04-04-05 @ 9:23 am EDT

AKA, "History Starts At Home," AKA, "Everything I Ever Needed To Know About Michigan I Learned From A Cheesy Tourist Trap."

Blah. I didn't have anything to write about yesterday, obviously. Unless I wanted to step in and say, "I don't have anything to write today," and then blather about that for a few sentences. :/ I don't really have anything to write about today either. I got on the computer all gung-ho and certain to do something but after doing the requisite five pages of Historic Mackinac I'm absolutely clueless. -_- I keep playing Tile Fall when I can't think of what to do, and Tile Fall is not the most interesting game in the world.

Well...I guess I'll try to get that "history" entry I've been meaning to type up out of the way. Not sure if I have it in me but here goes. I guess this is an appeal to teachers of history out there, not that any of them would be reading Skew of all things. o_o

The book I'm reading at the moment is The Archaeology Of Michigan or some such (cripes, can't even be sure of the title ^_^; ) by Fitting, a VERY dry text which blithers on and on about glaciers and stone projectile points. Maybe a year ago I wouldn't have even touched a book like this. A few years back, I would have completely ignored any books about Michigan or Mackinac Island sitting on the shelves, and back when I was in school, I never ONCE checked out books about Indians or the history of the Michigan/Great Lakes region. It's only been in the past few years that I've started to finally get interested in the area I live in. What got me interested in the first place? A wax museum exhibit. Yep. That was what first got me interested in local history.

The ONLY regional Michigan history lessons I ever remember learning in school were those I got from my Social Studies class in junior high. Oh, in elementary school we did do this project which involved picking a city, writing to their chamber of commerce for local publication materials, and then writing up a report on the history of that city, but since I got stuck with Muskegon, a city I had never really heard of and had absolutely no interest in, and since we were writing these reports based solely on those little tourist flyers you can find in any restaurant in any city, needless to say I was not much enthusiastic about that project, and I never had any more desire to learn about ANY Michigan city, much less Muskegon. >_<

Well, fast-forward to junior high and this weird class called "Social Studies." Do schools even have that course anymore? To this day I do not even understand what the purpose of Social Studies is--what is it--history? Humanities--? Anyway, the teacher was this bald man named Mr. Olson who had a very dry, dull style of teaching, though he did try hard. He tried to teach us about Michigan history and ALL I remember learning of this state I live in, of its four hundred-some years of history, was...the lumber industry.

I kid you not! That is ALL I remember us learning about! The 19th-century lumber industry. We learned all the terms that had to do with lumbering...I can't recall them at the moment but there were quite a few. We learned about how they chopped the trees and cut off the limbs and dumped them in the rivers, steering them along, and how said trees were eventually made into buildings and paper and whatnot. The ONLY mention I even vaguely remember of an Indian was of a native woman in some probably fictional story who happened to be named...Stick-In-The-Mud.

Out of all my years of school, and of history, that was the ONE thing which stuck in my mind enough to influence me any. For those of you who read my fiction, you've probably already recognized the genesis of my medicine man character's name, Stick-In-The-Dirt. And that was all I ever picked up from Michigan history in school.

Oh, we had PLENTY of HISTORY lessons...world history...and American history. We learned of King Menes of Egypt (whose name, BTW, along with the name "Osiris," the teacher mispronounced, despite the pronunciation guide right in the book!), Charlemagne, the witch trials, the Inquisition. We learned of the Middle Ages and the Black Death. We learned of Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, of the presidents, of Benjamin Franklin and his Poor Richard's Almanack, of Thomas Edison and the Suez Canal and Carl Sandburg's Chicago. We learned of the Renaissance and the French Revolution, all those kings and queens of England, who possibly built Stonehenge, and who did build the pyramids. We learned of Pizarro and Marco Polo and Magellan, Napoleon, Galileo, Da Vinci, Picasso...we learned of the first colonies in New England, up to the Civil Rights Movement, the women's vote, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the dustbowl...things right up into my own lifetime and memory like the space shuttle, President Reagan, terrorism (my earliest childhood news memories are of Beirut), pop music, the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the USSR...we learned all these things and a ton more that I will be sure to remember after I type this up.

And all I ever, EVER learned of the history of the state I myself was born and grew up in...was lumberjacks.

Oh wait! Now that I think of it, we did have an attempt at learning about our local city, Cheboygan, in elementary school...they called in an old man who was VERY dry and boring, and he lectured us about the MODERN history of the place, and sometime later on we learned about the Edmund Fitzgerald (a shipwreck unrelated to Cheboygan)...but it was so very bland that I cannot even remember a bit of it. The old man was so dull and lifeless that when he first came in the room I thought he was wearing a mask!! It was only later on that I learned he was Gordon Turner, a local historian of note, for whom a local park is named. As influential as the guy may have been (he died some years back), he was certainly not a gifted orator. My interest in the locality probably WANED after that.

So now you see why I had NO desire whatsoever to learn anything more about this state or region? Why? I thought lumberjacks were all there was! BORING! Even the most interesting teacher couldn't make that interesting for me. So while I often went to the school libraries to check out books on ancient Egypt, UFOs, and other such things, I was never ONCE tempted to look up any that had to do with where I lived. Blech!

Well...although it took me a long time to realize it, I DID actually have a slight interest in my own area...and it started back in elementary school, when I visited a wax museum tourist trap. To this day, I hold this tourist trap responsible for all my interest in Michigan's history--it took some cheesy wax displays to get me interested in this subject, which did a WHOLE lot more than any of my teachers ever did.

When I was little I loved to visit the Haunted Wax Theater on Mackinac Island. I was too little to understand the displays or what they had to do with anything; it was only as I got older and entered junior high that I finally read the captions and saw what they were about. The stationary wax displays were what intrigued me the most. There was a great winged wolf-headed demon named Ocryx who, the caption said, was responsible for the displays now visible in the museum. Those displays included a massive, white, hairy beast with wide antlers and glowing eyes named Mitchi Manitou, who was said to have lived in a bottomless lake upon the island itself...and a tall, wide-eyed, pointy-eared creature tearing out a human heart, who was called a Geebee and was said to have lived in a cave on the island, consuming human flesh. These displays didn't scare me. But they did fascinate me. So much so that after a visit to the island with my best friend Mya, we went home and were so excited about what we had seen that we immediately set out to write a story based on it. That story was called "A Nightmare On Manitou Island."

That story was pretty stupid and cheesy, BTW. But it did get me interested in "Mitchi Manitou" and "GeeBees," even though I had no idea they had anything to do with anything other than Mackinac Island and its wax museum.

On a school field trip to Old Mill Creek, also in junior high, I located two books by Dirk Gringhuis, a local author. One was of legends of Mackinac Island and its natives; the other was early French-Canadian legends of the same area. The former mentioned Mitchi Manitou and the bottomless lake, and the GeeBees! Amazed, I bought both books and devoured them. I had not known there really WERE legends about a bottomless lake, a great manitou who sang people to their death, and giant cannibals who lived in caves and cooked people. I had only ever known of these things in the context of the tourist trap wax museum. Now, they suddenly had a wider context--the island itself, and the region I lived in. But even after buying these books, my interest lay solely in these legends, and in nothing else. I did not put my hands on anything else even remotely having to do with the native legends of the area unless it mentioned the Mitchi Manitou or the GeeBees or some such. I just was not interested. I did write, in Mya's absence, a long series of "native"-themed stories using these and other creatures of my own creation, but those petered out after a while, and that was that.

Probably in high school or some such, on a visit to Mackinaw City I spotted a book called Michilimackinac, a novel about the massacre at Fort Michilimackinac, but didn't buy it. I did convince my parents to take me back to buy a copy at a later date. I did not put the book itself into context though; I was really only interested in it for its graphic sex scenes. Shh. Don't tell my parents though. ^_^;

I attended community college in Petoskey, another area important to the natives, from '95-'97. I even took an anthropology course. Pat Ranger, the anthropology teacher, did make things more interesting. We went on a field trip to a nearby archaeological area. However, all I remember of it was the foundation of a since-vanished house, and lots of myrtle ground cover. I was not interested. There was ONE thing, however, which intrigued me along the way. We passed a set of trees and Ms. Ranger stopped us long enough to point one out. It was a very strange tree, its trunk rising up, bending to the side, then rising up again at almost a 90-degree angle. "That's a crooked tree," she informed us. "The Indians shaped them as they grew so they would form in this manner, but to this day, nobody knows how it was done without killing the tree. There used to be a ring of them here, but all were cut down but for that one." It was on private property now...and we continued on our way.

I didn't think much of the crooked tree at the time. But it did stick with me. Not enough to influence my choice of an older culture when we did reports later on, though...I, of course, chose ancient Egypt. (I had so much material that Ms. Ranger had to cut me short. :P )

I never once looked up any books on native legends or folklore or anything in the great big library at the college. (Oh, the things I could have found in that library! Due to poor scheduling on my part, I even spent HOURS there by myself! I NAPPED and ATE and WROTE ENTIRE PAPERS RIGHT BEFORE CLASS in that library! I probably would have ended up building a house and raising a family in that library... -_- ) The only books I ever checked out from the Petoskey city library were the Griffin & Sabine books, and a Lovecraft novel.

I graduated college with no more interest in Michigan than I'd had when entering.

A few years passed. Cue 2001, a year after I'd gotten online and had found out I could show my writing to people from around the world (whether they wanted to READ it or not). I joined writing groups and sites and looked for prompts. Sometimes I responded, though people usually didn't reply. Back then this did not discourage me so much. One day I decided to respond to some word prompts in a story. I'd already had a few ideas floating around loose in my head. I decided to focus on a place I had not written about in years, the "Manitou Island" Mya and myself had created. I wrote and posted the first chapter, which was not noticed in the writing group. But it was noticed elsewhere...and I wrote about the same place for fully two years after, until I'd finished the story in February 2003. Then, after a break of a few days, I started it up again. And it's still going, over two more years later. And I rather plan to keep writing about it for a long time to come.

A great deal of the way through this story, probably in 2002, I really began to wonder, what was I even writing about? Did I even know this culture any? Looking back on my older chapters, it's obvious I didn't--I used words like longhouse, which don't even RELATE to Michigan's native culture. My interest in the manitous and GeeBees had been growing but I vaguely remembered a character from Gringhuis's book, a trickster character, who I thought of introducing. But before I could do that I had to learn some more, obviously. I didn't even know the TRIBE whose mythology I was borrowing from--all I knew is they had lived sometimes on Mackinac Island, and they were an Algonquin tribe. Even in Manitou Island, as the story was called, I used the word "Algonquin" when referring to them since I had no other idea what to call them!

"Nuts," Charmian whispered.

"Do you think he's a native?" was all Drake said.

"What do you think? Well...obviously, he is. I mean, look at how he's dressed." Charmian slowly lowered the hand holding the guidebook. "This isn't good...I don't know anything about native tribes. Are they friendly? Are they mean?"

"What kind of Indian do you think he is?"

"Well, I know we had Algonquin in the area...but I have no idea what he is...and anyways, I don't know how to speak their language in order to find out!!"

This whole time they'd been whispering back and forth to each other, or more like hissing, but Charmian's mouth clamped shut as soon as she saw the look on the stranger's face change. He seemed to find it displeasing that they must be talking about him under their breath; his eyes darkened and his frown grew, and Charmian couldn't be sure if he lifted the stick a little higher or not.

"Shhh," she hissed at Drake. "He's listening to us."

"Well, like I said, if we're lost, we can just talk to him."

"He doesn't look very friendly, if you know what I mean!"

"The worst thing we can do is find out, right?" Drake said, and stepped away from her, toward the cliff. He rose his hand and actually said, "How!" Charmian cringed and felt like vanishing into the ground. She wondered how sharp a stick had to be before it could effectively pierce the human skull.

I figured, if I'm going to keep writing this thing, I should at least know a little bit more about the area and culture I was writing about. o_o

I picked up my old books, and picked up some new ones. Learned from Gringhuis's book that the guy I wanted to add to my story was Manabozho, and learned from further reading that he was a lot more important than that one book would lead you to believe. Picked up more books and eventually learned it was the Ojibwa tribe I had been borrowing stories from all this time. Learned from another book, called The Crooked Tree (!), that Petoskey itself (or rather, the nearby Harbor Springs), where I had seen said tree, had once been known as L'arbre Croche...Crooked Tree. And Little Traverse Bay, which I had passed many times on the way to college, was itself a stand-in for the bottomless lake in the Mackinac Island legend! Suddenly Michigan history was starting to seem a little bit more interesting.

I finished the story and picked up more books. I started reading not only about the mythology but about the culture of the Ojibwa...then about their role in early Michigan history...then about Mackinac Island...and the early French-Canadian trappers and traders...and then early history itself. I started to become interested in voyageurs (whom Gringhuis had mentioned in his other book), and prehistoric land formations, and the Great Lakes, and other local tribes, and pre-contact cultures. I looked back on Michilimackinac and was surprised to find out that there had been an Indian massacre just a half hour from where I live, staged to look like...a lacrosse game! I again learned about the British trader Alexander Henry, who hid out in Skull Cave on the island and only by these means survived the slaughter; I'd heard of him before, but had never cared about his story. I started reading about the Midewiwin and the manitous and Manabozho and his brothers, and the construction of wigwams and canoes, and how the rocks on Mackinac Island formed thousands of years ago...I learned that Lake Huron was once called Nipissing, and Algonquin, and was even referred to as Karegnondi...I learned about the coureurs de bois, or unlicensed trappers, and the differences between voyageurs who worked only in the summer and those who stayed through the winter...only lately have I just started peeking into the prehistoric Great Lakes cultures (I just found out that the Indians I've been writing about on my own Island are Late Woodland natives, the direct predecessors of the Ojibwa), and wondering about Iroquois mythology and culture as well. And right now I'm reading about glaciers and stone projectile points...and every time I see a book on Mackinac Island or early Michigan history (and prehistory!), I jump at it. And I'm still looking and learning.

All this, because of some tacky wax museum tourist trap.

I'm actually disappointed and rather angry about the lack of local education I received in school. We never ONCE heard of the massacre at Michilimackinac; probably for politically correct reasons, but still, shouldn't it have been MENTIONED? (There was a class field trip to the site when I was in elementary school, but I had chickenpox then... -_- ...and somehow, I seriously doubt the teachers mentioned the word "massacre" to a bunch of little kids!) Dad himself told me how HE learned of it in school, and he too knew of the lacrosse game which prompted it...but by the time I was in school, any such subject had been completely dropped from the curriculum. Aside from Gordon Turner's bland contribution, which I do not even recall, I learned practically NOTHING of my own city's history. Even my city's name, "Cheboygan," was something I never learned...Mr. Olson did share with us the jokey story of how it supposedly got its name, the story of the old Indian chief whose wife had given birth to only sons, and she was going into labor...after she had delivered, the old chief exited his home, and the others asked what the child was, to which he answered, "She boy again"...nowadays, remembering hearing that story in a HISTORY class rather pisses me off. >:/ Mr. Olson made no attempt whatsoever to teach us the REAL meaning of the name...if he even knew.

The probable meaning of Cheboygan, BTW, is "The Passing-Through Place"...so named because of the river. I had to learn this on my own. They never taught it in school, that I can recall.

I'm disappointed that in all those years that I was surrounded by local history texts, my years at Black River Elementary School, and Cheboygan Junior High and Cheboygan High School, at North Central Michigan College, I never ONCE learned anything that even remotely interested me in going to those libraries, and checking out anything that had to do with my own home state. Pat Ranger came close, but not close enough. The Crooked Tree itself didn't have any bearing on ME personally...it was still too distant and out-of-context a concept. I did not associate it with my existing interest in the manitous and GeeBees, so it didn't click...until much later. AFTER my access to all those possible resources was completely gone.

Long lesson short?...TEACHERS! I do not blame you, but think about this. Why are so many students so bored to death of their classes?--because all they can think of is how none of this has anything to do with THEM personally. I never CARED about Michigan history because what did it have to do with me? It had no bearing on anything I did or was interested in. It had no importance. It had no context. I was interested in Egypt up the wazoo because I was already writing stories about its mythology, but Michigan?--I did not care. Even after my interest was sparked by the Haunted Theater, all I knew was GeeBees and manitous, and we never even heard the WORD "Ojibwa" in any of my classes and so how could I have known to learn more? We learned about Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and Sacajawea but what did we ever learn about Pontiac and Minavavana and Wawatam? We heard all sorts of stuff about the Lakota (back then called the Sioux) and the New England tribes with Pocahontas but what did we EVER learn about the Ojibwa or the Ottawa or Huron? Not one thing! I was never interested in learning about Michigan history because according to my history classes, MICHIGAN HISTORY DID NOT MATTER! To me, Pontiac was the name of a car and of a city! Michilimackinac was just some boring old fort up north, and what the hell were the Ojibwa??

How are we as students expected to gain any pride in our region of birth if we are never TAUGHT about it? Historic peoples of thousands of miles away were given great importance but I never had any pride in my own state because it was so boring and had nothing interesting to contribute. Perhaps, if I had known back then of the fur traders and the voyageurs and the native legends with their Underwater Lynxes and Mitchi Manitous and Wendigoes, and Alexander Henry's hideout in Skull Cave, and the British soldiers massacred in the fort and the American troops trying unsuccessfully to recapture the island in the War of 1812, and Pontiac's Conspiracy and the Jesuit missionaries and whatnot, maybe THEN I would have wanted to learn more. This place would have had some importance to it. It would have started to have context for me, as I would have started relating all this to my writing, where that interest already existed in a very limited form (my interest in Ojibwa mythology). I would have thought, "Hey, that has to do with what I'm already interested in! You mean there's more? Cool!"...and I would have checked out books, and asked questions, and maybe by the time I GRADUATED I would have known all that I know NOW, only after learning it all on my own, without a teacher's help or inspiration.

I'm disgusted that our local history and heritage, in all my years of schooling, all boiled down to...lumberjacks. And the Edmund Fitzgerald. There was so much more to learn, but they never bothered teaching it. And so I've only just figured it all out on my own, WITHOUT their help. It's only too bad that these teachers and classes didn't at least lay the foundation for my interest, but they did not. It was that tacky little wax museum that I give credit to. It did far more to help me learn more about my area and this state's history than fourteen-plus years of SCHOOL ever did.

I do not blame teachers for this--but I do blame who the hell writes up the curriculum. Whose grand idea was it to COMPLETELY OMIT our local history?? I do not blame the writers of the textbooks because I guess to them, Michigan history, even that of the Northwest Territory and the Great Lakes and the fur trade, isn't interesting or important enough...I mean...even look at the Discovery Channel...you would think the Great Lakes region doesn't even exist. (Their loss. I'd take this stuff over tidal waves and dinosaurs any day.) History textbooks give all sorts of mention to the New England colonies, to westward expansion, to the South, and almost everything in between, but you'll be hard pressed to find much mention of...THOSE FIVE HUGE BODIES OF WATER! And the land that lies in between them! Never mind that it helped shape the very beginnings of our country. Guess that doesn't count.

This oversight could have been remedied, however, by whoever writes up the curriculum...but even THEY decided that Sitting Bull and Sacajawea and Pocahontas and all that jazz were MUCH more important...than Michigan ever was. And so can you blame me for not much caring about history all through school? Sitting Bull and Sacajawea and Pocahontas, to the best of my knowledge, never set foot in northern Michigan...so what did they ever have to do with me?

History starts best at home, and grows outward. I started out interested in two dinky legends, then in an entire mythology, then in an entire culture, then in the entire region, and THEN in the cultures which came in TOUCH with this region. I did this on my own. MAYBE, if whoever had written up the curriculum had bothered to think that students might be more interested if what they were learning had something to do with THEM and their OWN land, personally, they too would have gone off to try to learn as much as I've learned. Only they wouldn't have had to wait until they were out of school and almost out of resources to do it. School would have done its job.

But the person(s) in charge of the Cheboygan curriculum, in all my years of school, evidently deemed northern Michigan history not important enough for inclusion, beyond Mr. Olson's feeble attempt with the lumberjacks. I'm wondering, is it the same way in other areas? If where you grew up is not already known as some huge historic spot--like New England, or Washington DC, or near Gettysburg or whatever--then how much attention does it get in your history schooling? Even if it is one of those or another famous site, is that all you learn about it, that one incident in its entire history, and nothing else? Do they make brief mention of your area in some boring context which skips over HUNDREDS of years of history, or do they really spend time on it? Do you learn everything there is to know about some OTHER region of the United States or of the world, but practically zip about your own hometown? If so then I know that feeling completely. Maybe you don't give a rip, but now that I'm seeing all I missed all those years, yes, I'm quite irritated that the writers of the curriculum saw fit to omit all this.

I feel sorry for all the other students who might have been inspired to learn as much as I've learned, but never bothered to because it wasn't of relevance to them. I feel sorry for the teachers who never got to teach all that stuff and probably don't even know much of it themselves. And I feel really sorry for me, still having to poke around in the local library and hope I can find something else interesting once I'm done with THIS book, and wishing I could find more. Sorry that I had the chance to learn it all long ago, but whoever wrote up the lesson plans...didn't deem it worth knowing.

And you had to read about it here in this dinky journal, instead of out there in the world, because one after another, people deem it not worth knowing. Isn't that sad?

So teachers, and whoever writes up the curriculum...the next time you sit down to do just that...why not put a little more thought into not world history, not American history, but in LOCAL history? Just maybe, if you start out with THAT first...the other two will start to have a lot more meaning. Once we learn that our OWN part of the world matters...then the rest will start to matter, too. It's at least worth a shot. Isn't it?


This entry has barely been checked for factual or grammatical/spelling errors. Blame the latter on me, but blame the former on my poor excuse for schooling. Nyar. :P