My husband died last week in a
shoot-out with Shoshone Indians on the Oregon Trail, and while it doesn’t seem
to be bothering anyone else (including my husband), I find myself brooding over
the situation as I put away laundry and wash dishes.
We were approached by six Shoshone
Indians on horseback. There were seven of us, and we panicked. Well, the kids
did. One of them wanted to start shooting right away. The other convinced him
to call their grandparents.
The reasoning was quite rational.
It went like this: you can’t outrun them. You’ve got oxen and a wagon. If you
try to talk to them, and they’re “fierce,” you won’t have a chance to get to
your guns. So the safest, most logical thing to do was shoot.
And they did.
Yeah, we were pretending.
But my kids still chose to shoot at innocent strangers rather than talk first.
They were caught up in the simulation, I know. In real life we don’t even own
any guns, and we never shoot strangers. I’m taking it too seriously, I’ve been
told.
But I played the simulation
with my husband before the kids began. I knew that the situation could be
gotten out of with a friendly conversation and a gift. Like most things in life,
if we will use our words, we will have less trouble.
The “guns” we shot were
just rolls of the dice. The Indians were make-believe. Nobody got hurt, not
really. “But,” I asked them, “who were these men you killed? Brothers? Fathers?
Husbands?” And even now I want to weep. Because I know that these imaginary
people in a history simulation represent real people who were killed just as
senselessly as my sweet children rolled the dice.
Yes,
it seemed safer to just shoot.
In many ways, it often seems safer to just shoot. Then we don’t have to worry
about understanding other people, being hurt, risking ourselves in an attempt
to cross the chasm between one human heart and another.
But I believe in stepping
away from my guns and risking my life to cross the prairie to a stranger, hand
held out in friendship. It doesn’t sound like much, not shooting strangers for
fear they’ll shoot you first, but sometimes…when you’ve run out of food and
outrun cholera and winter’s approaching…sometimes life is hard, and it’s easy
to think only of survival. In those difficult,
stretched-to-the-point-of-breaking times, that’s when we really choose Who to
follow, and survival was not a message He preached.
My husband and I have a
strict policy of non-intervention with this simulation. We let them buy the
snake oil from Professor Thaddeus P. Farnsworth and get sick trying it. We let
them bring the silverware and every spare part a wagon could need, even though
that meant bringing less food. We giggled but said nothing when they decided to
buy oxen instead of donkeys, since that meant they wouldn’t have to bring
donkey food. We knew those oxen would come to places where the grass was too
scarce to eat, would pull the wagon too slowly and leave them fighting
blizzards and avalanches.
We let them decide to shoot
the Indians, too.
The
simulation does not teach you what to think. It’s merely fact, choices, odds, dice. If you try
to outrun the Indians, they’ll ride beside you and laugh. If you try to talk to
them, they’ll trade with you. If you shoot them, they’ll shoot back. The
impetus to give meaning to these outcomes is on us as teachers.
I’ve told the kids what I
think: they killed innocent people. But you can see in their faces that the
information does not register, not really. They think they went left when they
should have gone right, made an error of judgment. They don’t see the deeper
significance. They don’t see that these six characters represented real people.
So we’re reading about
Native Americans for the next few weeks. We’ve learned that the Hopis are a
subgroup of the Pueblo Indians, and my son is fascinated by the pueblos they
built. We’ve read If You lived With the
Sioux Indians and learned about some of the things they made from bison.
We’re working our way around the continent with crafts from More Than Moccasins, and more books and
films that are on hold at the library now.
My son said to me this
week, “Wow. The Indians are really interesting. They’re like real people!”
Almost all my kids knew
about Native Americans came from Little
House on the Prairie, and I failed to realize it sooner. I’d dutifully
pointed out the racist passages that that book contains as they were reading
through it, we discussed them, and we kept reading.
When presented with a group
of Shoshone Indians, though, and grandparents who suggested they might be
“fierce,” I asked them, “Are they? Are these Indians ‘fierce?’”
My daughter quoted Ma’s
objections to Indians and my objections to Ma’s racism.
“So what does that mean?” I
asked.
“That means I don’t know,”
she said.
We will be reading about
the Shoshone next week and about Sacajawea and her baby, her joy over being
reunited with her older brother, a relationship my two take very seriously and
so will relate with deeply. When we do, then then they will weep. Because then
they will know who they killed at Independence Rock.
