Ellie Kahn, GBP Student The history of our city is well-known to all who have studied it: the desperation to detach from an unforgiving nation, a suspenseful and painful revolution, and ultimately, bittersweet independence. The stories we hear about dodging whizzing bullets, surviving cold winters, and other acts of strength sketch for us a portrait of our ancestors as heros, paving the way for us to live in safety and security. We are taught the valor of those who settled this country, portrayed through Thanksgiving arts and crafts in preschool, plays in elementary school, projects in middle school, and documentaries in high school. And of course, not to forget the abundance of gleaming statues and plaques located around the city of Boston itself, a reminder to praise those who settled it. After all, we owe our “land of the free and the home of the brave” to those who won that perilous fight we all know so well. But underneath the red, white and blue, the glimmer of the statues around Boston, and the Thanksgiving arts and crafts lurks a darker, more hidden past. It is a past that isn’t talked about as much as it should be. The past few weeks in the Greater Boston Project have been dedicated to researching and learning about the different Native American tribes whose lives were transformed when the settlers came over from England. We have read primary source after primary source detailing the horrors, ignorance, and general disrespect that the Puritans offered to them, as if they were gifts. For example, the Nauset Tribe, who, despite being known as the colonist’s greatest “allies,” were decimated by disease and abduction as a result of the the colonist’s introduction. Or the Paugussett Tribe, the first group to help the settlers after they arrived, as well as the first group herded onto a reservation, leaving their land to be taken by the settler’s. Or the Quinnipiac tribe, who could not no longer sustain themselves because of the environmental changes caused by the colonists. The list of Native American tribes who were profoundly affected by the arrival of the colonists is shamefully long.
The point of that list: our history is not untainted. It is okay to want to celebrate our nation; there is a lot to be celebrated. We fought brutal battles to break away from a powerful country that aimed to control every aspect of our lives, and when the dust settled and we were finally free, we were left to pick up the pieces and establish our own nation. Our history is important to remember and commemorate, but we cannot just pick and choose the stories of which we are proud. Along with the tales of sacrifice and glory, of passion and of victory, we must not forget those who were made to suffer through trials of despair and pain in the cause of our history, the terror and disruption we caused to the Native American tribes. We cannot acknowledge our fight for freedom without first acknowledging those whose freedom we took away.
This seal was the message members of the Mass. Bay Colony wished to convey to prospective settlers still in England. The image created was designed to appeal to those across the pond with an appetite for evangelizing, establishing a perception that the Massachusetts Bay Colony was a place to do “God’s work.”
The reality on the other side of the Atlantic, as our students found, was quite different. In a letter from one of the colonists home to England, evangelizing Native Americans took a back seat to survival. In the letter, which plead for his relatives in England to send provisions across the oceans, it certainly seemed as if it was not the Native Americans who needed help from the English, but the other way around! This contrast between perception and reality is a foundational part of the GBP curriculum, and though I am teaching my students to explore this through lessons like the Massachussets Bay Seal, I am navigating perception and reality in my own way on a daily basis. I have taught at Needham High School for three years, but this is my first year teaching the Greater Boston Project, and I am slowly coming to understand the true nature of the course, having only seen it from the outside for its first two years. The Greater Boston Project always had the air of “big” to me before I became involved with it. Three teachers, a giant room, two blocks per day, and a mass of students coupled with strong and important initiatives like one-to-one technology pilots and interdisciplinary learning goals. All of that is true about the course, by the way, but my perception was that the point of GBP was its grandeur; that is where I was wrong. After seeing it in action and taking part in the classroom, I’ve found that for all of its size, GBP’s greatest focus is on the small. The giant room in which we reside is rarely used as such, and the majority of the day is spent with students in small groups. We even go a step further in analyzing and assessing teamwork within these groups, paying close attention to who takes on what roles, and advising how better to relate to each individual within the group. These big initiatives like one-to-one device pilots and interdisciplinary learning turned out to be a way of making sure every student can engage with the course content on an individual level. Having three teachers has really meant extra eyes to review the details of the day. This seems fitting. In a senior elective in which we could have taught anything we wanted on any scale, we chose to study a relatively small city on a relatively small timescale. Through focusing on the sometimes small details that make up this city and its history, we find important reminders, positive and negative, of where we came from and where we’re going. |
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May 2016
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