Editor’s Note: The Great Lakes Social Studies Journal, a Midwestern journal for middle and high school social studies educators, published the following article on Wisconsin Armenians and genocide education in “Powerful Teaching and Learning of Social Studies,” Volume 4, Issue 2, Fall 2024. The article is based on a presentation given at the 2024 Wisconsin Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference held from March 15 to 17.
BY GEORGE DALBO, TALENE KELEGIAN, ARMEN HADJINIAN, and JOHN C. SAVAGIAN
Wisconsin, like most of the United States, has a rich history of immigration. While middle and secondary social studies students generally learn about the push and pull factors that drove (and continue to drive) people to settle in the state, frequently, the particular experiences of individual groups remain largely unknown outside of those communities. Such is the case for Wisconsin Armenians. The Armenians who settled in the state in the late 1800s and early 1900s fled discrimination, massacres, and, ultimately, genocide. Individual and collective memories of these experiences, as well as cultural traditions and religious practices, were passed down within the community to children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of survivors. Like other groups that have experienced mass violence, genocide, or another type of atrocity, intergenerational trauma has also become part of Armenian-American identity. Every Armenian family, observes Author 2, has a “genocide story.” These “stories” or testimonies can be impactful sources for social studies students. However, bringing these stories to classrooms often falls on community members who must wrestle with what it means to make their individual and collective experiences of trauma pedagogical, especially for non-Armenian teachers and students.
Recently, a group of Wisconsin Armenian-Americans, after efforts to expand genocide education in the state following the passage of Act 30, Wisconsin’s Holocaust and genocide education mandate, have been examining what it means to share individual and collective experiences of genocide and trauma in classrooms. This article explores the history of Wisconsin’s Armenian-American community and the teaching and learning of difficult heritage narratives in social studies classrooms. Author 2 shares one family’s “genocide story,” providing the testimonies of three relatives who survived, and reflects on her own experience of learning about the genocide as a child. Author 3, a survivordescendant and community educator, reflects on the importance and difficulty of sharing personal and collective heritage stories in public school classrooms. In sharing these stories, the authors hope to make the Armenian Genocide more visible in social studies literature and to contribute to the existing body of work on teaching and learning about genocide, heritage narratives, and local histories, as well as educator emotions, especially among community educators or guest speakers. The article concludes with a list of resources for teaching and learning about the Armenian Genocide and the history of Wisconsin’s Armenian-American community.
Despite a 2021 Holocaust and genocide education mandate and being home to the second-oldest Armenian-American community in the United States, the Armenian Genocide (1915-1923) is not frequently taught in Wisconsin middle and secondary social studies classrooms (*Author Citation). While there have been recent community-led efforts to expand teaching and learning about the history of the Armenian Genocide and Wisconsin’s Armenian diaspora, these narratives remain largely the stuff of heritage rather than history. Heritage, according to Levy (2017), is:
[T]he passing down of stories, mementos, legends, pictures, and other pieces of the past in order to both preserve memories of the past and to shape the way those pieces are interpreted by people in the present and future […] Heritage is one mechanism by which a group of people can generate feelings of pride, connection, and belonging around a shared past, no matter how painful or violent that past may have been. (p. 159) Heritage narratives are often layered and punctuated with individuals’ stories and experiences. They are primarily constructed and shared in families and communities. In contrast, middle and secondary history curricula present simplified and distilled historical narratives, which privilege some histories over others, underrepresent minoritized groups, and gloss over individual stories. For example, in one popular high school world history textbook, the Armenian people are mentioned only once in a six-sentence-long callout box, and rather than genocide, the events of 1915 are referred to as the “Armenian Massacre” (Beck et al., 2009, p. 844). Recognizing their importance, some teachers expand their social studies curricula by including heritage narratives, often through guest speakers and field trips to local sites (Flajole, 2007).
Teaching and learning about genocide has long been understood as “difficult knowledge” (Britzman, 1998) or “difficult history” (Levy & Sheppard, 2018). However, temporal and spatial distance from the events of the genocide have lessened the emotional impact of teaching and learning about the Armenian case for many non-Armenian teachers and students in contemporary social studies classrooms in Wisconsin. Heritage narratives can help to bridge space and time, connecting students to the events of the past, such as the Armenian genocide and Armenian immigrants in Wisconsin; drawing connections to the present, such as the conflict and recent genocide of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh; and emotionally engaging and impacting students. Britzman (1998) wrote that teaching “the experiences and the traumatic residuals of genocide, ethnic hatred, aggression, and statesanctioned social violence requires educators to think carefully about their theories of learning and how the stuff of such difficult encounters becomes pedagogical” (p. 117). Sharing difficult knowledge evokes strong emotional responses in community educators serving as guest speakers in middle and high school classrooms, both as they recall deeply personal heritage narratives and wrestle with how to engage students around such narratives.
A map showing the Armenian population in the Ottoman and Russian Empires prior to World War I
The Armenian-American community of Milwaukee and southeast Wisconsin is part of one the largest diasporas in the world. The first significant settlement was around Armenians fled political repression and atrocities at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government.
Each violent pogrom against Armenians saw a spike in refugees. During the Hamidian Massacres from 1894 and through 1896, in which over 200,000 Armenians were killed, tens of thousands fled to Russia, and many more thousands to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. By the mid-1890s, 2,500 Armenians arrived in the United States each year. Close to eighty-five percent of these immigrants were young men. Many of these men left families behind, intending to reunite with them after earning sufficient wages. However, most would never go home again due to events about to take place, resulting in the loss of their homeland and families (Mirak, 1983). In Southeast Wisconsin, most Armenian refugees settled in South Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Caledonia due to employment opportunities in the area’s varied industries. One of the first Armenian aid associations established in the United States was the Charitable and Educational Society of Tomarza, which began in 1909 in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The town of Tomarza and its five surrounding villages is in present-day central Turkey. Their inhabitants comprised a sizable majority of the Armenian emigrants who came to South Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha, Wisconsin in the first quarter of the 20th century (Bartootian, 2006).
Traumatic events in Turkey kept Armenian-Americans focused less on community building and more on raising money to assist those continuing to live in their homeland. When World War I broke out, the Ittihad Party (Young Turks), under the triumvirate leadership of three Pashas, Enver, Talat, and Jamal, took advantage of European preoccupation and orchestrated a final solution to what they called “the Armenian question.” Beginning in April of 1915, the government rounded up Armenian intellectuals and executed them, isolated and systematically killed Armenian men in the Turkish army, and drove out of Turkey the remaining population of women, children, and elderly from their villages (Dadrian, 1995). American Consul Leslie Davis, in his June 1915 report to American Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, provided a chilling account of the Turkish technique for annihilation:
Another method was found to destroy the Armenian race. This is no less than the deportation of the entire Armenian population, not only from this Vilayet, but I understand, from all the Vilayets comprising Armenia […]. The full meaning of such an order can scarcely be imagined by those who are not familiar with the peculiar conditions of this isolated region. A massacre, however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in comparison with it. In a massacre, many escape, but a wholesale deportation of this kind in this country means a longer and perhaps even more dreadful death for nearly everyone. I do not believe it possible for one in a hundred to survive, perhaps not one in a thousand. (Morgenthau, 1918)
Hundreds of thousands were killed outright, and many more died of starvation. Ambassador Morgenthau protested the mass killings in a meeting with Talat Pasha, but his complaint was brushed aside. Anywhere from 1.5 to 2 million Armenians were killed in what is recognized by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century (Dadrian, 1995).
Just as during the 1896 massacres, when U.S. organizations such as Clara Barton’s Red Cross raised money and established missions throughout eastern Turkey, American relief organizations responded to the cataclysmic events of 1915. (Balakian, 2003) This time, American Armenians responded as well, with cash and men for the eastern front. Some Armenians from Southeastern Wisconsin joined the American forces to fight in Europe, while others joined French or Russian brigades to fight the Ottoman Empire (Sahakian & Gengozian, 1990). Over thirty transplanted Tomarzans living in Southeastern Wisconsin fought as volunteers in the Russian Army, many arriving in the Russian city of Rostov in 1915 after traveling aboard the Lusitania (Barootian, 2006). A more sizable group of Armenians along the South Milwaukee to Kenosha corridor fought under the French f lag as members of the Legion d’Orient.
At the war’s end, the surviving veterans from Milwaukee and Racine counties brought back victorious stories. Together with the other Armenian immigrant men now residing in WI, they began forming new families, often through arranged marriages with women survivors of the genocide. The resulting 1920s baby boom created a vibrant community. The Armenians now began to resemble other ethnic enclaves that made up the industrial belt stretching from Milwaukee to Chicago; stalwart defenders of their ancestry were clannish and dedicated to protecting their families and restoring their homeland.
One of Racine’s most famous Armenian community members is David Kherdian. An author and poet is well known for writing about the Armenian-American experience and the Armenian Genocide. One of his most famous books is The Road From Home: A True Story of Courage, Survival, and Hope, based on the testimony of his mother, Veron Dumehjian, an Armenian Genocide Survivor. His book has won several awards, including a Newbery Honor in 1980.
For many Armenian immigrants, the church was their “diasporan home.” The church has its origins from the earliest formations of Christianity, with Armenia adopting Christianity in 301 C.E. Throughout the millennia, the church was the center of Armenia’s existence, and while Armenia kingdoms came and went as territories were conquered by various superpowers of the time, the church contributed significantly in keeping the Armenian people together. As Armenians began to settle and thrive in Wisconsin, they consecrated churches to continue to worship and gather culturally: Holy Resurrection in South Milwaukee (1924), St. Mesrob in Racine (1926), St. Hagop in Racine (1938), and St. John the Baptist in Milwaukee (1942).
Armenian people continue the fight for sovereignty and self-determination as a counter to genocidal actions. Recent events affirm their warning that what happened in the past has happened again in Nagorno-Karabakh. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1988 and the establishment of the Republic of Armenia, the Armenian lands of Nagorno-Karabakh, situated inside the Soviet borders of Azerbaijan, declared their independence from Azerbaijan. This declaration led to the first Nagorno-Karabakh war that concluded in 1994 with an Armenian victory and the establishment of the Republic of Artsakh. Despite a ceasefire after a second war in 2020, Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, invaded Artsakh in September 2023, this time forcing nearly all Armenians to flee their ancestral homeland in an act of genocide.
Armenian Genocide survivors in 1919. (Library of Congress)
A Lesson Begins with a Story: One Family’s Story
BY AUTHOR 2
“History is the enemy of memory,” wrote American scholar Richard White. It was a lesson he learned as he constructed the history of his mother’s journey from Ireland to The United States (White, 1998). The stories she told did not mesh with the historical record. Lessons learned were not meant to be shared. Hurtful things were to be said only between family members. The more he tried to align history with her memory, the more angry his mother became. He was not there, after all. Who was he to say, “It did not happen that way!”
Such is the challenge for all storytellers. It is especially difficult when recounting traumatic and contested events. How far down the historical path do you go? How much context do you provide? When do you correct a story? When do you leave it be? These are the unspoken questions that stalk my family’s stories. For educators who need or want to teach about genocide, personal stories help create empathy and prepare the ground for the lessons of history. As difficult as it may be, we cannot rely on memory alone to tell the story of genocide.
Every family, whether Armenians or any people from a culture that has been through a genocide, has their “genocide story.” It is a way to relate to our families and each other and is often wrapped up with our immigration story. Trading genocide stories can result in finding long-lost family members or information about family members who we thought were lost forever. A genocide story is fundamental to an individual and is one of the first ways we learn about our family.
Teaching children about genocide can be intimidating, so I start with digestible and relatively kid-friendly stories. Here are three stories from my family, told in the way I interpreted them as a small child:
My grandpa grew up in an orphanage because his dad had died and his mom was somewhere else. He was with other little Armenian children until he grew up and became a tailor.
One of my great-grandmothers had to escape from soldiers, so she was a stow-away on a train. She took the train from one side of Russia to the other side, then took a boat to the United States. [I always liked this story and thought it was very adventurous.]
My great-grandparents did not meet each other until they moved to the United States. They were both born in “the old country.” They had to move here because of the Genocide; when they got here, they married each other, started our family, and lived happily ever after. Here are the more accurate versions of these stories, together through family oral history and legal documents from the United States and France.
My grandpa did not grow up in an orphanage. He was born in Turkey, the Ottoman Empire at the time. His father was killed when the genocide began. Then, his mother tried to escape with her five children. They were stopped by a soldier who promised safe passage in return for one of the girls. They traded one daughter to ensure the safety of the rest of the family. The mother and four remaining children fled to Greece or Cyprus, then to France, where the two youngest children (my grandfather and his sister) were left to fend for themselves in a refugee camp because the rest of the family members were able to get sponsorship to go to America. I have Grandpa’s work papers, which state that he was a child laborer in a textile factory. Eight years later, he finally got word from his family in America that he could join them.
The family never sent for the other sister, who was left at the refugee camp. She lived in France without her family for the rest of her life. My grandpa’s travel papers did not have his real name on them. In order to come to America, he had to use the name and birthplace of his brother-in-law. His actual birthdate and birthplace are nowhere to be found in official documents. That part of him was erased. Although his family eventually brought him to the US, and he had a great relationship with his wife’s family, he never got over the abandonment in the refugee camp. On his deathbed, his repeated words were, “I have no one.”
Prior to my great-grandmother’s adventurous train ride in Russia, she was forced on a desert march with her two young children, both of whom died, along with many other people in her town. She escaped with a group of women and children from her village. One child could not find his parents, and my great-grandmother held his hand and said, “It’s ok. You’ll be my little boy.” The train ride was not as adventurous as six-year-old me pictured it. The train was not a passenger train but a group of boxcars. It was rough going and long. They ended up in Vladivostok, Russia, where they were able to get papers to emigrate to the United States.
My great-grandparents went through a lot before meeting each other and living happily ever after with their new family in the United States. Greatgrandpa lost his wife and two sons on one of the desert marches from the middle of modern-day Turkey to Syria. Great-grandma and her brother were forced on a desert march with the brother’s children. Great-grandma cared for the children and carried them; they were so young. After weeks or months of almost no food or water, she was too weak to carry them and had to put them down. They stayed down. She lamented that for the rest of her life. To her dying day, she would say, “They just wanted some water.” Her sister was taken by an Ottoman family, who “marked” her with a tattoo- as their property. Rumor had it that she was raped, became pregnant, and had to give up the child. Once Great-grandma and her brother got to safety and got travel papers, they went back for their little sister. All three siblings (soldiers had killed their fourth sibling) were able to travel to the United States and settled in Wisconsin.
When family members arrived in the United States, many settled in Wisconsin and were very active in the general and Armenian-American communities. They all love the Green Bay Packers, but instead of eating burgers and brats while watching the game, they ate traditional Armenian food prepared by my great-grandma.
Just because my family and other Armenians left the geographical area and arrived safely in the United States does not mean that their lives were happy. The sadness did not end. They knew they could never go home. Their homes and communities had been burnt down. They had no idea where most of their friends or even their family members ended up or if their friends and family were dead or alive. They had to mourn the loss of their homes and family while trying to create a new life in a new country in a new language. They knew their children born in the United States would never be able to go back to visit their homes and villages in the old country. A lot of their identity had been erased. As an Armenian-American, I keep their stories for the next generation. I do not, in any way, enjoy telling them. I greatly respect all teachers who provide opportunities for students to learn about genocide. Through this type of education, we all develop a deeper understanding of what people of different cultures have gone through. This understanding will lead them to be kind and empathetic when meeting immigrants and children of immigrants. This understanding will lead them to be vocal and spread awareness when they see injustice at any level.
Reflections on Sharing Difficult Stories in the Classroom
BY AUTHOR 3
In early 2024, Author 2 and I, both of us survivordescendants of the Armenian Genocide, were asked to speak to social studies teachers and teenage students about our families’ experiences. This was my first time sharing my family’s story and the collective story of the Wisconsin Armenians with teachers and students. It is not an understatement to say that this was one of the hardest discussions I have ever had.
How do you explain what happened to the people who survived the genocide? How do you explain war and violence from the civilian or child’s point of view? How do you explain something that we were never told about? We grew up without the movies. The books about the genocide were hidden from us due to their graphic nature. However, these books were purchased and tucked away, maybe for future generations. We grew up just assuming that Grampa never had a brother. We walked into the presentations for the teachers and students with facts, but we walked out with questions. For example, what does it mean to say, “They survived the Genocide?” How do we impress upon students the enormity and violence of the genocide and its impact on the community in an age where violence is celebrated and encouraged in their algorithmic consumption of media? Did teachers and students come away from our talk thinking genocide is something in the past and will never, ever happen again?
Growing up, gramma and grampa seemed ok to us most of the time. However, as we got older, we started to find fragments of a blood-soaked puzzle of trauma our grandparents experienced and, to some extent, we inherited. Gramma and grampa were not okay, and 100 years later, two secondgeneration American Armenians are trying to tell these comfortable, happy students that our families did everything they could to get out of that cauldron. Do we share the horrific details that we discovered from deathbed confessions? In the eyes of the teachers and students, we could see disbelief and the same victim blaming that was prevalent among our ancestors. “It could not have been that bad.” How do you relate something so personal yet historical and impress upon students that it still happens? We were just one genocide in history, and we can stand in front of a classroom and try to represent all those victims across the planet, yet there is a part that seems missing. Can modern American students relate to these stories of Genocide?
Author 2 had a novel approach based on her shifting understanding of the genocide as she grew older. It was age accessible and not too scary. Kind of like the Titanic sinking’ her story was tragic yet stirring and romantic. However, how can you tell a story to a Wisconsin student, whose biggest worry may be losing their Internet connection? Ironically, a springtime snowstorm appeared during one of our lectures, and the worry among teachers and students shifted to getting home after school. How can we tell them that our grandparents had no home to go to and that some of them witnessed the killings of their parents? How can I tell them that in our local Armenian cemetery, there are no women survivors who were born earlier than 1905? That those born earlier were either sold into harems or raped and killed?
However, the most frustrating part of talking with teachers and students was trying to explain that this type of government-sponsored mass violence against an unarmed, non-hostile population is happening right now in our sophisticated world. It is happening to Armenians and many other groups. Do we sugarcoat it? We are not Social Studies teachers, yet we see the list of genocides growing as we near the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, and we must collectively do whatever we can to stop this. We must share our individual and collective stories with new generations.
Our takeaway from this experience, as community educators or guest speakers, is that teaching social studies is more than teaching the events and facts of what happened more than 100 years ago. In a world where attention spans are short, many Wisconsin teachers and students may see violence simply flashes on a screen. However, we must try to teach for never again. I don’t mean to be flippant, yet the media has made most landlocked Midwesterners afraid of sharks. When will the media make us afraid of totalitarian regimes, discrimination, mass violence, and genocide? Perhaps more and better genocide education can inspire change.
Events like the Armenian Genocide, which is already underrepresented and undertaught in Wisconsin’s middle and high school social studies classrooms, can be brought to light and life by engaging local histories of survivors and survivordescendants who made Wisconsin their home. Social studies teachers have long known the power of bringing local heritage histories into classrooms through guest speakers. However, little research has examined how guest speakers navigate and narrativize individual and collective experiences of trauma. The authors hope that this article serves as a starting place to open up further discussion, research, and, especially, teaching and learning about the Armenian Genocide and other difficult heritage histories in social studies classrooms. What follows are lesson ideas and selected resources for educators and students related to Wisconsin’s Armenian-American community and the Armenian Genocide.
The authors would like to thank Dr. Nick Akgulian, Sara Cohan, and Fr. Yeprem Kelegian for their contributions to this article.
Works Cited:
Yorumlar kapatıldı.