American-ness and imagine we come from, say, Botswana, this typical
sentence (from The American Journey) appears quite jarring: “In 1637 war
broke out in Connecticut 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 settlers
by whites makes for a more accurate but “unsettling” sentence. Invaders is
more accurate still, and still more unsettling.
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.”^8 If we look Indian
history squarely in the eye, we are going to get red eyes. This is our 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.^9 From the start, however,
American Indian societies pose a problem for textbooks.^10 Their authors are
consumers, not practitioners, of archaeology, ethnobotany, linguistics, 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