may therefore call “white society,” through marriage. After her, most
interracial couples found greater acceptance in Native society. There their
children often became chiefs, because their bicultural background was an asset
in the complex world the tribes now had to navigate.^105 In Anglo society
“half-breeds” were not valued but stigmatized.
Another alternative to war was the creation of an American Indian state
within the United States. In 1778, when the Delaware Indians proposed that
Native Americans be admitted to the union as a separate state, Congress
refused even to consider the idea.^106 In the 1840s, Indian Territory sought the
right enjoyed by other territories to send representatives to Congress, but white
Southerners stopped them.^107 The Confederacy won the backing of most Native
Americans in Indian Territory, however, by promising to admit the territory as
a state if the South won the Civil War. After the war Native Americans
proposed the same arrangement to the United States. Again the United States
said no, but eventually admitted Indian Territory as the white-dominated state
of Oklahoma—ironically, the name means [land for] red people in Choctaw.
Our textbooks pay no attention to any of these possibilities. Instead, they
dwell on another road not taken: total one-way acculturation to white society.
The overall story line most American history textbooks tell about American
Indians is this: We tried to Europeanize them; they wouldn’t or couldn’t do it;
so we dispossessed them. While more sympathetic than the account in earlier
textbooks, this account falls into the trap of repeating as history the propaganda
used by policy makers in the nineteenth century as a rationale for removal—
that Native Americans stood in the way of progress. The only real difference is
the tone. Back when white Americans were doing the dispossessing,
justifications were shrill. They denounced Native cultures as primitive,
savage, and nomadic. Often writers invoked the hand or blessings of God, said
to favor those who “did more” with the land.^108 Now that the dispossessing is
done, our histories since 1980 can see more virtue in the conquered cultures.
But they still pictured American Indians as tragically different, unable or
unwilling to acculturate.