Erasure Hidden in Plain Site
As I was driving my daughter home the other afternoon, I noticed some new signage along stretches of road in Carver county (see below) that immediately caught my attention. According to a press release on the topic, there are 10 signs located throughout Carver county. To me, the erasure of American Indigenous people couldn’t be more blatant. The Stories We Tell As a teacher and scholar of pedagogy and language, I know that what I say and present in the classroom has a massive weight upon how our students think and feel about selected topics. But what we don’t say and/or present has just as much weight, if not more, on the public consciousness and the thinking of our young children. One of my favorite quotes from Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois sums up what happens when we only present one side of information when he wrote: How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man’s soul; that every great thought the …