Lies My Teacher Told Me, Chapter 4

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. ISBN 1-56584-100-X

“Dedicated to all American history teachers who teach against their textbooks”.

The supplied PDF is only for Chapter 4, “Red Eyes”. will attempt further research in future?

Red Eyes

“In learning about Native Americans, ‘One does not start from point zero, but from minus ten.’ High school students start below zero because of their textbooks, which unapologetically present Native Americans through white eyes.”

• authorial interpretations “shackled by the ‘conventional assumptions and semantics’ that have ‘explained’ Indian-white relations for centuries. Textbook authors still write history to comfort descendants of the ‘settlers.’”
• “Original Sin”
• red eyes refers to crying eyes; different view on Native history
• recognition of diversity in Native societies as long as it is unusual, and ignored if it is regular/normal
• history textbook authors are “consumers, not practitioners” of humanities disciplines, and regarded as “dead disciplines” with full certainty and authority
• “It is understandable that textbook authors might write history in such a way that students can feel good about themselves by feeling good about the past. Feeling good is a human need, but it imposes a burden that history cannot bear without becoming simple-minded. Casting Indian history as a tragedy because Native Americans could not or would not acculturate is feel-good his­tory for whites.”
• “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.”

Prominent Stereotypes

“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.”

• archetype of the primitive savage (“vaguely Neanderthalian”)
  • vs. “affluent primitive” hypothesis
• wealth is equated with civilization
• primitivity of America, especially North America, is compared to Europe; civilization is reserved for Europe
  • “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.”
  • “Even an appreciative treatment of Native cultures reinforces ethnocentrism so long as it does not challenge the primitive-to-civilized continuum.”
  • continuity of everyday meaning conflating with a scientific meaning
  • civilization is othering

Syncretism and Cultural Imperialism

“Calling the area beyond secure European control ‘frontier’ or ‘wilderness’ makes it subtly alien. Such a viewpoint is intrinsically Eurocentric and marginalizes the actions of nonurban people, both Native and non-Native.”

• syncretism: blending elements of two cultures
  • linkage and dependency on a global economy; sled dogs → snowmobiles led to oil embargo issues
  • dependency on trading economy let to atrophy of cultural skills
  • governments and politics blended with “civilized” practices → military conflict and escalation of Native warfare between one another vs. between colonies
    • economy began to depend on trading people to European colonists; slave trade and slave exports
      • slave trade even of trading Native slaves for Black slaves
  • “As Europeans learned from Natives what to grow and how to grow it, they became less dependent upon Indians and Indian technology, while Indians became more dependent upon Europeans and European technology. Thus what worked for the native Americans in the short run worked against them in the long. In the long run, it was Indians who were enslaved, Indians who died, Indian technology that was lost, Indian cultures that fell apart.”
• syncretism evolving into cultural imperialism
  • Sioux word for white man, wasichu: “onee who has everything good”
  • culture contact terms
• mutual acculturation vs directional selection of the frontier
  • 325 years of Native autonomy and cohabitation with colonizers from 1565–1890
  • frontier connotates a boundary to cross and civilization vs. wilderness
  • in reality, contact, not division was the rule
  • blend of cultures as non-Native and Natives interacted; notably in cities and etc. “The Glaize” in northern Ohio when contact had reached the eastern Midwest
  • “interculturation” across all points of contact; some fled from autocratic rigor to Native villages; defecting; Indianization and attractiveness of Native American society vs embarrassment towards American colonialism
    • white colonists fled to avoid hierarchy, enjoy freedom and rights, democratic structure of government
• syncretism in democracy
  • liberty, fraternity, equality of Native philosophy
  • Iroquois League over 150 years of contact; large domain democratically ruled
    • used as inspiration for Articles of Confederation and Constitution; found through conventions and congregation
  • argument towards presence of public gathering, Bill of Rights democracy and free speech vs. previous intolerance
    • nations did not have rulers, but a different government entirely which “radicalized” schools of European thought
  • imagery of Native Americans used to symbolize liberty in Revolutions
    • symbol of eagles and arrows appropriated from Iroquois League
• syncretism in regional cuisines
  • mutual acculturation in Native and African Americans: soul food
  • worldwide crops, language integration
  • interculturation requires ideas and thought
  • acknowledgement of aboriginal culture and intellect; two-way basis of ideas and inspiration

Native religion and ideology

“Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.”

• textbooks see Native religions as a general whole, unsophisticated, non-symbolic, offensive, non-satisfactory, no attraction or persuasion
  • “These Native Americans (in the Southeast] believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature.”
  • “These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son’s body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died.”
• admittance of own faults in non-persuasive description of religion

Contact from the Native perspective

“Like the legacy of slavery, the legacy of conquest persists, however. Indeed, conquest ended more recently than slavery, outlasting that unfortunate institution by a quarter-century. Slavery is now taken seriously in our histories; conquest still is not. In this sense, the American Indian Movement, unlike the civil rights movement, has failed.”

• historical revision of settler and aggressor
• tense, violent climate caused by white actions that exacerbated Natives at the “frontier” of contact
• European warfare considered by Native Americans more savage than own warfare
  • intensified through European influence; allyship led to attack at dawn, fire and shooting escapees
  • extermination vs subjugation; reproach: “It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men.” vs. pastime belief of colonialism that believed in conquering and subdueing
  • religious devotion
  • total erasure
• Europeans were seen as nomads vs. Native American travel between summer and winter homes
  • “To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seem­ingly without regret.”

Warfare

• Colonial-Native warfare: 80% federal budget in first administration and large issue/expense to successors
• war was started by colonial hands: King Philip’s War, Acoma (New Mexico) 1599, lasting until Wounded Knee 1890
• continued misrepresentation of colonial-Native war
• Native allyship or participation in wars downplayed
  • the War of the League of Augsburg/King William’s War (1689–1697); the War of the Spanish Succession/Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713); the War of the Austrian Succession/King George’s War (1744–1748): tribes were barriers between European powers and colonies
  • Seven Years War (French and Indian): Native tribes on both sides
  • American Revolution: background for Proclamation of 1763
    • proclamation: land grants forbidden past Appalachian divide; concern over Native relations vs. Europe in 1775+ hostilities
    • Iroquois Confederacy sided with British
  • War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War
  • in all wars, Native tribes fought against other Natives, but more fought on the side against the US: geopolitics would grant them better likelihood of human rights and land
  • invisibility of Natives
• Native and European international allyships; alliances ceded in the War of 1812, but obscured as the result of maritime misconduct; War of 1812 led to domination in Native-American relationships
• history of “conflict partnership” of Native Americans ignored for conquest and national desires
  • “our acquies­cence in Indian dispossession has molded the American character.”: reassignment of Native Americans as powerless, lazy, useless as result of cognitive dissonance and rationalization of prejudice
  • Native American perspective led to the ruin of national idealism and the growth of the white supremacist, American hegemony; led to emulation from other nations in Europe
  • “Hitler admired our concentration camps for Indians in the west “and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination-by starvation and uneven combat” as the model for his extermination of Jews and [Roma].”
  • “the alternatives to war remain roads largely not taken in the United States”

Land Ownership

• stereotype of naivete over land ownership and claims
  • “Textbook authors seem unaware that most land sales before the twentieth century, including sales among whites, transferred primarily the rights to farm, mine, and otherwise develop the land. Undeveloped private land was considered public and acces­sible to all, within limits of good conduct. Moreover, tribal negotiators typically made sure that deeds and treaties specifically reserved hunting, fishing, gath­ering, and traveling rights to Native Americans.”
  • naivete should be applied to white perception of land ownership and claims

Coexistence

• “As Edward Carr noted, ‘History is, by and large, a record of what people did, not of what they failed to do.’ On the other hand, making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning. History is contingent upon the actions of people. ‘The duty of the historian,’ Gordon Craig has reminded us, ‘is to restore to the past the options it once had.’”
• coexistence was impossible due to white conduct and encroachment on the concepts of peace + racist, xenophobic treatment; material interests vs. racial harmony
  • triracial isolates: white, black, Native heritage in swamps and undesierable land intending to be left alone
    • Roanoke hypothesis of biracial isolate
  • intermarriage and European relationships: “the French penetrated Indian societies, the Spanish acculturated them, and the British expelled them”
    • jesus fucking christ
    • only Pocahontas well-known acceptee into “white society” via intermarriage; other couples were better accepted in Native society
    • descendants became chiefs due to advantage of bicultural heritage vs. “half-breed” depiction in Anglo-society
  • Native state refused by congress
  • coexistence in textbooks was argued only possible through directional acculturation
    • “The overall story line in contemporary American history textbooks 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 policymakers 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.”
    • acculturation was impossible for irreconcilable cultures; truth was desire against two-way acculturation and constant alienation and crime against assimilation
      • “Without legal rights, acculturation cannot succeed. Inmuttooyahlatlat, known to whites as Chief Joseph, said this eloquently: ‘We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. If an Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law. If a white man breaks the law, punish him also. Let me be a free man-free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to talk and think and act for myself.’ It was not to be. Most courts simply refused to hear testimony from Native Americans against whites. After noting how non-Indians could rise through the ranks of Native societies, Peter Farb summed up the possibilities in white society: ‘At almost no time in the history of the United States, though, were the Indians afforded similar opportunities for voluntary assimilation.’ The acculturated Indian simply stood out as a target.”
• modern day allows for acculturation which ironically dissolves the core values of Native cultures: “can distinctively Indian cultures survive?”
  • “Textbooks still define Native Americans in oppo­sition to civilization and still conceive of lndian 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. 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 Indianness. We can alter our modes of transportation or housing while remaining ‘American’. Indians cannot and stay ‘Indian’ in our eyes.”
• hope for recognition of syncretism and two-way acculturation; hope for recognition of choices unconsidered and contrast to “pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God’s chosen people”
• “Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this-not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again. We must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge, suggests Christopher Vecsey: ‘The study of our contact with Indians, the envisioning of our dark American selves, can instill such a strengthening doubt.’ History through red eyes offers our children a deeper understanding than comes from encountering the past as a story of inevitable triumph by the good guys.”