And Last Updated on May 2, 2018 Notes and Suggestions from Chapt
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John S.W. Park Professor of Asian American Studies April 2018; and last updated on May 2, 2018 Notes and Suggestions from Chapter 2, The Kinetic Nation, Immigration Law and Society (Polity, 2018) In 2003, about a year after we moved to Santa Barbara, we took the kids to the Museum of Natural History. The curators had put together two or three entire rooms devoted to the Chumash Indians, the “original” inhabitants of the regions around Santa Barbara. They’d placed the Chumash in rooms adjacent to the ones devoted to the natural world, as it must have appeared to European settlers—in one room, there were stuffed versions of the snowy plover, the Channel Island fox, black and brown bears, and sea otters, and then in the next, there were statues of Chumash people, some sitting and weaving baskets, and others lining their canoes with the oil that seeped from the sea beds nearby. One gets the sense, after walking through the Museum, that once the Europeans arrived, the plovers, foxes, bears, otters, and Chumash were all in big trouble. The Museum of Natural History showed how the region once looked, “naturally,” before it was all swept away.1 It all happened so slowly at first, and then it was fast: Juan Cabrillo, a Portuguese captain, was the first European to sail his vessel in and around the harbors of Santa Barbara and Goleta. He arrived in October 1542. In the late 18th century, the Franciscan fathers made their way into what was Alta California—beginning in 1769, Father Junipero Serra and his friars established a set of missions from San Diego to Sonoma, California. Just before the last mission was built in 1823, however, Alta California became part of Mexico, only to become part of the United States just twenty-five years later. California’s population doubled every ten years—people came from everywhere, by land, by rail, and by sea. When lots of Chinese people came, white folks in California freaked out. Legislators from this state pushed hard for a Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in Congress in 1882. In graduate school, I studied the origins of this rule, and so that was how I became an Asian Americanist. In 1913 and in 1920, the California state legislature and California voters decided separately that families like mine—people of Asian descent—should not buy or own land in the state of California, but shortly after World War II, the United States Supreme Court struck down these Alien Land Laws, such that by 2002, my wife Gowan and I purchased the house on Cambridge Drive in an uneventful sale. In the language of another time, my family and I were “Orientals,” and “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” Not fifty years ago, our children would not have been allowed to attend integrated schools; Gowan and I, being born in Korea, would not have been able to pass into American citizenship, and then vote; and as “aliens ineligible for 1 citizenship,” we would not have been allowed to purchase property in the state of California. I suppose it was progress, that none of these things were true for us in 2002. But there were other truths too disturbing to ignore: even though my family and I had nothing to do with the original displacement of the Chumash, we got to own a small parcel of what was once their land. I was an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies, and I started teaching Asian American Studies 2 in 2002. The oldest Chumash settlements date to about 13,000 years ago; Cabrillo got here less than 500 years ago; and California became part of the United States about 170 years ago. I’ll be 48 years-old in May 2018. None of this is a long time, and so it’s endlessly fascinating to consider how the present connects to the past. * * * * * Imagine being a Chumash person in October 1542. What did it feel like, making baskets and lining canoes, much like your ancestors had done for thousands of years, and then seeing off of the coast a largish ship with big sails? As these unidentified floating objects got closer, you might see strange, funny looking people who didn’t look at all like any other people you’d seen before. These circumstances had happened before—strange ships, odd looking people, even magnificent beasts that were unfamiliar, especially horses. In the Bahamas, or in Massachusetts or in Jamestown, native people encountered Europeans and their animals (and their germs). But each time, such events, from the perspective of native peoples, must have felt so disorienting, frightening, and terrifying—did they think that their lives could remain the same, and then how did they cope, over time, with the sinking reality that nothing would ever be the same? Try it yourself: tomorrow, if strange beings came to Earth in unidentified flying objects, how would we react? How would you react? What might your parents recommend for you? Would life go on, or would things just never be the same? I wonder how many of you would continue to do the readings for my class. Imagine if the space aliens had advanced weapons systems, if they vaporized an earthling or two, if they acted as though they were superior beings (after all, they found us, not the other way around), and if they came with exotic religious beliefs, and then demanded that we believe them or die. What if they also brought exotic, alien space germs that casually wiped out thousands of human beings who came in contact with them. In the midst of all that death, what if the aliens were indifferent, because it meant fewer earthlings and more Earth for them. If things did unfold in this way, well, I might advise you to skip your homework, go home and be with your families. And why? It’s because I’ve been a student of American history, and that history would suggest that these beings will have their way, and that even if a few aliens might have great empathy for what was happening to the earthlings, we’d be lucky if some of us even survived their arrival, luckier still if they chose to settle and started calling this planet their home. It’s a thought experiment, but it’s more familiar than you might think. It’s true, that most Americans do not think deeply or daily, I think, about Native Americans, about the Chumash, or the Massachusetts, or the Chicago Blackhawks, or the Florida Seminoles, or the Cleveland 2 Indians, and yet I do think that Americans have imagined themselves suffering similar fates in their science fiction, in their collective obsessions with UFOs, in their movies and books and other cultural productions. It seems that every year, in another blockbuster or bestseller, Americans imagine a technologically advanced civilization doing to them what they once did to other unsuspecting people. The space aliens use probes, they reduce people to animals or things, they turn us into slaves or into raw materials, and they kill and vaporize without a care. Once in a while, we get an E.T., a gentle alien botanist, but then the same director imagines an apocalypse set in America, a war of the worlds. Just like in the original novel, published by H.G. Wells in 1898, human beings only survive this war because the aliens died—they had no immunity to our earthly germs—and yet this was exactly the opposite of what had happened when Europeans came to the Americas. It’s a radical way to think about immigration, as a kind of trauma and displacement, a helplessness in the midst of a powerful, indifferent other, huge in number, well-armed, and arriving on your head and rearranging everything. European migrations traumatized the original inhabitants of North and South America. Perhaps that history—our history—has left a profound, indelible, and recurring imprint on the American imagination.2 If space aliens did arrive, and gradually and then suddenly took over as the Europeans took over, perhaps in time the aliens might establish their own Museum of Natural History, a version of the Earth from the time when they found it, so that younger space aliens could see how primitive this planet once was. There might be dioramas of you and me in Embarcadero Hall or in Girvetz Hall, with the same PowerPoint presentation repeating over and over again. To be truly realistic, a few of my students would be paying attention to their social media feeds, rather than paying attention to the lecture. Generally, though, to keep the diorama safe for families, there might be no exhibits about the vaporizing and mass die-offs of human beings, because showing things how they really were—that would just be too upsetting for the younger space alien children. When my children were in their twos and threes, I did not want them to see the Chumash depicted as the slaves of the friars, or buried in big dead heaps, their bodies black with pox and measles. Such dioramas would have required too much explanation, and I’m sure that my children at that age would not have understood or appreciated the frightening events that the Chumash had suffered. * * * * * If Native Americans experienced the Europeans as a collective trauma arising from migration, then we might also consider how Europeans forced Africans to come to the New World in the most awful way. Europeans brought Africans in chains. Over hundreds of years, Europeans brutalized Africans in the most haunting conditions, and they sold them into lives that were unspeakably bleak and terrible.