Lies My Teacher Told Me

guests. As a holiday greeting card puts it, “I is for the Indians we invited to share our food.” The silliness of all this reach ...

able to learn from and deal with people from other cultures. On occasion, we pay a more direct cost: censorship. In 1970, for ex ...

forth in the late fall to make their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed. In their first year the Pilgrims, like ...

4. RED EYES To understand the making of Anglo- America is impossible without close and sustained attention to its indigenous pre ...

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE^3 There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who does not cringe in anguish and frustration becau ...

people who participated in struggles to preserve their identities and their land. Included were Metacomet (King Philip), Crispus ...

A nearly naked American Indian shakes William Penn’s hand, sculpted in sandstone in the United States Capitol. Having been in Ph ...

American-ness and imagine we come from, say, Botswana, this typical sentence (from The American Journey) appears quite jarring: ...

earth’s atmosphere thirteen thousand years ago, setting much of North America on fire. Possibly the resulting firestorm killed o ...

wild game they could walk across the 56 miles from Siberia to Alaska. Without knowing it, they had discovered two large continen ...

determination of the direction and timing of their migration. Archaeological finds do not grow older as we move northwest throug ...

rich and prosperous.” Boorstin and Kelley cannot easily concede even that much. After devoting a page to the advanced civilizati ...

lived about twenty-five million people. In the rest of North America lived perhaps twenty million more. Furthermore, the image o ...

Even an appreciative treatment of Native cultures reinforces ethnocentrism so long as it does not challenge the primitive-to-civ ...

from Christianity. Most American history textbooks emphasize the changes in only one group, the Plains Indians. The rapid efflor ...

fight to annihilate.^25 Native Americans also became well known as linguists, often speaking two European languages (French, Eng ...

Like African slaves, Indian slaves escaped when they could. This notice comes from the Boston Weekly News-Letter for October 4, ...

imported there, in 1638, were brought from the West Indies in exchange for Native Americans from Connecticut.^33 On the eve of t ...

invading culture that told them their religion was wrong and Christianity was right. This process exemplifies what anthropologis ...

explain why sometimes Europeans traded and coexisted with Natives and other times merely attacked them. Nor do they tell how con ...