The United States of America was born from violence.
This is a hard fact to deny, but it has become a political flashpoint in recent years. The 1619 Project, the Pulitzer Prize-winning multi-platform feat of historical recuperation and revision undertaken by Nikole Hannah-Jones and her team at the New York Times, argued that the real founding of the United States was not with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 but with the arrival in 1619 of White Lion, an English vessel carrying Africans from the Kingdom of Ndongo to the colony of Virginia, where they were enslaved. In an interview with Fox News, President Donald Trump professed confusion over the project’s thesis: “Where did that come from? What does it represent?” Rather than investigate those questions, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell protested the Department of Education’s proposal to encourage public schools “to use tools like the 1619 Project in their classrooms.”
The subsequent struggle for control of that history—especially as it is told to students in our schools—touched off a wave of book-bannings, state laws restricting the teaching of specific texts and historical events, and now has led Trump, as he prepares for a second term in office, to call for the “virtual closure” of the Department of Education, in order to allow states to individually decide their curricula. What Trump does not mention is the bitter irony that the department was created under President Jimmy Carter as a way of locking in the gains made in equal education during the Civil Rights era. Eliminating or hobbling the department now would permit state and local school boards to proceed with limiting the teaching of uncomfortable truths from our nation’s history.
As I mentioned in May 2023 in the inaugural issue of Switchyard, this battle has particular resonance in our hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In that first issue, we featured a poem sequence by former Poet Laureate of the United States Natasha Trethewey, writing about the excavations in Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery, seeking skeletal remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. In the intervening time, researchers have positively identified the first victim: C. L. Daniel, an African American World War I veteran, who appears to have been passing through Tulsa at that disastrous moment. Months earlier, he had written to the federal government from Ogden, Utah, seeking assistance with medical expenses. He had gone to Europe “for 9 m & 16 days trying to do my part,” he wrote, but since returning had been ill and unable to afford passage home to Georgia. “Now I have ben discharge from the army for some time,” he continued. “I have traveld this country over.”
Daniel’s journey through Tulsa proved lethal. He was part of the group of African American men killed by a white mob and buried in the potter’s field at Oaklawn. Some of these men, known as The Original 18, were burned beyond recognition and interred in plain pine boxes in unmarked graves. One newspaper account reports that the white gravediggers refused to open the earth for these men. “Finally several blacks volunteered for the work,” the Tulsa World reported. In November 2024, Tulsa mayor G.T. Bynum apologized to Daniel’s family at a public memorial. “He was just trying to get home to his mom when he stopped here and was murdered,” Bynum said. “His mother died never knowing where her son was buried.” But Ryan Walters, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, has insisted that Daniel’s death should be taught outside the context of race. “Let’s not tie it to skin color,” he said at a public meeting of concerned teachers and parents in 2023.
It’s unmistakable: the American political divide has deepened into a battle for the soul of the country. And as we know too well in Tulsa, that battle often becomes a struggle for land—for physical terrain—and for control of landscape—the identity and perspective that we map onto that space. This split between land and landscape raises unavoidable questions: Who owns the land? Who has a right to it? Who decides?
In this issue, Mya Frazier writes about farmers and rural landowners in Ohio who have been forced to sell their land to Amazon and other big tech companies that need the space and water resources for their data centers. Ted Conover discusses the San Luis Valley of Colorado where people pushed to the margin, too poor to afford a traditional home or too unconventional to maintain that lifestyle, have taken up makeshift residence in the style of old homesteaders. Robert Kunzig writes about the ways that the land of poor Black farmers in the Mississippi River Delta was coopted by the forces of industrial agriculture to produce commodity grains, instead of sustainable and life-sustaining crops. Victoria Chang, in her stunning poems, writes about the violent removal of Chinese immigrants from Eureka, California, in 1885—and its echoes with her own upbringing a century later.
More metaphorically, Dean Bakopoulos returns to the pages of Switchyard to explore the landscape of memory and the question of forgetting. Tailyr Irvine examines what it means to her Salish and Kootnai relatives to hunt on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. Devon Fredericksen questions why we have this compulsion to own a place by interrogating her complex relationship with the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state—and her compulsion to steal a bone from a rotting whale carcass on intertidal sands there. These explorations raise the bigger and more complicated question raised by another Oklahoman, Woody Guthrie: “Is this land made for you and me?” Beyond the pages of this issue, Switchyard is also launching a video series with Tulsa songwriters to explore this very question.
On January 20, as Trump is sworn in for a second term, Switchyard will unveil a new national anthem, composed by Kalyn Fay, a Tulsa singer-songwriter who is a Cherokee enrollee with Muscogee Creek heritage, and Damion Shade, a Tulsa songwriter and executive director of Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform. And then, over the weekend following the inauguration, we will host a gathering of journalists, writers, artists, and musicians in Tulsa to discuss the future of our country and our shared responsibility as storytellers. As Donald Trump threatens mass deportations of immigrants and closure of the southern border, as he promises to make everything from reproductive autonomy to public education into states’ rights issues, the question of what America is—and who it is for—is more pressing than ever. We must decide. —Ted Genoways
