There are some parts of history that are difficult to reconcile.

Alex has been thinking about that lately.

He thinks about the missionaries who came to Southeast Alaska believing they were coming to help. Some came with faith. Some came with education. Some came with a sincere desire to change lives and bring what they believed was a better way of living.

And yet, alongside those intentions came something much darker.

Native people were often described as savages, uncivilized, uneducated, or people who needed to be changed.

That is a difficult thing to read.

It is even more difficult when it is part of your own history.

Alex finds himself wondering how someone could come to a people saying, in essence, “I have come to help you,” while at the same time looking down upon the very people they had come to serve.

History is rarely as simple as we would like it to be.

People can do good things and still cause harm.

A missionary can teach someone to read while holding beliefs that diminish that person’s culture.

A church can become an important part of a community while the institution behind it carries attitudes that wounded generations of people.

Both things can be true.

And perhaps that is one of the hardest lessons history teaches us.

Alex doesn’t believe that the answer is to erase the missionary from the story.

Nor does he believe the answer is to excuse the things that were wrong.

The answer is to tell the whole story.

The good.

The bad.

The painful.

The complicated.

The things that made people proud, and the things that made people angry.

Because when history is sanitized, people who carry the wounds of that history can feel as though their pain is being dismissed.

And that pain is real.

Resentment doesn’t simply disappear because a hundred years have passed.

Stories are handed down.

Photographs are handed down.

Memories are handed down.

Sometimes even anger is handed down.

But Alex has also been thinking about something else.

How do we move forward?

How does a community honor what happened without allowing yesterday to determine everything about tomorrow?

He doesn’t think the answer is telling people to “get over it.”

That doesn’t work.

You cannot heal a wound by pretending it isn’t there.

Maybe the first step is simply to acknowledge it.

To say, “Yes. This happened.”

To say, “Some of it was wrong.”

To say, “Our people were hurt.”

And then to listen.

Really listen.

Listen to the Elders.

Listen to the stories of families.

Listen to the stories that may never have been written down.

Listen to the people who remember what their grandparents told them.

And perhaps, over time, something begins to happen.

The history becomes ours again.

Not the missionary’s history of Native people.

Not somebody else’s interpretation of who we were.

But our history.

The story of our people told in our own voices.

That is one of the reasons Alex believes preserving history matters so much.

Preservation isn’t simply about old buildings.

It isn’t simply about photographs sitting in boxes or documents sitting in an archive.

It is about preserving the voices of the people who lived through the history.

It is about making sure the next generation knows where they came from.

And perhaps most importantly, it is about teaching them that they don’t have to choose between remembering their history and moving forward.

They can do both.

Alex also believes there is a difference between forgiveness and forgetting.

Forgiving does not mean saying that something was acceptable.

It doesn’t mean pretending people weren’t hurt.

And it certainly doesn’t mean rewriting history to make everyone comfortable.

Perhaps forgiveness is simply refusing to let the wrongs of the past have the final word over the future.

That is a very different thing.

Anger can be powerful.

Sometimes anger is what tells us that something mattered.

But Alex wonders what happens when we take that anger and turn it into something constructive.

Anger can become preservation.

Hurt can become education.

Loss can become remembrance.

Resentment can become determination.

Determination to preserve the language.

Determination to record the stories.

Determination to teach our children.

Determination to protect the things that make our communities who they are.

And maybe, someday, determination can become reconciliation.

Not reconciliation built on forgetting.

Reconciliation built on truth.

Alex doesn’t know exactly what that will look like.

Maybe nobody does.

But he believes the conversation has to begin somewhere.

And perhaps it begins with something very simple:

We can tell the truth about the past without becoming prisoners of it.

We can acknowledge the harm without throwing away everything that came afterward.

We can recognize the good without excusing the bad.

We can remember the people who came before us without allowing their mistakes—or ours—to determine the people we become.

History belongs to all of us.

And if we are willing to face it honestly, perhaps the next chapter can belong to us, too.

That may be what healing really looks like.

Not forgetting.

Not pretending.

But remembering—and choosing, together, what we do with that memory.

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A Note From Alex

There are some stories that are hard to tell, and some truths that are even harder to face. But Alex believes that preserving history means having the courage to tell the whole story—not just the parts that make us comfortable.

We remember because our history matters.

We listen because our people matter.

And we move forward because the generations coming behind us matter.

Perhaps healing begins when we can look honestly at where we have been, acknowledge the hurt, and still have the courage to believe that there is something better ahead.

— Alex
Notes From Alex