TBD, Science is Storytelling
Joking, but not joking, to be “from” Winona, where I have now taught for 20+ years and where 3 of my children were born, your grandparents need to have immigrated from a small part of Kashubian Poland in the 1850’s. Like most people in town, I’m not “from” Winona.
On one side of my family my grandmother’s grandfather, Johnny Eastlick, watched the murder of most of his family at Lake Shetek in opening days of the 1862 war. Family lore and the state park monument describe him walking 100 miles with his brother to Mankato where the boys were miraculously reunited with their mother.
On a different side of the family, my grandfather’s grandfather, Ole Dahle, emigrated from Norway to preach the gospel, and temperance, to the Norwegian lumberjacks cutting old growth pine in what is now resort country near Brainerd. Ole originally arrived in Duluth with his wife and children, but the depression of the 1890s pushed them to move to the poorest farmland in the state in Aitkin county, because at least there they could grow potatoes and not starve.
The Moore’s in my family history trace back to Ohio, then Alabama, and then Barbados. They were almost certainly slaveholders.
Every family has stories like this. I am not my dead ancestors but the stories I heard growing up, and the subsequent stories I learned when I was an adult, form a part of how I see the world. Sometime in the early elementary grades, most kids learn these family stories as part of a social studies assignment – at about that age I remember doing the math that I was ½ Swedish, ¼ Norwegian, and another quarter Scotch Irish.
With each generation, these fractions of immigrant identity get smaller, but for now they still seem present, and it is ironic that the only people who are truly “from” Minnesota, are depicted as being driven from the land, on both the old state flag, and in written correspondence from when the flag was created.
Imagine for a moment that when you were in 2nd grade you worked out that your heritage was ½ Dakota, 1/8 Ojibwe, and the rest German. How would you feel to learn that your state’s flag celebrates the murder of your ancestors and the loss of your family’s land?
Plenty of people around Minnesota are flying the old state flag. My local volunteer fire department is flying the old flag! Why? Do you really mean to tell some of the children in this community that they don’t belong?