Who is Erased from the Narrative?
Homeschool alumni are an underrepresented community
It was August—sunny, hot, and dry. The grass crunched under my feet as I trudged to the edge of my grandfather’s cow pasture with an armful of journals. The journals contained a decade of my inner turmoil and they terrified me.
“Plesles God”— my 8-year-old self struggled to spell the word please—“help me be kind to my brothers.” High school Abbi echoed those sentiments on some days, but most of those pages were filled with a fierce rage I dared not express aloud.
My family was moving away from my hometown and I wanted to put that part of my life behind me. Perhaps destroying the journals would let me escape the intrusive memories that returned when I flipped through the pages. After a year of a college work-study job in an archives, I knew the significance of destroying documentary evidence. But I could not imagine a world where I could continue holding the weight of these memories. It was a matter of survival. I chose to erase myself from the narrative.
In the North Country, many of us didn’t recycle paper waste; we burned it in defiance of recycling regulations. On the edge of the cow pasture, we had a large metal drum for “burnables.” I dumped the journals into the burn barrel and fled. I didn’t stay to watch them burn—I had already locked that part of my memory away.
History is the story that we tell about the past. As an archivist, my job is to collect, preserve, and provide access to pieces of documentation of our world—letters, maps, photographs, video files—so that we can assemble the pieces into a coherent narrative of our past.
But what happens when that documentation doesn’t exist? What story is told when archives and museums and historical societies have nothing to say about people like you? Archives are often perceived as neutral but that is far from the truth. Over the millennia, archives and other repositories of knowledge have documented the stories of the powerful and propped up systems of oppression. Marginalized communities and vulnerable voices are silenced, erased, and ignored. They are symbolically annihilated.
Symbolic annihilation is the idea that, even though they do exist, without representation in the media, archives, history, etc., certain identities, topics, and experiences seem not to exist. Archivist Michelle Caswell pierces the veil of neutrality around archives when she asks: “What are the implications of not being able to find any (or very few) traces of the past left by people who look like you, share your cultural background, or speak the same native tongue?”1
I filmed this video with my long-time collaborators Krista and Max a few years ago. (You can see the progression of my pregnancy throughout the video!) We discuss the places where textual primary sources are lacking and how sometimes objects are uniquely suited to both identify and fill these silences.
When people think of the term “undocumented,” they think of immigrants, not homeschooled children denied birth certificates and social security numbers by their conspiracy-driven parents. Those homeschoolers exist—I know some of them—but they are an invisible minority. Without access to records that prove their existence, these children are symbolically annihilated. They are erased from the narrative.
Tradwives, proponents of Project 2025, and homeschooling leaders dangle promises of power, but the utopia they imagine is an illusion. The illusion only holds if we erase the experiences of my generation—the Joshua generation that was supposed to take over the world for Christ. What I and many other children raised in religious homeschooling communities offer is an inconvenient truth: our parents’ generation already tried to build this utopia and they lost their children in the process.
As an archivist and a homeschool alumna, I’m committed to documenting the voices of underrepresented communities, particularly those of homeschool alumni. Assembling my own personal archive—albeit a small one—is my contribution to the symbolic annihilation of children raised in extremist religious communities. While some voices are starting to come forth—
’s Rift and Amazon’s Shiny Happy People come to mind—many are unaware of the exploitative practices and intense indoctrination that children experience in these contexts.The primary sources that provide a framework for my writing are my modest contribution to exposing what is too often hidden.
I come with receipts.
Michelle Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation.” The Public Historian (2014) 36 (4): 26–37, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.26.