story that they don't know with their audiences. The trail from 1997 to 2015 and from Washington, DC to Norman, Oklahoma is a rugged one, with very uneven footing.

The contexts of history and art history are large ones. I noticed while watching Sundby's youtube-recorded speech that, in the background, behind him, there stood a life-sized bronze statue of a Native American. From my viewing angle it appeared generic: a non-specific American Indian. But then I thought--this is Oklahoma, after all--that the sculpture may well have been of a Cherokee. And I thought: how ironic! In 1838 in what is known as the Trail of Tears, tens of thousands of Cherokee, native to Georgia and surrounding areas were force-marched all the way to Oklahoma. The reason: white Euro-American settlerswanted access to the rich farmland and forests that the Cherokee had inhabited for generations. The outcome: a small-scale genocide. Thousands of Cherokee perished along the way to Oklahoma, where those who survived the journey were forced to take up residence in an area reserved for them--a reservation--that offered nothing like the land from which they and come, nothing that would be conducive to living lives anything like those they lived back east.

North America, then, and the United States in particular, has a lamentable history with regard to the treatment of Native Americans by whites and by the white federal government. So--and this is third part of my interwoven Memorial Day rumination--there on youtube is a functional symbol of that horrific past, a past which the United States