I was having a fairly innocuous conversation with an extremely conservative man about an elementary school teacher who teaches in a diverse classroom where the students speak several different languages. I realized early on in the conversation that what I consider to be a safe non-political topic is not necessarily all that safe to discuss with a social and political conservative.

Almost immediately, he turned the conversation to immigration and away from education with a decidedly pointed question: “Why are there so many immigrants and why can’t they speak English?”

I hate this line of thinking and came very close to rolling my eyes. Instead, I looked around at the parking lot we happened to be standing in and thought how ugly it looked compared to the more scenic places around and changed the subject for the purpose of making a point.

“Which tribe lived here before?”

Unbelievably, the ultra-conservative guy I was talking to didn’t see where I was heading with the not-so-subtle change of topic and answered my question with the name of the tribe. I was actually familiar with the name of the tribe because one of the counties in our state was derived from the name of the tribe, but knew little else about the tribe beyond the name.

“What language did they speak?”

Finally, he realized where I was heading with the conversation, and I think even he saw the parallel I was getting at. Here’s a bit of what of what I would have liked to tell him, but didn’t because it wouldn’t have changed his mind in the least:

We live in the Pacific Northwest and the white people you like so much have only lived here about 200 years. Yet, since we’ve been here, we have managed to nearly decimate the Native population, destroy several once-abundant species, and cut down the very trees that are needed for sustainability.

Oh, we also erased more than few tribes languages.

Contrast the record of my ancestors to the “new immigrants” who often work for beneath minimum wage, contribute to our economy by purchasing items and paying taxes, and enrich our way of life by introducing us to new food and new traditions.

When I think about the original discussion about the difficulty the teacher was having in the classroom, I know that the problem wasn’t with the immigrants in the classroom, but with an underfunded education system that didn’t give the teacher the extra support she needed in that diverse of a classroom.