Lies My Teacher Told Me

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE^3

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.

—RUPERTCOSTO^4

Old myths never die—they just

become embedded in the textbooks.

—THOMAS BAILEY^5

HISTORICALLY, 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.”^6 High school 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 Triumph of the American Nation contained
fifteen illustrations of American Indians; more important, no longer were
Native Americans depicted as one-dimensional primitives. Rather, they were