This whole thread. Growing up in small town Indiana, I had a nagging sense that I was from “nowhere,” when really it was a sense of not being connected to a distinct history.
1/ https://twitter.com/davidastinwalsh/status/1274543967074476032

It was only through studying history I learned that we had eradicated the local histories & peoples, our ancestors/predecessors pursuing whiteness and forgetting their own history in order to achieve it thru violence.
2/

The Midwest felt historically thin & young because I judged it against the ages of European civilizations, revealing my own biases along the way. I’m still working to correct that.
3/

Indigenous history and the histories of systemic racism in the Midwest were left out of my public education. Without those facts, how all these white people came to populate state a place called *Indiana* is little more than a whitewashing myth. 4/

It’s telling and sad that I had to take graduate level courses to learn so much of this, because my K-12 education in IN & IL and the Christian reconstruction curriculum at my Christian college didn’t teach it.

Learning history should not be another function of privilege.
5/5