To understand the making of Anglo-America is impossible without close and sustained attention to its indigenous predecessors|My essay solution

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No word count, 4-6 sentences.

RED EYES

To understand the making of Anglo-America is impossible without close and sustained attention to its indigenous predecessors, allies, and nemeses.

—JAMES AXTELL1

The invaders also anticipated, correctly, that other Europeans would question the morality of their enterprise. They therefore [prepared] . . . quantities of propaganda to overpower their own countrymen’s scruples. The propaganda gradually took standard form as an ideology with conventional assumptions and semantics. We live with it still.

—FRANCIS JENNINGS2

Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE3

There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who does not cringe in anguish and frustration because of these textbooks. There is not one Indian child who has not come home in shame and tears.

—RUPERT COSTO4

Old myths never die—they just become embedded in the textbooks.

—THOMAS BAILEY5

ISTORICALLY, AMERICAN INDIANS have been the most lied-about subset of our population. That’s why Michael Dorris said that, in learning about Native Americans, “One does not start from point zero, but from minus ten.” High school6

students start below zero because of their textbooks, which unapologetically present Native Americans through white eyes. Today’s textbooks should do better, especially since what historians call Indian history (though really it is interracial) has flowered since the 1970s, and the information on which new textbooks might be based currently rests on library shelves.

Textbooks’ treatment of Native peoples has improved in recent years. In 1961 the bestselling Rise of the American Nation contained ten illustrations featuring Native people, alone or with whites (of 268 illustrations); most of these pictures focused on the themes of primitive life and savage warfare. Twenty-five years later, the retitled contained fifteenTriumph of the American Nation illustrations of American Indians; more important, no longer were Native Americans depicted as one-dimensional primitives. Rather, they were people who participated in struggles to preserve their identities and their land. Included were Metacomet (King Philip), Crispus Attucks (first casualty of the Revolution, who was also part black in ancestry), Sequoyah (who invented the Cherokee alphabet), and Navajo code-talkers in World War II. In 2003, the successor, , had forty-threeHolt American Nation illustrations of American Indians. Some other textbooks published after 2000 continue this trend of giving more attention to Native Americans. stands out for its honest coverage of some of the events this chapter will treat, and ,The Americans American Journey the middle-school textbook, is close behind.

Nevertheless, the authors of American history textbooks still “need a crash course in cultural relativism and ethnic sensitivity,” as James Axtell put it in 1987. Even , the best of these books, devotes its first two pages to a reproduction ofThe Americans Benjamin West’s 1771 painting, . Painted almost a century after the event, West followed the usualPenn’s Treaty with the Indians convention of depicting fully clothed Europeans—even with hats, scarves, and coats—presenting trade goods to nearly naked Americans. In reality, of course, no two groups of people have ever been dressed so differently at one spot on the earth’s surface on the same day. The artist didn’t really try to portray reality. He meant to show “primitive” (American Indian) and “civilized” (European).

Axtell also criticizes textbooks for still using such terms as , , and . Reserving milder termshalf-breed massacre war-whooping 7

such as and for whites is equally biased. If we cast off our American-ness and imagine we come from,frontier initiative settlers

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 8 . T h e N e w P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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say, Botswana, this typical sentence (from ) appears quite jarring: “In 1637 war broke out in ConnecticutThe American Journey between settlers and the Pequot people.” Surely the Pequots, having lived in villages in Connecticut probably for thousands of years, are “settlers.” The English were newcomers, having been there for at most three years; traders set up camp in Windsor in 1634. Replacing by makes for a more accurate but “unsettling” sentence. is more accurate still, and stillsettlers whites Invaders more unsettling.

A nearly naked American Indian shakes William Penn’s hand, sculpted in sandstone in the United States Capitol. Having been in Philadelphia in August, I can report that if this negotiation occurred then, Penn was near death through heat exhaustion. Having also been in Philadelphia after Thanksgiving, I can report that if this negotiation took place in winter, the Natives were suffering from frostbite.

Even worse are the authors’ overall interpretations, which continue to be shackled by the “conventional assumptions and semantics” that have “explained” Indian-white relations for centuries, according to Axtell. Textbook authors still write history to comfort descendants of the “settlers.”

Our journey into a more accurate history of American Indian peoples and their relations with European and African invaders cannot be a happy excursion. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. “What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America” is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin.” If we look Indian history squarely in the eye, we are going to get red eyes. This is our8

past, however, and we must acknowledge it. It is time for textbooks to send white children home, if not with red eyes, at least with thought-provoking questions.

Most of today’s textbooks at least try to be accurate about American Indian cultures. Thirteen of the eighteen textbooks I surveyed begin by devoting more than five pages to precontact Native societies. From the start, however, American Indian9

societies pose a problem for textbooks. Their authors are consumers, not practitioners, of archaeology, ethnobotany, linguistics,10

physical anthropology, folklore studies, cultural anthropology, ethnohistory, and other related disciplines. Scholars in these fields can tell us much, albeit tentatively, about what happened in the Americas before Europeans and Africans arrived. Unfortunately, the authors of history textbooks treat archaeology et al. as dead disciplines to be mined for answers. These fields study dead people, to be sure, but they are alive with controversy. Every year headlines appear about charcoal possibly forty thousand years old found in cooking fires in Brazil, new dates for an archaeological dig in Pennsylvania, or more speculative claims that some new human remain, artifact, or idea hails from China, Europe, or Africa. In 2007 came evidence that a comet may have exploded in the earth’s atmosphere thirteen thousand years ago, setting much of North America on fire. Possibly the resulting firestorm killed off the larger mammals, like horses and mastodons, and decimated the human population.11

“Possibly,” howe