Time passes at a dizzying and accelerating rate as we grow old. At the Jack London Saloon in Glen Ellen I ran into Caterina Landry, a trustee on the Sonoma Valley School Board. We talked generally about high school curriculum and I mentioned the contrast between when I was in school in the 50’s and 60’s, and what my 40-something stepchildren told me they never learned in school. I revealed I would be 74 this year, Caterina said, “No Way.” I said, “Way.”
I vividly remember civil rights marches, Vietnam protests and my public and personal struggle for women’s rights, yet they seem far away, in the distant past. MLK and others before him said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In 1960’s high school, in the state of Minnesota, civics, U.S. and world history, and open discussions were not things our school administration thought of as controversial.
I remember discussions initiated by our teachers on economic and civil rights disparities caused by race and as the result of slavery. I remember a class where we studied and discussed the hanging of 38 Native Americans in 1862, in Mankato Minnesota, an aftermath of the Dakota Sioux Uprising of 1862. That conflict erupted when the Dakota, deprived of their land and facing starvation, attacked white settlers, killing hundreds. The Dakota were inevitably defeated and 303 were sentenced to die. President Abraham Lincoln asked to study trial transcripts of all, and pardoned 265. Because of this high school curriculum, and the hard work of many others, a 1912 monument to the hangings was removed in 1971 (amid protests), and today the Mankato Pow-wow and memorial rides honor the executed. Over many years I believed that the arc was bending toward justice…