empty beer cases laying along the road. “But,” he said, “Wait until you see how the Indians live. Every house is little more than a shack with an unkempt yard and a brand new Cadillac in the driveway.” He went on to tell us that Indians do very little but drink and get money from the government. This was my first introduction to the Native American people. In school history classes, and through television shows and movies, I learned that Indians were savages who slaughtered thousands upon thousands of white people whose only crime was to want to build a home and raise a family in the frontier. I didn’t realize until I was an adult, that what I was really witnessing was the oppression, discrimination and slow genocide of the Native American people. And it wasn’t until I had children of my own that I learned my parents taught me the wrong words to Ring Around the Rosie, which ends with “ashes, ashes we all fall down” and not “the last one down’s a nigger baby”…or that the goal of eeny meany miney mo was to catch a tiger and not a “nigger” by the toe. But it wasn’t just my parents. Many of the children I grew up with were taught them this way, and we sang them at the top of our lungs in our yards and on the playgrounds of our schools. I guess my “community” wasn’t so non-racial and discriminating as I thought.

In his book, A Different Mirror, Takaki relates heartbreaking stories of the history of how America was built through oppression, class exploitation, slavery, discrimination and slow genocide of any and all people who did not fit their definition of “white”, which is so contradictory to the watered down version of American history taught in our schools, even today. He shows how stories can often be used as a powerful tool empowering one group of individuals over others. He who tells the story has the empowerment to control, oppress or destroy a community, race, gender, ethnicity and class of people. All people have a story, but not all stories are heard and many are silenced or even lost.

My thoughts of community have altered courses since taking this class and writing this paper. In the beginning, I felt a sense of pride in what my community was like when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s generation. I saw it as an idyllic time and place to grow up. As time went on, I realized I was viewing my community through rose colored glasses. I have also been viewing it through the eyes of white privilege. As I read stories about the Quinault Indians and how my community was built upon their oppression, I can only imagine how much their stories differ from my own. Their stories also need to be taught to our children and not silenced or even lost.