December 2021

Change doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s still worth fighting for, said Christoph Strobel, an author and University of Massachusetts-Lowell professor and this year’s Heyburn Lecture visitor.

Strobel recalled being a college student in the ’90s and protesting Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team for its stereotypical and insulting depiction of Native Americans. The team, named the “Indians” since the early 20th century, will officially become the Cleveland Guardians beginning in the 2022 season—without its previous red-faced mascot, “Chief Wahoo.”

“Even if it takes time, it’s always worth making your voice heard,” said Strobel, an expert in Native American history, African history, and cross-cultural perspectives of North American history. “There have been psychological studies that show how negatively Indian mascots affect people, particularly Indigenous children. We need to figure out how our traditions impact people.”

Strobel visited Milton to speak with history classes about Native American issues, particularly those affecting New England’s Indigenous peoples. As the landing site of some of the earliest white colonists, Massachusetts settlers’ history of violent subjugation of Indigenous residents “hides in plain sight,” Strobel said. 

He displayed the state’s coat of arms—an image that partially appears on the Massachusetts flag and seal of the governor—which depicts a stereotypical “Indian” figure holding a bow and arrow. Above the figure is an arm holding a sword pointing toward it; the state’s motto translates roughly to “By the sword we seek peace,” he explained. An earlier iteration of the coat of arms showed the figure saying “come over and help us.”

“It was a way of justifying colonization to the English,” Strobel said. “Our legacy of colonization is still there. Just getting rid of it doesn’t solve the problem; we need to educate people… (and we) need to recognize the impact of intergenerational trauma that exists to this day.”

Strobel, who grew up in Germany, recognized the solemnity and grief with which Germans remember the Holocaust; upon coming to the United States for college, he became curious about why the treatment of Native Americans is not acknowledged with the same gravity.  

As Indigenous peoples were forced off their land by white settlers in a federally sanctioned genocide, and throughout centuries of North American history, the oppression of native people has been largely ignored, he said. Residential and boarding schools across the U.S. and Canada abused large populations of Indigenous children—many of whom were forcibly taken from their parents—punishing them for using native languages, driving languages and traditions to extinction, Strobel said. 

Today, movements by Indigenous activists to save native languages and preserve cultures are gaining ground, he said. He encouraged Milton students to learn the real history and current issues facing Native Americans.

“Never stop learning,” Strobel said. “It’s the best gift you can give yourself.”

Strobel is the author of Native Americans of New England, The Global Atlantic 1400–1900, and The Testing Grounds of Modern Empire. With Alice Nash, he co-authored Daily Life of Native Americans from Post-Columbian Through Nineteenth-Century America, and he has published three books about immigration. 

The Henry R. Heyburn ’39 Lecture in History Fund was established in 1991 to support an annual lecture in history. It commemorates Heyburn’s love of history and geography and his many years of association with Milton as a student, parent, and trustee.   

“Poetry asks us to speak differently and it asks us to listen differently,” said Jenny Xie, an award-winning poet and educator who visited Milton as a Bingham visiting writer. “Partly because when you’re listening to a poem, you’re paying attention to the semantic content—what the words mean and what they point to—but at the same time, you’re tuned into the sonic qualities, to the poem’s music.”

To reach a creative place from which to write, Xie said she often needs to immerse herself in others’ voices, by reading or listening to music. Doing so helps her to leave the linear and task-oriented demands of daily life. Much of the language of daily life is transactional, and poetry is a counter force that asks for heightened listening, she said. 

Xie read several poems and explained their context; she shared one, “Unit of Measure,” that she wrote in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, “when time took on a different texture.” Xie also said the Today series by Japanese artist On Kawara inspired her. Kawara created thousands of paintings of dates, each taking on the date convention of the places he worked. Xie described seeing Kawara’s work in a Guggenheim retrospective shortly after the artist died. 

“Would you believe me if I told you I cried looking at these paintings?” she said. “They seem so monotonous, so boring in some sense, but you stand in front of them, and you think about all that a day could hold across the world, in a life… You look up into the atrium of the museum and see all these days accumulated into a life. I found it sublime, and I was measurably moved by how quickly a life can pass, and how much a day can contain.”

She also shared work about her early life in China and her family’s immigration to the United States. Mining memories for new and deeply emotional truths helps her create, Xie said.

“I’m not sure why I’m drawn to (something) unless I investigate it in writing,” she said. “I always tell my students, ‘Write because you have a question that remains unanswered. Write because there’s some mystery left in some experience for you.’”

Xie’s 2018 collection Eye Level was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and it received the Walt Whitman Award of the American Academy of Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Last year, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize in Creative Promise. She is a faculty member at Bard College and has previously taught at Princeton and New York University. 

The Bingham Endowment Fund for Creative Writing was established in 1987 to benefit Milton’s creative writing program. The fund brings prominent authors to campus. Recent Bingham visiting writers include Lauren Groff, Gregory Pardlo, Kamila Shamsie, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paul Yoon.

Documentary filmmaker CJ Hunt ’03 issued a direct challenge to Milton students this week: Live the school’s motto, “Dare to be true,” in real time while tackling the real and complicated issues of American history and injustice.

“What are the truths that we need to think about?” said Hunt, who screened his new documentary, The Neutral Ground, for students. “What are the stories that are buried, that we need to hear in this moment, in this country? I’m asking you to dare big. I’m asking you to make the motto real. Because when we dare to tell the truth, that daring is contagious, more contagious than a lie. The truth is out there, and it is just waiting for somebody courageous enough to dig it up. So go get your shovel.”

In The Neutral Ground, Hunt chronicles the years-long effort to remove four Confederate statues—of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, and the Battle of Liberty Place—from places of prominence in New Orleans, a city where the majority of citizens are Black. Following a 6–1 vote by the city council in 2015 in favor of removing the monuments, contractors hired to perform the work were threatened, and protests erupted in the streets. 

Hunt was living in New Orleans, where he had worked as a teacher and comedian. He set out to film some satirical videos about the issue. As the controversy and violence unfolded—and cities across the country began reckoning with their own monuments to slave owners, Confederate leaders, and colonizers—the documentary grew in scope and seriousness. 

In his film, Hunt spends time with Civil War reenactors and neo-Confederates as well as Black leaders and historians; he is also shown attending protests across the South, including the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some of the white subjects he interviewed denied that the Civil War had anything to do with slavery, or that enslaved people were mistreated. A young man in Charlottesville claimed that yelling “white power” is, simply, “fun.”

That he was visiting and presenting his film on Veterans Day felt somewhat fitting, Hunt said. 

“Part of the way that we honor veterans is to ask what freedom is made of,” he said. “Part of how we serve their legacy is to think deeply about the stories that we tell and the structures that we still hold up that keep freedom from being real for everybody in America.”

Hunt told students he was satisfied that the film doesn’t show him arguing white supremacists out of their positions. To do so would be too clean, and the true history of race in America is far too messy, he said.

“I think all of us, deep down, want our stories about race to be about reconciliation,” Hunt said. “We don’t want jagged-edged stories about reckoning and hard things that we cannot solve about the past.”

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek and spread the truth about the historic and present-day effects of slavery and inequality, he said. It just means that it will be uncomfortable.

“How do you learn about slavery without feeling uncomfortable?” Hunt said. “I don’t care what color your skin is, it’s literally the most uncomfortable thing that has ever happened. Education requires discomfort, a test, or a challenge.”