Anti-Indian racism eased considerably during the twentieth century. Taking
advantage of their special status as “dependent domestic nations,” as decreed
by Chief Justice Marshall long ago, many tribes developed gaming
establishments and hotels to build a solid relationship with the global
economy. Ironically, the very fact that the United States is beginning to let
Natives acculturate successfully, albeit on Anglo terms, poses a new threat to
Native coexistence. Poverty and discrimination long helped to isolate
American Indians. If they can now get good jobs, as some can, buy new
vehicles and satellite televisions, as some have, and commute to the city for
part of their life, as some do, it is much harder to maintain the intangible values
that make up the core of Indian cultures.^123 Only one textbook—one of the
oldest I studied—raises the key question now facing Native Americans: Can
distinctively Indian cultures survive? Discovering American History treats
this issue in an exemplary way, inviting students to experience the dilemma
through the words of Native American teenagers. Newer textbooks cannot
raise this issue because they remain locked into non-Indian sources and a non-
Indian interpretive framework. Textbooks still define Native Americans in
opposition to civilization and still conceive of Indian cultures in what
anthropologists call the ethnographic present—frozen at the time of white
contact. When textbooks show sympathy for “the tragic struggle of American
Indians to maintain their way of life,” they exemplify this myopia. Native
Americans never had “a” way of life; they had many. American Indians would
not have maintained those ways unchanged over the last five hundred years,
even without European and African immigration. Indians have long struggled to
change their ways of life. That autonomy we took from them. Even today we
divide Native American leadership into “progressives” who want to
acculturate and “traditionals” who want to “remain Indian.” Textbook authors
do not put other Americans into this straitjacket. We non-Indians choose what
we want from the past or from other cultures. We jettisoned our medical
practices of the 1780s while retaining the Constitution. But Native American
medical practitioners who abandon their traditional ways to embrace
pasteurization from France and antibiotics from England are seen as
compromising their Indian-ness. We can alter our modes of transportation or
housing while remaining “American.” Indians cannot and stay “Indian” in our
eyes.