Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (19 page)

The trouble is, it wasn't like that. The problem was not Native failure to acculturate. In reality, many European Americans did not really want Indians to acculturate. It wasn't in their interest. At times this was obvious, as when the Massachusetts legislature in 1789 passed a law prohibiting teaching Native Americans how to read and write “under penalty of death.”11“ The United States claimed to be willing to teach the Indians to farm, but Indians in Ohio already were farmers! American History fails to mention that the Cherokees were visiting Jefferson precisely to ask the president to assign their lands to them in severally [as individual farms] and to make them citizens. ]efferson put them off. John Peterson has pointed out that a visitor catching sight of a Mississippi farm in 1820 would have had no way of knowing whether it was European or Choctaw until the farmers themselves came into view,109 The Choctaws didn't need to ”settle down.“ The American Way asks students, ”Why were the Indians moved further west?“ Its teachers' edition provides the answer: ”They were moved so the settlers could use the land for growing crops." We might add this catechism: What were the Indians doing on the land? They were growing crops! When Jefferson spoke to the Cherokees, whites had been burning Native houses and cornfields for 186 years, beginning in Virginia in 1622.

No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not succeed in white society. Whites would not let them. “Indians were always regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to live within white society except on its periphery.”110 Native Americans who amassed property, owned Europeanstyle homes, perhaps operated sawmills, merely became the first targets of white thugs who coveted their land and improvements. In time of war the position of assimilated Indians grew particularly desperate. Consider Pennsylvania. During the French and Indian War the Susquehannas, living peaceably in white towns; were hatcheted by their neighbors, who then collected bounties from authorise who weren't careful whose scalp they were paying for, so long as it was IndianJ Through the centuries and across the country, this pattern recurred. In 1860, fbtl When they stress Natives' alleged unwillingness to acculturate, American histories slip into the story line of the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “Come Over and Help Us” is white settler propaganda, which grew into an archetype of wellmeaning Europeans and tragically different Indians.

instance, California ranchers killed 185 of the 800 Wiyots, a tribe allied with ihe whites, because they were angered by other tribes' cattle raids."'

Occasionally textbooks acknowledge that most Native Americans were settled, but they do not let these settled Indians interfere with the traditional story line. Early on, American History admits that the Ohio Indians were farmers: “Unlike the tribes who lived by hunting, many of these Indians had taken up farming. For ihem, moving would mean more than having to find another hunting ground.” But forty pages later, when trying to rationalize the Indians' removal: “They tried to get Indians to settle down on farms and become 'good Americans.'” If the author of American History cannot remember from one chapter to the next that the Indians didn't need to settle down, we can hardly expect his readers to. The story line is too powerful an archetype. Most of the textbooks I studied describe the acculturation achieved by the Indians of the Southeast, the A Census taken among trie Cherokee in Georgia in 1825 (reported in Vogel, ed.. This Country Was Ours, 289) showed that they owned “33 grist mills, 13 saw mills. I powder mill, 69 blacksmith shops, 2 tan yards, 762 looms, 2,486 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 2,923 plows, 7,683 horses, 22,531 black cattle, 46,732 swine, and 2,566 sheep.” Some Cherokees were wealthy planters, including Joseph Vann, who in 1835 cultivated 300 acres, operated a ferry, steamboat, mill, and tavern, and owned this mansion. It aroused the envy of the sheriff and other whites in Murray County, wtio evicted Vann in 1834 and appropriated the house for themselves, according to Lela Latch Lloyd.

“Five Civilized Tribes,” and point out that the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations were exiled to Oklahoma anyway. Nonetheless, . our culture and our textbooks still stereotype Native Americans as roaming primitive hunting folk, unfortunate victims of progress. Ironically, to Native eyes, Europeans were nomads. As Chief Seattle put it in 1855, “To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is , hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seem-. ingly without regret.” In contrast, Indian “roaming” consisted mainly of moving from summer homes to winter homes and back again.

One way to understand why acculturation couldn't work for most Natives is to imagine that the United States allowed lawless discrimination against all people whose last name starts with the letter L. How long would we last? The first non-L people who wanted our homes or jobs could force us out, arid we would be without resources. People around us would then blame us L people for being vagrants. That is what happened to Native Americans, In Massachusetts, colonists were constantly tempted to pick quarrels with Indian families because the result was likely to be acquiring their land. In Oregon, 240 years later,

the process continued. Ten thousand whites had moved onto the Nez Perce reservation by 1862, so a senator from Oregon suggested that the United States should remove the nation. Sen. William Fessenden of Maine pointed out the problem.“There is no difficulty, I take it, in Oregon in keeping men off the lands that are owned by white men. But when the possessor happens to be an Indian, the question is changed altogether.”114 Without legal rights, acculturation cannot succeed. Inmuttooyahlatlat, known to whites as ChiefJoseph, said this eloquently: "We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. If an Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law If a white man breaks the law, punish him also. Let me be a free manfree to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to talk and think and act for myself.“”5 It was not to be. Most courts simply refused to heat testimony from Native Americans against whites. After noting how non-Indians could rise through the ranks of Native societies, Peier Farb summed up the possibilities in white society; “At almost no time in the history of the United States, though, were the Indians afforded similar opportunities for voluntary assimilation.”'' The acculturated Indian simply stood out as a target.

Theauthorsofhistorytextbooksoccasionallyannouncetheirintentionsin writing. In the teachers' edition of The American Way, for instance, Nancy Bauer states: “It is (he goal of this book that its readers will understand America, be proud of its strengths, be pleased in its determination to improve, arid welcome the opportunity to join as active citizens in The American Wsy” That the author could noi possibly pay reasonable attention to Indian history follows logically.

It is understandable that textbook authors might write history in such a way that studc'ins can feel good about themselves by feeling good about the p.ist. Feeling good is a human need, but it imposes a burden that history cannot bear without becoming simple-minded. Casting Indian history as a tragedy because Native Americans could not or would not acculturate is feel-good history for whites. By downplaying Indian wars, textbooks help us forget that we wrested the comment from Native Americans. Today's college students, when asked to compile a list of U.S. wars, never think to include Indian wars, individually or as a whole. The Indian-white wars that dominated our history from 1622 to 1815 and were of considerable importance until 1890 have disappeared from our national memory, The answer to minimizing the Indian wars is not maximizing them.

Telling Indian history as a parade of white villains might be feel-good history for those who want to wallow in the inference that America or whites are bad. What happened is more complex than that, however, so the history we tell must be more complex. Textbooks are beginning to reveal some of the division among whites that lent considerable vitality to the alternatives to war. Seven of the textbooks tell of Roger Williams of Salem, who in the 1630s challenged Massachusetts to renounce its royal patent to the land, asserting, “The natives are the true owners of it,” unless they sold it. (The Puritans renounced Williams, and he fled to Rhode Island.)"7 Five textbooks mention Helen Hunt Jackson,

who in 1881 paid to provide copies of her famous indictment of our Native American policies, A Century ofDishonor, to every member of Congress,11 Eight of the textbooks tell how Andrew Jackson and John Marshall waged a titanic struggle over Georgia's attempt to subjugate the Cherokees. Chief Justice Matshall found for the Cherokees, whereupon President Jackson ignored the court, reputedly with the words, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” But no textbook brings any suspense to the issue as one of the dominant questions throughout our first century as a nation. None tells how several Christian denominationsQuakers, Shakers, Moravians, some Presbyterians and a faction of the Whig Party mobilized public opinion on behalf of fair play for the Native Americans. By ignoring the Whigs, textbooks make the Cherokee removal seem inevitable, another example of unacculturated aborigines helpless in the way of progress. Native Americans would have textbooks note that, despite all the wars,

the plagues, the pressures against their cultures, Indians still survive, physically and culturally, and still have govemment-to-government relations with the United States. As recently as 1984, a survey of American history textbooks complained that “contemporary issues important to Native peoples were entirely j excluded.”130 The books I examined were somewhat better. The American Indian Movement spurred three major Indian takeovers in the early 1970s:

Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., and Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Nine of the twelve textbooks mention at least one of these incidents; The American Tradition and Triumph offal American Nation competently explain the causes and results of all three. Seven of the twelve texrt facing Native fi and Triumph of. American History Anti-lndi cally, the very t successfully, all Poverty and di: get good jobs, have, and comi to maintain th Only one text cans: can disti this issue in : through the %

raise this issu< Indian interpr sition to civili call the ethni books show their way of way of life; unchanged a immigration. autonomy w ship into “pi ”remain Ind jacket. We r ; We j< Constitutioi ditional wa land are se transportati “Indian” in Impt sides of 01 have shape . societ the twelve textbooks make a reasonable attempt to cover the principal issues facing Native Americans in the twentieth century. Discovering American History and Triumph of the American Nation do a good job. Life and Liberty and Discovering American History offer maps showing Native American lands today.

Anti-Indian racism has eased considerably in the twentieth century. Ironically, the very fact that the United States is beginning to let Natives acculturate successfully, albeit on Anglo terms, poses a new threat to Native coexistence. Poverty and discrimination helped isolate Indians, If Native Americans can now get good jobs, as some can, buy new vehicles and satellite televisions, as some have, and commute to the city for part of their life, as some do, it is much harder to maintain the intangible values that make up the core of Indian cultures. Only one textbook raises perhaps the key question now facing Native Americans: can distinctively Indian cultures survive? DiscoveringAmerican History treats this issue in an exemplary way, inviting students to experience the dilemma through the words of Native American teenagers. The other textbooks cannot raise this issue because they remain locked into non-Indian sources and a nonIndian interpretive framework. Textbooks still define Native Americans in opposition to civilization and still conceive of Indian cultures in what anthropologists call the ethnographic presentfrozen at the time of white contact. When textbooks show sympathy for “the tragic struggle of American Indians to maintain their way of life,” they exemplify this myopia. Native Americans never had “a” way of life; they had many, Indians would not have maintained those ways unchanged over the last five hundred years, even without European and African immigration. Indians have long struggled to change their ways of life. That autonomy we took from them. Even today we divide Native American leadership into “progressives” who want to acculturate and “traditionals” who want to “remain Indian.” Textbook authors do not put other Americans into this straitjacket. We non-Indians choose what we want from the past or from other cultures. We jettisoned our medical practices of the 1780s while retaining the Constitution, But Native American medical practitioners who abandon their traditional ways to embrace pasteurization from France and antibiotics from England are seen as compromising their Indianness. We can alter our modes of transportation or housing while remaining “American.” Indians cannot and stay “Indian” in our eyes.

Improved histories might increase the chances for syncretism on both sides of our ideological frontier. If we knew the extent to which Indian ideas lave shaped American culture, the United States might recognize Native American societies as cultural assets from which we could continue to learn. At prePerhaps Native Americans can break through the dilemma of acculturation and become modern and Indian. Certainly their artists have accomplished this. Only since the 1930s have Inuit artists in Canada been carving soapstone, a material that in the previous century their ancestors used for making pots. This sculpture, “Dancing to My Spirit,” by Nalenik Temela. is a beautiful example of syncretism.

sent, none of our textbooks hints at this possibility; even the more enlightened ones merely champion better treatment for Indians and stop short of suggesting that our society might still benefit from Indian ideas.