View as published \ Fall 2020/Stav 5781 The New Mexico Jewish Link: COLORADO’S HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE EDUCATION BILL, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR NEW MEXICO
First Place, Education, New Mexico Press Women 2021.
By Diane Joy Schmidt
On July 9th, Colorado became the 13th state to pass a bill that Ho- locaust and genocide education be taught in high schools. Sue Parker Gerson of the ADL Mountain States, who also runs the ADL’s Governor’s Holocaust Remembrance Program for the region, said this was very close to her heart. The bill was 20 years in the making in Colorado. The Jewish Community Relations Council, the ADL, and Jewish Colorado were lead organizations who worked together and with the legislature there.
Colorado’s Governor Jared Polis signed House Bill 20-1336 standing together with 97-year-old Holocaust survivor Fanny Starr at the Jewish Center in Denver. The bill requires high school students to learn about the Holocaust and genocide as a prerequisite to graduation.
The Colorado bill details definitions of the Holocaust and genocide and includes, in clause c., that “Holocaust and Genocide studies means studies on the Holocaust, genocide, and other acts of mass violence, including but not limited to the Armenian genocide.” Colorado schools have until 2023 to put together curriculum and identify source materials, and each district in Colorado will decide how they will implement it.
Each state’s bill is slightly different. On July 23, Delaware’s Governor Carney passed their Holocaust and genocide education bill, for both middle and high school students. The following week Massachusetts passed their bill, also to begin in the sixth grade. Many of the reported incidents of anti-Semitism occur in schools.
Arizona currently has bills working their way through their house and senate. The Anne Frank Center USA’s 50 States Initiative has made it a goal to see bills passed in every state. The federal Never Again Education Act supports the US Holocaust Museum in providing educational materials.
To date, no bills specifically mention teaching about the Native American genocide, a shadow that hangs over this country’s history.
Pulitzer-prize winning historian John Toland writes in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, on page 702, “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”
This passage was pointed out in the article “Hitler Studied U.S. Treatment of Indians,” Indian Country Today, 8/8/16, by Elicia Goodsoldier.
The Navajo’s Long Walk took place here in Arizona and New Mexico a little over 150 years ago, where close to 10,000 Navajo people were rounded up in a scorched earth policy ordered by the government, beginning in 1864, and marched from their lands across Arizona and New Mexico in winter some 400 miles to an internment camp at Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner, some 80 miles from the Texas border. Many died along the way and another 2,000 died of starvation over the next four years, until a treaty in 1868 finally allowed them to return to a smaller area of their lands.
The decimation of Navajo women of child-bearing age during those years created a significant genetic bottleneck that may be the cause of a number of genetic mutation-based diseases suffered by Navajo families (See Erickson RP. 2009. “Autosomal recessive diseases among the Athabaskans of the Southwestern United States: Recent advances and implications for the future.” Am J Med Genet Part A 149A:2602–2611).
These include a very rare deadly pigmentation disease that has received particular attention, explored in the award-winning documentary “Sun Kissed.” The very rare XP gene mutation, xeroderma pigmentosum, causes children to become severely sun-burned after only a few seconds of exposure to the sun. Generally found within one in a million, it has now appeared among some Navajo families, statistically, among one in 30,000. Individuals with the disorder can never go outside during daylight hours, are about a thousand times more likely to develop skin cancer and suffer an early death.
Another contributing cause of these various genetic mutation diseases may also be the effects of 40 years of deadly uranium contamination throughout the Navajo Nation, where the EPA has identified that over 530 abandoned uranium mines remain.
The Uranium Education Pro- gram at Dine College in Shiprock, New Mexico points out that there are many hundreds of additional contaminated sites, not just the mines themselves. “Uranium mining and milling has left large areas of the Navajo reservation contaminated with abandoned mines, mine waste and mill tailings and associated radiation. There are well-documented problems with lung cancer and silicosis (Black lung) in former Navajo uranium miners, and there is great con- cern among uranium millers and other Navajos who reside near con-taminated areas about late effects of radiation exposure from these sources. There has been growing concerns over various environmental issues and their impacts to health and the environment.”
Jews know well the devastating effects of inherited diseases as a result of a genetic bottleneck. One in four is estimated to carry a genetic mutation. Following a model aggressive screening campaign led by Jewish doctors, the deadliest, Tay-Sachs, has been virtually eradicated. Couples routinely seek genetic screening.
The most common disease is Gaucher disease. The National Gaucher Foundation states that “Gaucher disease can affect anyone, occurring in up to 1 in 40,000 live births in the general population.” However, “Gaucher disease is more common among Jews of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) descent, occurring in approximately 1 in 450 within this population.”
A very aggressive type of breast cancer, found mainly among Jewish women, is also found to be prevalent among Catholic Hispanic women in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. This has stimulated lively inquiry and is being studied in relation to the history of Jewish Conversos who settled here over 500 years ago following the Inquisition.
For further information about the Native American experience, the Smithsonian’s American Indian Museum has begun an online cur- riculum, Native Knowledge 360 Degrees, which “provides educa- tors and students with new perspectives on Native American history, cultures, and contemporary lives.” Their website has information about the Long Walk at https:// americanindian.si.edu/nk360/navajo/long-walk/long-walk.csht- ml. The Navajo Nation Museum, in Window Rock, Arizona, has a large-scale permanent panel dis- play, and the Fort Sumner Historic Site/Bosque Redondo Memorial museum was dedicated in 2005.
The Long Walk is only one part of the story. The Pueblo Indians have theirs, and a series of forced-march resettlements occurred throughout the country, the best-known being The Indian Removal Act of 1830 that resulted in the Trail of Tears.
Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families have expressed concerns that the Holocaust is in some way diminished by identifying other atrocities in the world as genocide. No comparison is implied.
Over the last twenty-five years, the Shoah Foundation, founded by film director Steven Spielberg, has collected the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust, and in addition, as their website details, of survivors of other genocides, including “the Guatemalan Genocide, which killed some 200,000 civilians in the early 1980s, mainly indigenous Mayans,” and, in Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and most recently, genocide being carried out by ISIS against Yazidis, Muslims and Christians.
The Shoah Foundation has a new initiative “Stronger Than Hate,” following the recent rise in antisemitism and hate against others, together with the University of Southern California, to provide educational materials through their eye-witness accounts to help stu- dents recognize and counter hate.
The Jewish people are in a unique position to bestow recognition on the wounds of others. Historic trauma is exacerbated when there is lack of knowledge and resulting denial. The historic atrocities committed against the Native American population of North America, call for our attention. At this time, while there is no active effort yet to pass a bill in New Mexico mandating the teaching of the Holocaust and other genocides, if this effort does go forward here, it would be an historic opportunity to include an initiative joining together with Native educators, that addresses the little-told history of our first citizens. #