Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Vol. CLIV, Issue 6
Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Think about it

Photo Credit : von Hafften

In 1836 Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding founded a mission at the behest of the American Board of Foreign Missions. It was established at Waiilatpu, near present-day Walla Walla. Because of non-payment for property taken by the mission, encroachment on American Indian trade and the constant outbreak of diseases introduced by the mission, a group of Cayuse, Umatilla and Nez Perce banded together and killed the Whitmans, along with others, in 1847. This set the stage for U.S. military engagement to kill American Indians and conquer the Washington and Oregon territories in the so-called “Cayuse War.” After most of the natives were killed or forced onto a reservation, the Reverend Cushing Eells decided to establish a seminary in order to honor the Whitmans. On Nov. 28, 1883, the Washington Territorial Legislature amended Whitman Seminary’s charter, creating the four-year, degree-granting institution Whitman College.

Whitman College was founded to honor and commemorate the genocide on the North American continent: a genocide that continues today. This is a reality that seems to be lost on most current and former Whitman students, but I hope it is not lost on us all that our education here is decidedly political. Whether we wish to engage with this politics or not, we unavoidably participate in it.

I don’t intend merely to decry Whitman College for being an institution of privilege. I want to impart a little bit of my views on my education here in the service of living more fully and justly.

To live more fully and justly does require us to have a sense of what kind of problems we are arrayed against, and some of the problems of the world haven’t yet been teased into easy formulations. Part of the work that we have done here, and part of the work we have yet to do, is to decide what exactly the problems are and how we will go about approaching them.

Posing things we take for granted as problems to be overcome and obstacles to critical thought is just one way of questioning the privilege we inherit. But it is a useful exercise: The problem of Whitman’s history does not mean we are all condemned to blindly repeat genocide. Telling this history is also not to say that we are bad people who deserve to be punished. Far from it.

The problem of Whitman’s history gives us a unique opportunity to question and critique the kinds of thinking that make genocide possible. It gives us a particular framework to view the problem of living in the world, one that changes in myriad ways the paradigms that we brought to the school.

There’s a cliché that a liberal arts education is about learning how to think, and there’s some truth to that, but what I’m struck by lately is that learning how to think doesn’t necessarily privilege one way of thinking over others. Every day and situation is an opportunity to expand possibilities for life and thought. The point is to think about it.

It’s not easy living anywhere and Whitman is no exception. Although it can seem idyllic, all of its students face problems of their own: depression, sleeplessness, laziness, substance abuse, etc. The hardships faced at Whitman, however, are very different from some of the hardships faced by people in other parts of the world, or even right next-door. So whether you’re calling out the asshole in Gucci sneakers or you’re the one sporting them, climbing rocks or mining them, traveling in Europe with your family or working in an airport, I hope you’re giving it serious thought.

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