White House officials, Republican politicians, and right-wing activists have been complaining recently about getting heckled and kicked out of restaurants and Ubers. Earlier this month, the Raleigh News & Observer reported that a local Uber driver had expelled six Republican volunteers from a ride, allegedly telling them as he pulled away, "Welcome to the resistance." The response from mainstream pundits has largely been to call for civility, but there are strong historical reasons why some Americans don't consider civility an absolute virtue.
White people tend to use the word "civilized" in its adjectival form. To them, it describes being polite and respecting other people's opinions and beliefs. For me, as for many other natives, "civilized" is a historical verb, recalling a bloody ultimatum imposed on us by an invading army. White people were never more "civilized" than us; they perpetuated the dichotomy of civilized versus savage to dehumanize us.
Those who posit themselves as most civil are often the people with the most power and privilege, and they're also often the most forgetful of the history of this continent, which was founded in blood. I do not believe in civility, just as I do not believe in savagery. I believe in decency and see the living traumas still unresolved in my own people's history. There are remnants of distrust that go back to when my grandmother went to Indian residential school, and indigenous people still distrust the government, not only for the massacres throughout indigenous history, but also for parts of our history that are often neglected or overlooked, like the coerced and forced sterilization of indigenous women in both Canada and the United States, which occurred as recently as 1990. Today, the only people telling the story of Louie Sam, an indigenous boy lynched near the Canadian border in 1884 over a crime he did not commit, are the people of our nation.
[For more on this story by TERESE MARIE MAILHOT, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...-lessons-in-civility]
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