think to include Indian wars, individually or as a whole. The Indian-white
wars that dominated our history from 1622 to 1815 and were of considerable
importance until 1890 have mostly disappeared from our national memory.
The answer to minimizing the Indian wars is not maximizing them. Telling
Indian history as a parade of white villains might be feel-good history for those
who want to wallow in the inference that America or whites are bad. What
happened is more complex than that, however, so the history we tell must be
more complex. Textbooks are beginning to reveal some of the divisions among
whites that lent considerable vitality to the alternatives to war. Several tell of
Roger Williams of Salem, who in the 1630s challenged Massachusetts to
renounce its royal patent to the land, asserting, “The natives are the true
owners of it,” unless they sold it. (The Puritans renounced Williams, and he
fled to Rhode Island.)^119 Most authors now mention Helen Hunt Jackson, who
in 1881 paid to provide copies of her famous indictment of our Native
American policies, A Century of Dishonor, to every member of Congress.^120
All recent textbooks tell how Andrew Jackson and John Marshall waged a
titanic struggle over Georgia’s attempt to subjugate the Cherokees. Chief
Justice Marshall found for the Cherokees, whereupon President Jackson
ignored the Court, reputedly with the words, “John Marshall has made his
decision; now let him enforce it!” But no textbook brings any suspense to the
issue as one of the dominant questions throughout our first century as a nation.
None tells how several Christian denominations—Quakers, Shakers,
Moravians, some Presbyterians—and a faction of the Whig Party mobilized
public opinion on behalf of fair play for the Native Americans.^121 By ignoring
the Whigs, textbooks make the Cherokee removal seem inevitable, another
example of unacculturated aborigines helpless in the way of progress.
Native Americans would have textbooks note that, despite all the wars, the
plagues, the pressures against their cultures, American Indians still survive,
physically and culturally, and still have government-to-government relations
with the United States. As recently as 1984, a survey of American history
textbooks complained that “contemporary issues important to Native peoples
were entirely excluded.”^122 The books I examined did better. The American
Indian Movement (AIM) spurred three major Indian takeovers in the early
1970s: Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the Bureau of Indian Affairs in
Washington, D.C., and Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Most new textbooks
competently explain the causes and results of all three.