History, and what we choose it to mean

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/09/2024 (417 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As I write this column for the 23^rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I realize that virtually all of my current students were not yet born when it happened.

Right from the classes I taught that same day, and for decades afterward, I have related those events to a wide range of issues in our world. It was a defining moment in world history, or at least in how the West understood itself and its relations to other countries, as the 21^st century began.

Seeing pictures of the twin towers falling all these years later still brings back memories of what it was like that first time. For someone who was too young or not yet born, however, 9/11 just can’t have the same impact.

There are different stages to history. The first stage is observation, recounting the events, as someone who witnessed them. But, very quickly, those observations coalesce into the second stage. They are turned into a story, in which those events are selected, framed, interpreted and their meaning agreed upon by an audience.

As those events recede further into the past, as the eyewitnesses diminish or forget, the story takes on a life of its own, perhaps acquiring new elements to serve other purposes than merely recounting what happened.

In that sense, history is not about the facts, but about what, in this present moment, we have chosen them to mean. We can’t separate “just the facts” from that story any more than we can eliminate the air we breathe from who we are. Dead history is of little value.

So, when I talk to my students about 9/11, when I get them to read or watch things that relate to what I am saying, I am telling them what I think is the right story to help them understand what happened that day.

Am I the best person to decide what they need to learn? Probably not. But in this moment, at this time and place, I am the only narrator, interpreter — or storyteller — they have.

Teachers and especially parents are placed in this position every day. We interpret history to our students or our children, sometimes when we are prepared, but often by surprise, as unexpected questions are just asked. How we answer them will shape the way in which our students or our children see the world from that point onward.

The more I have learned through the years, however, the more likely I am to respond with “I don’t know — but I will find out.” We all need help understanding the story, realizing the ways that it is constantly being reshaped, reinterpreted and retold in every generation.

I am used to shocked expressions when I tell my students I learned “Columbus sailed the ocean blue, in fourteen hundred and ninety-two,” discovering America in his ships the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. As we work through the tropes of their own historical knowledge, they are unsettled to find that history is not safely dead, but alive. They are responsible not only for learning the stories but for choosing how to retell them to the next generation.

Watching history being rewritten to serve certain groups and factions today is therefore not only unsettling, but scary. We need to remember what happened in the Holocaust; what the Holodomor meant; what the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki experienced; what happened in Rwanda, and Cambodia, and Srebrenicà, and Armenia; so we can challenge the evil that threatens to do the same things all over again in our generation and to ourselves and to our children.

We need to recognize that genocide did not only happen far away and long ago but recently and right here in Canada, as the generational traumas of residential schools and cultural assimilation continue to unfold among Indigenous Peoples in Canada.

So, as I try to frame events like 9/11 in ways that do justice to what actually happened and to what lessons we should learn from such history, I am profoundly grateful for places like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), that next week celebrates the 10th anniversary of its opening in 2014.

I am old enough to remember the wisecracks that greeted Izzy Asper’s idea (“Winnipeg: The place where human rights go to die”) and the naysayers who said it couldn’t — and shouldn’t — be done. Yet CMHR continues to provide a quiet focus for retelling stories many would rather forget, and its importance has only increased in the last decade.

CMHR is an investment in collective memory, where stories are remembered and retold. It could do much more than, at present, it is able. It should also be a repository for oral histories about current problems, preserving stories after all the eyewitnesses are gone but it needs your ongoing and generous support.

People who have lost their stories stagger into the future, uncertain where they are going because they do not know where they began.

Peter Denton writes from his home in rural Manitoba.