Truth
The rolling hills of Montana sweltered under an unpitying August sun. It was the summer of 1996. My parents and I drove past fields of tall grasses, here and there marked by small white marker stones. The stones stood in clusters where panicked White United States soldiers, under the command of General George Armstrong Custer, fell as they battled a superior force of Indigenous warriors. In Custer’s arrogance and desire for glory, he ignored the warnings of his Absaroke/Crow guides and charged into battle with ill-trained and outnumbered troops. An hour later, the bodies of Custer and all of his soldiers lay scattered across the battlefield.
U.S. history books when I was growing up called it Custer’s Last Stand. Now it is known as the Little Bighorn Battlefield.
My parents and I left the park and drove down below the steep bluffs and deep ravines, to a modest museum nestled up against a slough of the Little Bighorn River. It stood not far from the site where roughly 8,000 people from three Indigenous Nations united with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to stop U.S. expansion into the lands they had been promised by treaty. The purpose of the museum was to tell the Indigenous side of the story.
We stepped inside. Behind the reception area stood a dignified man who introduced himself as Barney Old Coyote, an elder in the Absaroke (Apsáalooke/Crow) Nation. His daughter Rachel sat behind the desk.
“The Indian way of telling history is different from the European way,” Mr Old Coyote said. “In the European way, everyone tells what they saw, and someone decides which story is the true story. Then that story becomes the history.
“But the Crow way of telling history is that everyone gathers in a circle. One person says, ‘From where I was standing, this is what I saw,’ and another says, ‘From where I was standing, this is what I saw.’ And all of those stories together is the history.”
All of those stories together is the history. Even if the stories contradict each other.
Contrast that with the Western European way of telling history, an exercise in power and domination. Only the people in power get to say what the true story is. And in their eyes, there can be only one true story. Everyone else’s story is erased.
“What is truth?” the Roman governor Pontius Pilate asks Jesus, during what Christians know as Holy Week. In the Gospel of John (chapter 18), Pilate asks this question after Jesus says that he has come into the world to testify to the truth.
“What is truth?” Pilate asks. And Jesus does not answer.
It is a question that has no easy answer. Perhaps Pilate knows that. Or perhaps he really doesn’t care what the answer is, because he doesn’t wait for it. Instead, he returns to the mob and says, “I find no case against him.” The mob is insistent, so Pilate tries to appease them by having Jesus flogged and tortured. He repeats that he finds no case against the rabbi. But the consensus of the mob is that Jesus should be crucified, so, despite affirming, for a third time, that he finds no case against this itinerant teacher, Pilate orders Jesus to be crucified.
All in all, the story takes a fairly sympathetic view of the governor of Judea who, by all accounts, was brutal in his governorship — too brutal even for the Roman Empire. Not long after Jesus’ execution, he was summoned back to Rome to stand trial for cruelty and oppression, and, under orders from the emperor Caligula, killed himself.
Which makes me wonder: Is the story in the Gospel of John true?
What is truth?
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I grew up, the White daughter of a White Baptist preacher — hence, all the biblical references — reading books with a White point-of-view of history, in all-White schools. My mind has been blown open by the stories of people who were not included in my White school’s educational canon. We White people, it seems to me, have spent centuries straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel (to use a biblical image), trying to get to The Truth — or perhaps more accurately, THE TRUTH (all caps). After which we say Amen as if there is nothing more to be said.
Pilate’s question haunts me as I try to get to the truth of the story I have to tell, about White supremacist violence that happened to my family and friends in North Carolina in the late 1960s. What is the truth?
All I can say is, if you want THE TRUTH, don’t come to me looking for it. I can tell you what I saw and what I now see, looking back through the tunnel of half a century. Seeing “through a glass darkly,” to use another biblical image.
Is the past that I see through the glass true?
I have a singular, personal, and particularly strong point-of-view about what happened in 1969. However, even that — my own POV — has shifted over the years. Especially over the last four years, as I’ve come to recognize and grapple with the way Whiteness has shaped not only the landscape around me, but the eyeglasses through which I observe it.
In the past, I would have told the story of what happened to my family as an epic tale, about a courageous White Southern Baptist preacher’s family braving violence and ostracism to stand against racism and White supremacy, both of which I saw as traits outside myself.
From where I stand now, I cannot help but look at the story against the backdrop of my great-great-grandfathers and great-great-uncles who fought for the Confederate Army, whose fathers enslaved people and who worked to shore up a system that disenfranchised and disempowered Black people.
There were also those who took small stands here and there for what they viewed as simple fairness. My Granddaddy Shipp worked part-time at one point in his life as voter registrar for Princess Anne County, Virginia (now part of Virginia Beach). He was handed a test and instructed to give it to every Black person who came to register to vote. A man with a 4th-grade education, Granddaddy took one look and thought, I could never pass this test. He handed it to the best lawyer he knew, who blurted out, “Man, the governor of Virginia couldn’t pass this test!” Granddaddy returned to the Courthouse and told his employers that he would either give the test to everyone who came to register, or he would give it to no one.
They promptly fired him. And that was the end of his protest, because at the time Granddaddy believed in segregation. He believed that everyone should “know their place.” He had taken a stand against what he saw as unfair — but once he was fired, from his point-of-view it was no longer his battle. He felt no need to work to change the underlying system. On the other hand, Granddaddy’s son, my father, went on to challenge segregation and to build churches that reflected what Martin Luther King Jr. called beloved community.
So, what is the truth of my story? What is truth of my family’s story?
The truth is all of it. The White settler colonialists and the Confederate soldiers, the enslavers and the segregationists, and those like my father who came to believe that segregation was immoral. The truth of my story is all of the stories of my ancestors.
The truth of the story I’m writing about also includes the stories of others who experienced that time with me. Those who were with us and those who stood against us. I want to hear from them, to know what they saw from where they were standing.
The violence fell like an ax across my life, severing the ignorant bliss of my childhood from an uncertain future. A wound gaped open there and swallowed up everything I thought I knew. It was a necessary wound, because the violence that caused it laid bare the lies of Whiteness. If I want to tell the truth I cannot avoid the wound.
But the story ain’t about my wound. It’s about speaking truthfully from the center of my experience and listening deeply to the experiences of others.
The truth is not complete until all of our stories are told.
Note: My memory of the Barney Old Coyote quote was confirmed by his daughter Rachel Sue Old Coyote in private conversation.
