lived about twenty-five million people. In the rest of North America lived
perhaps twenty million more. Furthermore, the image of the moccasined Indian
“padding” through the virgin forest won’t do; a majority of Native Americans
in what is now the United States farmed. Pageant originated more than half a
century ago and is now in its thirteenth printing. In 1956, it may have been
written by its “author,” Thomas Bailey. Who wrote the current edition is
anyone’s guess.
In the late 1990s, someone—certainly not Bailey, long deceased, and
probably not either of the other two listed authors—realized that the book
needed to mention the Columbian Exchange and the post-1492 epidemics that
decimated American Indians. As a result, a later page tells of these staggering
population declines, without acknowledging the contradiction between that
passage and this one. Thomas Bailey’s own book thus proves him right: “Old
myths never die—they just become embedded in the textbooks.” Boorstin and
Kelley are even less competent; they still omit the Columbian Exchange
entirely.
Even the best textbooks cannot resist contrasting “primitive” Americans
with modern Europeans. Part of the problem is that the books are really
comparing rural America to urban Europe—Massachusetts to London.
Comparing Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) to rural Scotland might produce a
very different impression, for when Cortés arrived, Tenochtitlan was a city of
one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand, whose central market was so
busy and noisy “that it could be heard more than four miles away,” according
to Bernal Díaz, who accompanied Cortés.^20 It would be even better if authors
could forsake the entire primitive-to-civilized continuum altogether. After all,
from the perspective of the average inhabitant, life may have been just as
“advanced” and far more pleasant in Massachusetts or Scotland as in Aztec
Mexico or London.
For a long time Native Americans have been rebuking textbook authors for
reserving the adjective civilized for European cultures. In 1927 an organization
of Native leaders called the Grand Council Fire of American Indians criticized
textbooks as “unjust to the life of our people.” They went on to ask, “What is
civilization? Its marks are a noble religion and philosophy, original arts,
stirring music, rich story and legend. We had these. Then we were not savages,
but a civilized race.”^21