My tab-clearing reference to a Time piece on colonial expansion in the Americas sparked a mini conversation in the comment thread that made me think of the above piece from Schoolhouse Rock. For anyone unfamiliar, Schoolhouse Rock was a series of education cartoons that ran between Saturday morning cartoons on ABC in the 1970s and into the 1980s. They famously included such bits as I’m Just a Bill about the legislative process and Conjunction Junction with its lessons on grammar, and so forth. I still remember the song that goes along with the preamble of the US Constitution and recall that when I had the assignment in the 8th grade to memorize it that I didn’t have to actually do any work because the words were already in my brain.
At any rate, the conversation about how the clash between European settlers and the native people of the Americas and how history is written by the winners made me think of Elbow Room. The piece strikes me as a perfect distillation of the dominant myth that residents of the United States, in particular, tell themselves: that the continent was largely empty, that we were destined to control it, and that we got it by hard work and ingenuity (not to mention God’s blessings). And, we needed the space, by golly.
I highlight the United States because it is impossible, for a variety of reasons, for Latin American countries to pretend like the space they occupy was once empty.
Of the things that are pretty amazing viewing this as an adult with some level of education include:
- The way the Louisiana Purchase seamlessly includes all of the western United States (we can gloss over the Mexican-American War, for example).
- There were some “fights over land rights” which includes an arrow shot at folks in the “Oregon or Bust” wagon (~1:40), but that is the only reference to the indigenous population.
- How political slogans of the nineteenth century (i.e., “manifest destiny”) resonated well into the twentieth.
While I know there is some discussion of indigenous persons and Western expansion in American schools, and in broader American culture, it seems to me, at least, that the dominant myth is that the space was just sitting here waiting for us to show up and tame. (I will say that my experience in public schools in both Texas and California was there was a good deal of focus on native culture, but a lot less on what the US government did to those cultures).
At any rate, I have nothing more to add than to share these observations as inspired by the previous conversation. If anything, this might stir some nostalgia for Saturday morning cartoons back in the day, or provide an amusing example of 1970s pop culture.
