Settler Mentality

 On Friday I was in the Hayden Library on the ASU campus. I don't have borrowing privileges yet, but I wanted to walk around. It's an interesting structure, built in 1966 in modernist style, and named for Charles Trumbull Hayden, who founded the city of Tempe, Arizona. 

Among the places I checked out was a reading room, the Luhrs reading room, to be exact which is near the front entrance. To enter one must open one of the long slender glass doors with long slender metal door handles.

Inside were students at various study stations, as well as a collection of books on the history and peoples of Arizona. The main exhibit and display was about the "#LandBack" hashtag movement, which is native Aemrican-centric. I read the description. It talked of the need to develop "settler consciousness" about American history, presumably an appeal for us to acknolwedge more the negative consequences of white settment. This is actually one of the core mission statements of the university, as I learned when I was hired. Walking around campus it feels like much of the point of the education is to refute everything I learned about America and Western Civilization and replace it with a different version.  I don't know if the kids coming out of college go along with that or not. It seems a lot of them do, but there is also skepticism and a backlash. I will leave it to them to figure out how they want to think about these issues.

Besides the main display, there were a series of three chest-high shelves on which other collections sat. The first one, opposite the main "#LandBack" display, was for queer literature. On the other side of the shelf I found a collection of emergent Black voices. On the next shelf were Hispanic authors. Finally on the back shelf, which was mostly a spillover of the Hispanic section, there was a single shelf of Arizona pioneer-era literature

Of courses this is the one that fascinated me, and where I lingered.  The history of Arizona, like any state, is full of some rich detailed descriptions of life on the frontier, much of which is now considered not worthy of study at the university, at least by the people who run things and the circle of activists.  I started my Arizona pioneer studies by reading the intro to The Hand-Book to Arizona, a classic which once could. be found in any respecable home in the state a hundred years ago, according to its description.