{"id":13266,"date":"2015-03-29T20:05:43","date_gmt":"2015-03-29T20:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/for-years-i-opened-my-11th-grade-us-history\/"},"modified":"2015-03-29T20:05:43","modified_gmt":"2015-03-29T20:05:43","slug":"for-years-i-opened-my-11th-grade-us-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/for-years-i-opened-my-11th-grade-us-history\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>For years, I opened my 11th-grade U.S. history classes by asking students, \u201cWhat\u2019s the name of that guy they say discovered America?\u201d A few students might object to the word \u201cdiscover,\u201d but they all knew the fellow I was talking about. \u201cChristopher Columbus!\u201d several called out in unison.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRight. So who did he find when he came here?\u201d I asked. Usually, a few students would say, \u201cIndians,\u201d but I asked them to be specific: \u201cWhich nationality? What are their names?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Silence.<\/p>\n<p>In more than 30 years of teaching U.S. history and guest-teaching in others\u2019 classes, I\u2019ve never had a single student say, \u201cTa\u00ednos.\u201d So I ask them to think about that fact. \u201cHow do we explain that? We all know the name of the man who came here from Europe, but none of us knows the name of the people who were here first\u2014and there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of them. Why haven\u2019t you heard of them?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This ignorance is an artifact of historical silencing\u2014rendering invisible the lives and stories of entire peoples.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/view\/2012\/10\/06\">Rethinking Columbus: Towards a True People\u2019s History by Bill Bigelow<\/a> (via <a href=\"http:\/\/bestoffates.tumblr.com\/\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">bestoffates<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For years, I opened my 11th-grade U.S. history classes by asking students, \u201cWhat\u2019s the name of that guy they say discovered America?\u201d A few students might object to the word \u201cdiscover,\u201d but they all knew the fellow I was talking about. \u201cChristopher Columbus!\u201d several called out in unison. \u201cRight. So who did he find when [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3rY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}