Lori Falce: Museums must be honest repositories of history

When I was a kid, we didn’t go on vacation to beaches or amusement parks. We didn’t take cruises or spend a week at the lake. My vacations were spent hiking across history and crawling through the cracks of time.

I walked in Sacajawea’s footsteps. I climbed up the side of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings and panned for gold in a ghost town. I’ve prowled through Jamestown and Williamsburg. I have stood in battlefields from Gettysburg to Vicksburg, from Little Big Horn to Wounded Knee. I’ve seen the good and the very, very bad.

And what I learned as I stared at broken bones and the ravaged remnants of lives in museums is that what is important about history is more than the snapshots. It’s the context.

Without context, the Liberty Bell is just broken bronze and Independence Hall might as well be a Marriott ballroom. Auschwitz is a stop on a train line. The pyramids are piles of stone. The context gives them weight.

That can be the problem with things like flags or statues — or museums. Some people see the piece of cloth or block of granite. Some people see the story — the complicated timeline of events. We need to see both. More importantly, we need to see why someone might think differently about this statue or that flag, and why that position can change what someone thinks about us.

This has been an issue in recent years as some have pushed to prevent Confederate generals’ names from being honored with namesake public buildings or statues. It has reached a peak currently as President Donald Trump seeks to strip criticism of slavery from museums.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” the president posted on social media, saying he was directing a review of the Smithsonian museums to bring them in line, much as he has with universities and other cultural institutions.

But we can’t pour bleach on the past to erase the bloodstains. We can’t erase history by tearing down a statue or by ignoring the actions of the person it honors. It has been tried before and failed. Pharaohs have tried to chisel each other out of stone. Books have been burned. But the sands shift and facts remain.

We need to acknowledge how we got where we are today, and we need to do it without painting over the parts we don’t like. History needs to be honest, not a sanitized version we tell children because we don’t want to have difficult conversations about things like slavery and oppression.

We can learn from our history or we can repeat its mistakes, we are told. We learn nothing with our eyes closed.

We need to crawl all over our history like a kid at the Grand Canyon, asking questions and exploring niches. We need to stop looking to Kardashians for our entertainment and look to the nooks and crannies of our past to help us find where we’ve been so we can see where we are going.

And we need to not be offended by or defensive about what we find. Be sad. Be resolved. Be angry. Be inspired. All of those can help us do great things or stop us from following the bad paths that make us ashamed.

But being offended makes us look for someone to blame. Being defensive makes us shy away from solutions by turning away from problems.

I want my son to learn about history the way I did — from the gravel up. He has explored the Good Hope Plantation in Jamaica and those same fields at Gettysburg. He has learned histories from Native American powwows and climbed into the seats of World War II planes. I want him to feel the reality and the context of what happened before.

So maybe someday he won’t have to relive the mistakes someone already made. But to see that happen, the museums need to be honest reflections of the past.