Indian History Too Moderate
Dear Editor:
Frederick Hoxie’s, “The Indians Versus the Textbooks” (Perspectives, April 1985) makes excellent suggestions for improving coverage of Indian issues in US history textbooks. Good examples of state and regional histories that integrate Indians into the narrative do exist, but other types of textbooks need to improve their treatment of the Indi an past. For example, Black history texts are lacking in their attention to such important themes as Indian-Black interaction and inter marriage since the colonial era, the Seminole Wars, the Lumbee resistance of the 1860s and the Oklahoma Territory.
Although I support Hoxie’s ideas, I feel he is too moderate in his recommendations for the historical treatment of the precontact aboriginal Americans. 1492 is an arbitrary date to begin dealing with the Indian past and to define “American History” as beginning with the settlement of white people is racist in the extreme. We should not perpetuate stereotypes that nonliterate peoples have no history, Native people of North America experienced vast changes in their ways of life through time and their cultural development refutes the notion of the “unchanging savage.”
To the textbook inadequacy that Hoxie addresses, I would add that an entire chapter be devoted to American Indian culture up to European contact. Such a chapter might begin with the peopling of the continent and the Paleo-Indian way of life. Based on archaeology and ethnohistory, the chapter would emphasize the diversity of cultures in each region of the continent and the livelihoods developed by the indigenous peoples in order to cope with their environment. The chapter could then turn to the event of European contact and place the vast consequences it had on the native populations in the proper perspective.
A comprehensive approach to early Indian culture would provide basic exposure to the American history student in the same way that a Modern European history course provides an introductory understanding of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation culture sequences. We as teachers should expect our students to be familiar with at least an overview of the cultural development of native America. As Gary Nash suggests in Red, White, and Black, America can only be understood if it is recognized as a merging of the influences of three peoples: Indians, Europeans, and Africans. Textbooks should be expected to include this type of approach. Since textbook writing is a continual readjustment of data, revisions such as these are necessary and should not be impossible to accomplish.
I was trained in both history and anthropology and I have found that this combination of training is rare among historians. Contemporary historians with backgrounds in cultural anthropology, archaeology, or ethnohistory, may be able to help textbook writers give more adequate attention to the Native American past. The story is too rich and 30,000 years too long to treat as one static period. If we continue to write text books without at least some coverage of the pre-European eras of American history, we do our students a grave injustice.
Walter L. Williams
University of Southern California
Anemic, Moribund History?
Dear Editor:
During the past several years, Perspectives has published several articles and letters decrying the alleged anemic, moribund approach to the teaching and writing of history. Here’s another.
I have just received, from a journal editor, another “thanks but no thanks” response to an article I submitted. Again, the reason is that I included in my text on seventeenth-century England references to twentieth-century England.
Last spring in my Monday History of Civilization class, I neglected to begin, as I traditionally do, with a discussion of the historical events of the week and what significance they have on the present. The students promptly brought this to my attention. As a result, I suggest that there is a relationship between the way we teach and write history and the amount of interest our students show in history.
Earlier in the semester, we discussed the principles of the early nineteenth-century liberals. I threw out for discussion the statement that former Budget Director David Stockman made before a congressional committee in February about farmers being responsible for their current financial situation. The students analyzed the statement from the standpoint of nineteenth-century liberalism. In another discussion, I introduced the topic of the Governor of South Dakota’s veto of a spousal rape bill and later signing of a different version that excluded the possibility of rape between cohabitating spouses. My classes unemotionally discussed both spousal rape bills when we analyzed J. S. Mill’s Subjection of Women and pondered what Mill’s reaction to both bills might have been.
The examples are endless. History is all around us and is alive and well. The study of history is not about a dead past irrelevant to the present. History must be taught and written as relevant, as living, and as vibrant. Until professional historians change their view of the relationship of the past to the present, they will deserve their small classes of bored students. Max Planck once declared that real change occurs only after one generation with established values dies off and another generation replaces it. Must we historians demonstrate the validity of Planck’s thesis?
Students do not need us to give them “facts”; historians are needed to help students make connections. Why then, do so many professional historians and editors of historical journals perceive as “bad history” attempts to connect the present and the past?
Walter J. King
Northern State College
