The American Battlefield Trust <\/a>is a nonprofit dedicated to preserving those and other battlegrounds. Referring to them as “living memorials,” their goal is to pass on the soldiers’ acts of heroism and sacrifice to future generations of Americans.<\/p>\nBut battlegrounds and cemeteries contain much more than stories of valor and courage. Many soldiers experienced intense suffering in their last minutes and hours. Like the one remembered by Walt Whitman in his poem The Wound Dresser:<\/p>\n
“The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard (Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! In mercy come quickly.)”<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, while such solemn verses might be studied in a literature class, they’ve been excluded from most high school history curricula.<\/p>\n
As are the civilian casualties of war. Scouring the historical record, anywhere from 50,000 to more than a quarter million innocent people lost their lives during the Civil War. Like the Unangax who died while interned at Funter Bay, war’s history is incomplete without their stories.<\/p>\n
“Our history – the good, the bad, the heroic, the regretful – shapes who we are as Americans today,” the American Battlefield Trust tells us. “That history can serve as a powerful lesson and inspiration, but only if it can be preserved.”<\/p>\n
These stories suggest the chorus to the song Down by the Riverside that’s often sung at anti-war rallies – “I ain’t gonna study war no more” — isn’t consistent with the value of preserving these cemeteries. To understand what war really is, we need to study it more completely.<\/p>\n
Think about America’s civil rights history. We can’t celebrate the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution unless we acknowledge the moral bankruptcy of slavery. We must learn about the scourge of Jim Crow laws that followed emancipation to appreciate the heroic work of Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n
And we need to know the full story of racial discrimination in Alaska to understand why the U.S. released a commemorative coin honoring Elizabeth Peratrovich.<\/p>\n
This year marks the 75th anniversary of Peratrovich’s speech to the territorial legislature that facilitated passage of Alaska’s Anti-Discrimination Act. It came too late for Unangax who perished at Funter Bay. But in the spirit of equal rights, and out of respect for their children and grandchildren, it’s time to properly protect the grounds where their souls were put to rest.<\/p>\n
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.<\/em> <\/ins><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We study history to avoid the mistakes of the past. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":58450,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[185,697],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-58449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-opinion","tag-alaska-natives","tag-graveyard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58449"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=58449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}