John Buttrick writes from his Vermont Folk Rocker in his Concord home, Minds Crossing. He can be reached at johndbuttrick@gmail.com

Each of us is a micro incarnation of our national and family heritage. That heritage includes values such as hard work, independence, freedom, democracy, and equality of all people. It is a heritage claimed and celebrated with honor, pride, and courage.

However, our heritage includes a dark side, unresolved and hidden from memory. It is the side that negates some of those professed values. For example, the New Hampshire legislature’s HB 1118, proposes to deny refugees and asylees (whose statuses have already been approved by the U.S. government) the ability to obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license until they become lawful permanent residents. This proposal seems to perpetuate an unresolved inheritance of a sense of superiority, for example, the actions of early New England settlers who believed the Abenaki Americans were inferior to the European “Christian” settlers.

The New Yorker magazine reports that in order to force the assimilation of Native American children, boarding schools were established, sometimes a thousand miles away from their homes, where children were stripped of their Native names, clothing, and language, and their traditional religion and culture. They were given Christian names and forced to learn English.

By 1926, more than eighty percent of school-age Indian children had been removed from their families. The New Yorker reports that U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, after a decade of litigation concerning the abuse of Native Americans, observed, “After all these years, our government still treats Native American Indians as if they were somehow less than deserving of the respect that should be afforded to everyone in a society where all people are supposed to be equal.”

Lamberth continues, “cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past that has been sanitized by the good deeds of more recent history.”

Von Spakovsky and Stimson, of the conservative Heritage Foundation, expose the inheritance of a continuing sense of superiority when they advocate for the “common sense” treatment of refugees and asylees. In support of HB 1118, they write, “A driver’s license … provides illegal aliens with the appearance of ‘legality, giving the alien access to goods and services he would otherwise be unable to use.’ It defies common sense… to give them all drivers’ licenses… The state should discourage them from driving in the first place.”

The heritage of treating Native Americans as inferior supports the proposed ugly practice of setting apart refugees and asylees as “aliens,” undeserving of driver’s licenses until they learn to conform to the American culture. In other words, a segment of our heritage leads to the belief that refugees and asylees are inferior to us.

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Heritage is something that is handed down from the past, as a tradition: something that comes or belongs to one by reason of birth. It is reason for honor, pride, and courage. It is also a reminder of mistakes, ignorance, and malevolent actions. Taken as a whole, our heritage is fodder for a transformed future. Knowing the stumbling of the past gives the opportunity to change in the present. Knowing the past reasons for pride gives us a model for present action: to strive in the building of “one nation… indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The Heritage Foundation got it wrong. The best of our heritage is not a sense of superiority. Seek to defeat HB 1118. Welcome refugees and asylees onto our roads and into our communities. Build a heritage of integrity for the next generation.