Sole Sisters

by Mary Reiman
 

Making a difference. I would love to save the whales, prevent wildfires, discover a cure for every infectious disease, stop the oil spills, and save the world in general. But I know my limitations and when the world news seems overwhelming, I sometimes think anything I do won't make a difference at all. 

Then I remember my favorite quote painted on the wall at Southeast High School. From Margaret Mead, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." 

So how can I help make the world a better place? Well, thanks to Becky, a group of us have now taken action. 

We clean a park. It might not sound like much but we've adopted a city park and are quite proud of it. Every week, two or three of us pick up trash at the American Legion Park on the corner of 27th and Randolph Street. It is a well used park with playground equipment and a picnic area and a parking lot for easy access. Thanks to Cheri, we named ourselves 'Sole Sisters.' 

Yes, we are proud. We are also grateful to the city for putting up a sign that it's our park!

Several months ago the food pantry in the park fell apart.  Thanks to the Boys and Girls Club of Lincoln for replacing it. Stop by any time and add food items. Often it has been emptied before we even leave the park. Yes, there is great need.

From the City of Lincoln website: "Parks are FUNdamental to Lincoln's wellness. We enjoy 133 parks in Lincoln with more than half of them identified as neighborhood and mini-parks. Parks and Recreation also cares for almost 4,000 acres of natural greenspace areas, four fenced dog parks, disc golf areas, and skate parks." They are ALL well used. Here is the list of the Lincoln Parks. Have you strolled through all of them? And the map of Lincoln Trails.  Have you walked all the trails? When you were walking, did you think about how clean they are? 

Adopting a park or trail or providing landscape maintenance in Lincoln is not difficult. The application form is available online: https://www.lincoln.ne.gov/City/Departments/Parks-and-Recreation/Volunteer/Adopt-a-ParkTrail-Application. You can adopt in one or two-year adoption cycles.

There are many, many volunteers throughout Lincoln and we give thanks for all their efforts from filling backpacks and organizing fundraisers to building houses and repairing bikes. And that is just naming a few. So many ways to help throughout our city. So many good and important causes. For several years we did not have the opportunity to give back, now again we do. We volunteer as a way of saying thank you for our great fortune to live in a community that is supportive and safe and generous. We take action as a way of feeling we can do something to make our world better.

I am proud to be a Sole Sister and every time I drive by our park, I smile. Whether there are families using the swings, someone finding food at the pantry, or someone waiting at the bus stop, I smile. 

Because for this city park, and the people who visit there, we are making a difference.

Stay in the fray

By JoAnne Young

With a postscript to Her Majesty

College and university campuses are inherently political spaces, University of Nebraska-Lincoln English professor Julia Schleck reminded us this week.

 

They are spaces for students, she said, to explore ideas, discuss or argue them with others, and emerge with a better understanding of the issues, an understanding of their own beliefs. 

 

Institutes of higher learning should not stay out of the political fray but in fact should serve as a crucible for the most intense of debates, Schleck said during the “Inquire” lecture series, as reported by Chris Dunker in the Lincoln Journal Star.

 

Schleck’s talk, which took on the question of higher education’s role in our society, was a timely reminder as UNL, and particularly its English Department faculty, in recent years have come under the scrutiny of some Nebraska state senators and other groups. The questions of the sacrifice of some academic freedoms, some constitutional free speech guarantees, are real. 

 

Some state senators in the 1970s also found protests an afront. Madeline Brown recounted several years ago in a UNL publication The Historian Craft, how a frustration with the early ‘70s student rebellion began to grow in the Nebraska State Legislature. 

 

“Since the University existed as a publicly funded institution, many senators questioned if taxpayer dollars should be going somewhere where students were seemingly in control. What resulted was a bitter battle between (UNL) and the Legislature. Students had a right to free speech, but would the Legislature allow it on the taxpayer dime?”

 

The Legislature, after all, holds the purse strings for a publicly funded university.  

 

In my college experience, English professors made up most of the population of rogue educators who were willing to challenge students and the status quo, to mix things up, to conduct their classes a little (or a lot) differently. 

 

Who else would have challenged me in my relative youth to read five Kurt Vonnegut novels and write a comparative essay? I’m sure it was woefully inadequate, but the reading of those novels was important enrichment to my education. 

 

Those English professors, along with some political science professors, were major players in allowing their students to learn outside of class time, to march to the state Capitol in protest of the Vietnam war, participate in a campuswide moratorium and an occupation of the Military and Naval Science Building.

 

That occupation led to an academic freedom tumult when the Board of Regents singled out a political science professor, Stephen Rozman, for refusing to leave the M&N building and for not encouraging students to leave. He was fired from his faculty position for “inappropriate” antiwar activities for a teacher, an act a faculty senate committee warned raised “grave and substantial issues of academic freedom.”

 

A lot was going on during my college years: The draft was taking young men – many not old enough to order a beer or to vote – across the world and into an increasingly unpopular war. Discontent was erupting for so many – Blacks, women, young people – with the theme of fight authority, change the rules, change the world.

 

Those movements had a profound effect on the whole of campus life, on the way we were taught, the books we read, the classroom discussions. The university offered a class, Black Experience in America, and I quickly registered. Civil and women’s rights activist and lawyer Florynce Kennedy visited the campus at the time.

 

“I’m just a loud-mouthed, middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing, and a lot of people think I’m crazy. Maybe you do, too,” she said, “but I never stop to wonder why I’m not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren’t like me.” 

 

The allowance of university campuses as inherently political spaces is so important in this era of division and of politicians attempting to discredit news media and universities, both of which must be bulwarks for serious discussion of the issues that confront us. 

 

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln expanded my thinking. It gave me the basis for my career in journalism. Mostly, it set me on a path of lifelong learning, appreciation of disagreement and debate, and the ability to use reason to unravel the problems and dilemmas that come up in our complex lives.

 

I am proud that our children all received their university degrees and excited for our grandchildren to have their own higher learning opportunities, to see what moves them forward in their journeys of adulthood. I lean on the academic freedom of these places of learning and ask that politicians don’t stand in the way of their growth in knowledge and wisdom. 

 

*  *  *

Postscript for a queen … I want to add to the expression of sadness on the passing of the second Elizabethan age of Great Britain. Barring some unforeseen and strange happening, it will be decades upon decades before England, the world really, has a queen the likes of Elizabeth II. 

She has exemplified the rich traditions of hard work, commitment, respect, quiet strength. She was not perfect; nor were the seven decades of British leadership she oversaw, which could be looked upon as sometimes quite messy. But there was still an endearing and enduring quality to her reign. 

 

We, in this country, are still waiting for a woman to ascend to our own throne of president. When it happens, may she have those same qualities of hard work, commitment, respect and quiet strength. I am ready for it.  

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Tell the Story...Tell the Whole Story

 By Marilyn Moore

At a ceremony earlier this summer, the name of Chief Standing Bear was added to Nebraska’s Justice Administration Building.  At the same time, a bust of Standing Bear was placed and a mural inside the building was dedicated to honor Chief Standing Bear.  

During the ceremony, Governor Ricketts noted the significance of the Ponca chief, describing him as one of his personal heroes.  He said that he had not known of Chief Standing Bear until he became governor in 2015, and that Standing Bear’s story is an important one, one that every Nebraskan should know.  I agree with the Governor; every Nebraskan should know the story.  

The story, in brief….Chief Standing Bear and the Ponca people were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma in the late 1800’s by order of the US government.  Upon arriving in Oklahoma, the Chief’s son died.  His dying wish was to be buried in Nebraska near the Niobrara, where he had grown up. Though against federal law, Chief Standing Bear made the long trek, through the winter, to return his son’s body to Nebraska, where he was arrested for being here unlawfully.  He sued the federal government, whose officials argued in court that he was not a citizen of the United States, was not even recognized as a person, and therefore had no standing in federal court and could not bring suit.

In his defense, he uttered the words that have become forever linked to his name, “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain.  If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain.  The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours.  The same God made us both.  I am a man.”

Those words were persuasive to Judge Elmer Dundy, who ruled in the Chief’s favor, affirming that indigenous people were indeed people and had human rights under federal law.  It was a significant step in the nation’s civil rights history.  Today, Chief Standing Bear is one of the two persons whose statue represents Nebraska in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall.  

I have three responses to the governor’s comments on that occasion.  The first is gratitude for his recognition of the importance of Chief Standing Bear and for the decision to place Standing Bear’s name on the Justice Administration Building.  That’s a placement of prominence, and Standing Bear’s name associated with “justice” is aspirational for all of us. 

The second is to wonder about Governor Ricketts’ admission that he didn’t know the Standing Bear story until he became governor, in 2015.  I thought about what that said about his history education in elementary and secondary school, remembering my own work as a history teacher, and my own elementary and secondary history classes.  

Most of us who grew up in Nebraska studied Nebraska history in fourth grade.  What I remember from that time, decades ago, is that we learned about the Indian tribes (that was the language used in the textbook) who lived in Nebraska in the pre-pioneer days, their homes, food, culture, buffalo hunts, ceremonies, etc.  And then…we learned about the Oregon Trail, the Homestead Act, the pioneers and the settlers.  There was a great big blank between those two segments of Nebraska history.  I don’t recall learning anything about how it was that the people who had lived on the prairies of what would be the state of Nebraska for millennia were suddenly not there, when homesteaders and pioneers arrived.  I did not learn about Chief Standing Bear.  I suspect the governor’s education was similar.  

I’m glad to report that the missing link is no longer missing, at least not in the Lincoln Public Schools curriculum.  Standing Bear is studied in fourth grade social studies, and again in ninth grade civics.  It is particularly important that his story is included in the civics course, because that judicial decision is a major ruling in the development of civil rights in the US.  Standing Bear is noted in the Nebraska state standards for social studies in grade four, and the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears are included in other grade levels.  The inclusion of Chief Standing Bear in social studies curricula is a significant improvement, and it would not have happened without the advocacy and persistence of citizens and educators at every level, demanding that the history that is taught be the history of all the people, not just that of the majority.  

Which brings me to my final response, and that is that the Standing Bear story is so much more than the dramatic courtroom scene and the very quotable quote.  The whole story would address questions that any thinking person would have, including ten-year-olds in fourth grade:  Why were the Ponca people forced to leave their homes in Nebraska and move to Oklahoma?    Why was it illegal for Standing Bear to return to his home to bury his son?  Why was someone who had lived his whole life in Nebraska not a citizen?  And how could anyone be considered “not a person?”  What does it mean to be “not a person?”  Just what happened in that time between the Indians roaming the plains, hunting buffalo, and homesteaders claiming a section of land and starting to farm?  

Excellent fourth grade teachers and secondary history teachers, and there are hundreds of them in Lincoln and in Nebraska, are intentional about helping students know the whole story, not just the courtroom scene.  It’s not an easy story to teach…so much complexity, so many perspectives.  And in some states, (not Nebraska, at least not yet), there would be extra scrutiny on teaching this story, because in some states there are state statutes that prohibit teaching anything in history that might make a student feel sad, or bad.  

I don’t know how you could hear, and learn, the Standing Bear story without feeling sad.  The same is true for many stories in history.  The Holocaust comes to mind, as does the enslavement of Black persons in the US, and the internment of Japanese US citizens in World War II, and the terrorist attacks on September 11.  You can add to this list…it’s nearly infinite.  The fact is, human beings have been cruel to one another in conflicts regarding power, land, and resources for most of our recorded history.  And from such cruelty, there have, at times, emerged wise leaders who can and do call out our better instincts (our better angels, as President Lincoln said) and inspire whole nations to move forward on the arc that bends toward justice.  Not teaching, and not learning, the whole story means we don’t have the chance to learn from such past and present lessons and get better at living together in the future.  Being sad may be uncomfortable, but it illumines a path forward.  Let’s tell the whole story.   

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