It’s not uncommon for the White House (under any administration) to make multiple overlapping “proclamations” for any given month. Many of these celebrations date back years, like Black History Month and Women’s History Month. But this year, the Trump administration has continued in its proud tradition of surreptitiously erasing non-white-dudes from the narrative in favor of some revisionist history of American Exceptionalism that prides itself on the many glorious accomplishments of violent Christian colonialism.
That’s why November has now been proclaimed as the inaugural “National American History and Founders Month,” with a press release full of the most painfully generic platitudes of 1st graders naive vision of American history. It focuses largely on those classic conservatives go-to’s of revering the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, and even quotes from every Republican’s favorite Founding Father: Ronald Reagan.
Yes, I’m serious.
But the anachronistic Reagan quote is hardly the most egregious offense here. No, that would be the fact the White House neglected to proclaim November as National Native American Heritage Month, which it has done every year since 1990. It ignored the original inhabitants of our country—who helped colonists settle here, perhaps against their wills—in lieu of celebrating the men who immortalized them as “merciless savages” in the Declaration of Independence.
If you check the White House archives of Presidential Actions right now, you will see that National Native American Heritage Month is there, with a date of October 31, 2019—as if it was proclaimed on the same day as National American History and Founders Month. But if you look at the Internet Archive, you’ll see that it wasn’t actually there on November 1 (Founders Month, of course, was present from the start). It’s hard to say when, exactly, Native American Heritage Month was finally acknowledged. But even if this was an honest, innocent mistake—which I doubt, but—it’s sadly fitting that this administration would try to revise history to sloppily cover up their revisionist history agenda.
Image via the Obama White House Archives