Treuer: The troubling movement to suppress diverse literatures and languages

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My dad made me get a job when I was 12 years old. We lived in rural northern Minnesota. I had no car or driver’s license. The only person who would hire me was my neighbor, Albert Swenson. He descended from Norwegian immigrants and still spoke Norwegian. I rolled hay bales and did farm work for him. I got paid $3 my first day, but his wife, Ruth, made a great lunch, so I didn’t feel too bad. The hard work and humble pay still make me smile. A few years later, during the 1984 election season, I saw Albert Swenson at our local precinct caucusing in Norwegian with other Minnesota farmers. It was perfectly American, totally patriotic, and quintessentially Minnesotan. I thought it was cool.

Minnesota has always been a land of many languages and literatures. A large percentage of Minnesota’s place names come from Dakota and Ojibwe languages, including the name for the state itself. In 2011, a book of stories in the Ojibwe language I put together with 11 other editors, “Awesiinyensag,” won honors as Minnesota’s Best Read by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, the first-ever tribal-language publication to be so named.

Minnesota, like the rest of America, is changing fast. Four years ago, white people constituted less than half of the U.S. population under the age of 18. By 2045, the national population (all age groups) will be “minority” white, according to census projections. The escalating changes to our demographics have brought new language enclaves to Minnesota, such as Hmong and Somali. Spanish is growing even faster. These developments have been met with a strong and sometimes negative reaction among some Minnesotans. Today, if someone wanted to caucus in Spanish, many Americans would feel that it would be un-American, even unpatriotic, to do so. Newt Gingrich once said that Americans need to operate in and learn English so that they will speak “the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.” And Donald Trump has said, “While we’re in this nation, we should be speaking English.”

I am part of a growing effort to preserve and revitalize one of Minnesota’s first languages — Ojibwe. It’s really hard to listen to folks like Gingrich and Trump running my language down with all the others. Fearing a world around them that looks and sounds unfamiliar, a fair number of the descendants of Minnesota’s Norwegian-speaking farmers would likely now favor official English language declarations for the state. I know that Albert Swenson would not be pleased. While an official language declaration hasn’t gotten far in Minnesota in recent years, more than 30 other states have passed laws declaring that English is their official language. There were never such declarations a hundred years ago, when the immigrants were white and spoke German, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish or Dutch.

The culture wars have come home. There are now more than 10,000 books banned in U.S. public schools, nearly triple the number from the year before, according to a recent report. The overwhelming majority are authored by LQBTQ, Black, Indigenous and Latino/a/x/e authors. Book banners tried to work their agenda in Minnesota, too; I was relieved when our state passed a law this year prohibiting book bans in public schools and libraries.

There has never once, in the history of humans, been a time when the book banners were the good guys. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower said, “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.” The book banners must think their ideas are very fragile indeed if they think that someone reading something with a different perspective will convince them to change their gender identity, religion or politics.

We should read everything, including, and especially, the work of people with whom we disagree. I was heartened to visit the “banned books” section at the Brainerd library. It was a Minnesota Nice version of subversive resistance, but it still made me proud.

The movement to suppress minority literatures and languages has the potential to erode or even derail one of our longest and most admirable cultural qualities — respect for linguistic and cultural diversity. Minnesota cannot afford to follow the misguided lead of states that have declared English their official language and banned trainings and discussion about diversity, equity and inclusion. Such actions marginalize what will soon be the majority of our population and attack critical proven tools for everyone’s academic success and our national unity. The demographic changes are beyond anyone’s power to legislate away. We should want our children to know how to get along with their neighbors and build for the future that will be here, instead of a fantasy land that will never exist. And we should want them to do it with the values that have sustained Minnesotans for all of its years. Let’s make Albert Swenson proud. Our future generations will be truly grateful.