I've always liked studying history. Back in my school days, it was one of my favourite assignments. Not every teacher made it interesting, but those who did took us on a trip through time showing us how life used to be and how far we have come as a species. However, I had classmates who despised it. They wondered what contribution did studying rocks and tales of dead people had in their lives. I didn't have a smart comeback for these remarks back then, but these days I would tell them that if history weren't that important there wouldn't be people trying to change it to suit their needs.
I mentioned in my previous post how when I went to school our history books painted the European invasion to America (the continent, not the country that has borrowed its name) as the saving grace for Aboriginal people. History has always been written by the winners, and nowhere in those books could you learn about the genocide and the appropriation of resources that made European empires so rich.
Since I wrote that post, I have thought a lot about human rights and the way we've had to fight for our dignity and the recognition of our humanity in recent history. It is still surprising to me that The Universal Declaration of Human Rights had to be signed and published in 1948. As if before that declaration was signed we didn't have that humanity. As if before we fought for those rights we didn't deserve them.
The Suffragette and the MeToo movements, albeit separated in time by almost a century, are two examples of these fights for the recognition of rights against conservative groups that have tried to make us believe that women have never had those rights. As if, historically, there hadn't always been societies where women were not only treated equally but also shared positions of power with men. I was born in a country where many Aboriginal cultures are still matriarchies to this day (The Ngäbe, The Guna and the Bri Bri people, to name a few).
The Abolition of Slavery, The Civil Rights Act and the Black Lives Matter movement are also separated by a century between them, and they represent the fight for the recognition of the rights of black people. As if before they were kidnapped from their hometowns four centuries ago by the European empires they didn't enjoy those freedoms.
The Indigenous Civil Rights movement and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Australia are examples of fights for the acknowledgement of rights and the humanity of Aboriginal people in Australia. Pause there for a second and think about how the British didn’t consider the Australian Aboriginal people as humans. They thought of them as cattle. They had to fight for the right to be considered human, as if before the British came to what they called the Antipodes the people living there didn't enjoy their freedom and their rights in their own land.
This list could go on forever, but I will finish with LGBTQ+ rights. We have been made to believe that it wasn't until Stonewall in 1969 that queer people gained our rights. As if before Stonewall we didn't have the right to identify whichever way we deserved or have sex or fall in love with whomever we felt attracted to. The truth is that, for centuries, religions have tried to take away our humanity and our rights because if we don't procreate we are not useful to them. It's a war of power, control and numbers between religions and they need humans to be born into their cults to win this war.
This is why it's not only important to study history to prevent ourselves from repeating the errors of the past but also to learn that we are not fighting to gain a set of rights that we feel that we deserve. We are fighting to reclaim the rights that have been taken away from us.
The past hasn't always been fairer nor kinder, but those who are trying to strip us of our rights these days are basing their arguments on a version of history that they have created for their advantage. And if we don't correct the way history is being taught today, we will have to continue reclaiming our rights for millennia to come.
Photo credit: portrait by Sarah Tucker.
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