Decolonization*
*terms and conditions apply
This weekend I attended the Missouri Interpreters Conference at the Lake of the Ozarks, and while I learned quite a lot, including that I am strangely decent with an atlatl and can fire 40 rounds at moving clay targets with a shotgun and actually hit five of those targets, I also couldn’t stop thinking about the keynote speaker and how her opening remarks related to our class focus: decolonization.
She began by saying that public historians need to rebuild trust between themselves and rural communities, something I was ecstatic to hear. Academia has long distanced itself from working-class and rural communities, so this felt like progress on something I have been harping on for years. Hurray! She laid out her bullet points on the subject, and I was wholeheartedly agreeing with everything that came out of her mouth. Until I didn’t.
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She then went on to imply that rural communities are backward, uneducated people who need well-educated professionals who Know Better to step in and show them how things should be done. Carefully, of course, because you know how Those People can be. Some of them might even be Republican! The horror!
While I am keeping hope alive that maybe she’s just a really, really bad speaker and I’ve got it all horribly wrong, I’m having a hard time reconciling her stated goal of rebuilding trust with the way she blatantly patronized rural communities in her remarks. She made these implications so casually that I even wrote in my notes that I thought she was arrogant.
It’s as though rural communities have become a new version of the Other: people who can be generalized, talked down to, and treated as though someone else knows what is best for them. Their experiences barely seem to matter because apparently they are all the same uncivilized, uncultured, uneducated right-wing caricature anyway. Except, of course, rural communities are much more complicated than that. Not that anyone would take the time to find out.
Perhaps it might do public history, and maybe even the public at large, some good to take a few lessons from decolonization efforts and apply them to how rural communities are viewed. Blatant classism and gross assumptions about people do nothing to further our understanding of anything, other than prove how easy it is to become the thing you claim to oppose.
