Forget Columbus.Instead, let’s start our history, our account, in Almo, Idaho. You know, now that I say it out loud, I even like the sound of it. On second thought, let’s not start with Columbus. I simply have difficulty with how we choose which stories become the pulse of history and which do not. Well, the “guns” remark was probably uncalled for and might suggest an animus towards history. It is a relationship we have with ourselves, a love affair we celebrate with flags and anthems, festivals and guns. National chronicle, a closely organized and guarded record of agreed-upon events and interpretations, a bundle of “authenti-cities” and “truths” welded into a f lexible, yet conservative narrative that explains how we got from there to here.

We throw in a couple of exceptional women every now and then, not out of any need to recognize female eminence, but out of embarrassment.Īnd we’re not easily embarrassed.When we imagine history, we imagine a grand structure, a By and large, the stories are about famous men and cele-brated events. History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past,īut the stories are not just any stories. Such a defini-tion might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Most of us think that history is the past. The azure lagoons, and the friendly Natives. And let’s not forget all the sunny weather, the sandy beaches, Three little ships, none of them in showroom condition, bobbing their way across the Atlantic, the good captain keeping two journals so that his crew wouldn’t realize just how far they had drifted away from the known world, the great man himself wading ashore, wet and sweaty, flag in hand, a letter of introduc-tion to the Emperor of the Indies from the King and Queen of Spain tucked in his tunic.Ī Kodak moment. There is even evidence to suggest that Asians found their way to the west coast as well.īut let’s face it, Columbus sailing the ocean blue is the better story. They arrived on the east coast of North America long before Columbus.

If Columbus hadn’t picked up the award, it would have been given to someone else.

And why not? It is, after all, one of history’s jobs to allocate credit. If you’re the cranky sort, you might argue that Columbus didn’t discover anything, that he simply ran aground on an unexpected land mass, stumbled across a babel of nations. In October of 1492, Christopher Columbus came ashore some-where in the Caribbean, a part of world geography with which Europeans were unfamiliar, and as a consequence, he was given credit for discovering all of the Americas. And I always give it my full consideration. When I announced to my family that I was going to write a book about Indians in North America, Helen said, “Just don’t start with Columbus.” She always gives me good advice. T h e I n c o n v e n i e n t I n d i a n

The inconvenient indian by thomas king