While in Arizona, waiting for our VW bus to get fixed, we met two young Native Americans who spoke about energy, their heritage, the importance of their language, their education from the elders and American history, as it’s taught. One of them spoke about African-American activist and comedian, Dick Gregory. He said Dick Gregory and others shined light on the fact that George Washington wasn’t technically America’s first president. He went on to say that Obama wasn’t even the first African-American president of the United States and that our educational system has been written and taught in a way that falsifies our true history. We thought it sounded like a stretch, but it made us wonder.

The two of us did a quick search online and we read some very interesting things. We read that the U.S. had systems of government as far back as 1774. George Washington didn’t get inaugurated until 1789 and technically was not our first president. Supposedly, before him, there were 14 elected presidents. We read that Washington was simply the first president under the Constitution we have now. The other elected heads of state were said to be part of the Continental Congress and Confederation Congress, which were in play before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

These are the presidents listed before George ever came into the picture:
Peyton Randolph of Williamsburg, Virginia was said to have been elected the first president of the United States. Henry Middleton of South Carolina was supposedly elected next. We read that John Hancock was elected the third chief executive officer and was, because of his role, the first to sign the Declaration of Independence.

The fourth elected president was said to be Henry Laurens, the fifth was John Jay, the sixth was Samuel Huntington, the seventh was Thomas McKean, the eighth was John Hanson, the ninth was Elias Boudinot, the tenth was Thomas Mifflin, the eleventh was Richard Henry Lee, the twelfth was Nathaniel Gorham, the thirteenth was Arthur St. Clair and the fourteenth was Cyrus Griffin from January 22, 1788 to April 30, 1789. George Washington then became the fifteenth president of the United States of America and the first president under the new Constitution.

It seems like many of the articles we read on this topic were speculating that some of these early leaders were African-American, which we found peculiar, based on the history we were taught. The native American fellow we spoke with in Arizona said that there was even a time when whites were enslaved for farming, building and servitude. We weren’t there, so we’ll never truly know what happened before we arrived.

When we lived in Beaufort, South Carolina, we worked with a local print company who was putting together the display for the Santa Elena History Museum. A discovery was made that revealed that Jamestown and Williamsburg, Virginia were not the first colonies established in the country. Based on the new findings, it is believed that Spain arrived earlier and touched land first on the shore of Port Royal Sound in Beaufort, SC. We can only imagine as time progresses, that we will all come to find that everything we’ve been told isn’t necessarily on point and that there is a lot missing from our history books that would change the way we look at our past.

In history class, we were never told about Tesla and when we google the word “Tesla”, it reveals mostly automobile pictures in the image results. The truth is that Tesla is not just a car, he was one of the most important men in history. He discovered how to power the entire world using free energy, he created wireless technology and yet, he and his works were not included in the history books growing up.

What we feel is that humans are being taught only a tiny sliver of our past, written by the winners, which keeps us focused on, supporting and believing in war, dominant religions, economy, politics and government. History and all the negativity humans breed, repeats itself because generations have been taught and continue to teach the same things over and over.

We can’t change history or how it was written, but we can change the future by changing what we believe in, what we support and how we live. We can make better choices of what we are consenting to and create new paths of understanding for our future.

Everyone will not agree on the same things but there are a few basic fundamentals (Food, Water, Shelter, Peace & Love) that everyone can agree on and by those things we can govern ourselves to create a mindful, compassionate future.