Having grown up 2.3 miles from the Tuscarora Indian reservation, and having cousins who are Native American, having attended Niagara-Wheatfield schools for 13 years, and also having a few Native American friends throughout my schooling, it is ironic that my knowledge about Native American history can be summed up by such terms as "Indian giver", "redskin", and a few Hollywood stereotypes.
Graham Millar was my history professor in my sophomore year of college, which was the spring semester of 1979. Love Canal was an emerging news story, Three Mile Island was very recent history, the U.S. was yet to boycott the Olympics, John Lennon was still alive, and multiculturalism was yet to be a popular term.
I remember Graham Millar's history class (U.S. Since 1865) like it was yesterday. Other classes have blurred and blended into the distant past, but I do still remember professor Millar's daily stories that were sprinkled about in his lectures. Once such story was his reminiscence about his days at William and Mary, and how locals still talked about "The War".
Most significantly, we read a paperback book with a gray cover entitled 'The Long Knife". The subject was the tragedy of the Trail of Tears. How I never heard this story throughout high school, I do not know - especially since most of the Native Americans in our school district had ancestry from North Carolina.
Like Father Warthling's philosophy class, the measure of professor Millar's history class was not in what I learned, but in how I saw the world. Specifically, I saw the world through the eyes of a Native American. I suppose this is the value of a great liberal education - seeing the world in a different way. In that regard, no one did a better job than that great Scotsman, Graham Millar.
