Every story has more than one narrative. While an event is a story of victory for someone or some people, it is a story of defeat for someone else. However, all narratives have one thing in common; they are often forgotten. Solnit argues in her book, Hope in the Dark, that our society suffers from a collective amnesia, which has led us to forget how far we have come in terms of social changes. She believes if society forgets the countless stories of positive social change and if people cannot see how much things have changed in the past, they will not be able to imagine what can be done for our future. She writes, “amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view”.
To overcome this social amnesia, history must be retold and relearned. However, learning one version of the story is not adequate since sometimes essential narratives get lost in stories of triumph. Particularly, Solnit explains her fascination with the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, which is celebrated as a victory by many Americans:
“Indigenous people throughout the Western Hemisphere used the occasion…to assert their own history of the Americas, as a place that was not discovered but invaded. Invaded but not quite conquered…[they asserted] that they are still here, that they remember, and that history is not over.”
Indigenous history and their issues began to enter more discussions progressively as opposed to the previous dominant view that Native Americans had all been wiped out. Although asserting their version of history has helped gradually retrieve their rightful land and power, they are still fighting against injustice by disseminating their story.