An essay on American history textbook portrayals of Indians is not news. Criticism of textbook treatments of Indians was first raised in the nineteenth century, and in our own time, the subject has been addressed in several publications and public forums.
In 1965, the American Indian Historical Society raised objections to grade-school texts and soon published a comprehensive evaluation. Three years later Virgil Vogel studied college texts and concluded that the role of Native Americans in our history had been obliterated, distorted, and disparaged.
I undertook my modest review to measure how Indians are being portrayed in contemporary university classrooms. To do this, I examined the thirteen US history survey texts advertised in last winter’s issues of the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History. I discovered that despite repeated protests, distortions, and inaccuracies persist.
Modern textbooks come in a variety of formats and styles, but all have a common didactic quality. They are, after all, written for students. And their tone corresponds to a view of our society that is positive, satisfied, and secure. Because the narrative of Indian dispossession is both negative in tone and troubling in content, authors have great difficulty shaping the Native American experience to fit the upbeat format of their books. But style alone cannot account for the persistence of inadequate treatment of Indians.
Textbook authors often ignore new information. This is particularly true when that information threatens cherished preconceptions about the American past. For example, during the 1970s the work of Henry Dobyns, William Deneven, Douglas Ubelaker, Russell Thornton, and others presented a new and unsettling view of early contact between Europeans and Native North Americans. Their scholarship has clarified the role of disease in Indian population decline and, in the process, demolished an earlier belief that in 1492 one-million native people inhabited the land that is now the United States. That one-million figure appeared sixty years ago in an estimate compiled by anthropologist James Mooney and published after his death.
There continues to be a lively debate over the precise size of the precontact population of North America, but there is now no question that the old one-million figure is so far off that it conveys an inaccurate picture of Indian life in the fifteenth century. One-million people might be “scattered,” “wandering” across the landscape; four million or six million or eighteen million required a more sophisticated set of social arrangements and a more powerful technology. In setting aside the old figure, one must also set aside the notion that America was an empty land, sprinkled lightly with aimless nomads.
Such ideas die hard. Perhaps that is why three of the thirteen texts examined continue to promote the one-million figure. American History, A Survey, by Richard Current, the late T. Harry Williams, Frank Freidel, and Alan Brinkley, first appeared in 1959. The 1983 edition (number six) repeats earlier assertions that “only about a million people resided in North America” on the eve of Columbus’s voyage. In the same vein it is probably to be expected that the seventh edition of Thomas A. Bailey’s The American Pageant (now coauthored with David Kennedy) would repeat the one million error. But social historian Stephan Thernstrom’s brand-new text seems a bit out of place in such old fashioned company. Despite his observation that scholars place the population of the Western Hemisphere at between 14 and 100 million, Thernstrom says nothing specific about North America.
Close on the heels of the three who continue in the thrall of Mooney’s sixty-year-old estimates are two other authors who peg the population 50 percent higher. Both Maldwyn Jones’ 1983 volume, The Limits of Liberty, and the 1983 abbreviation and revision of Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg’s History of the American Republic use this figure of 1.5 million. Unfortunately, neither text explains why.
The only authors to use the newer, higher estimates are Arthur Link and his colleagues in the 1984 edition of A Concise History of the American People. These men state flatly (and probably unwisely) that “10,000,000 to 12,000,000 lived north of the Rio Grande.” They do not explain why they are so sure, but it is significant that Link et al. turn almost immediately from population to a discussion of the nature of tribal societies and their relationship to European civilization. They conclude on a refreshing note: “The pre-Columbian world, which the Europeans altered forever in 1492, was one inhabited by many different peoples. . . . It was a world with many histories and cultures all its own. . . . [T]he ‘new’ world was a world neither more or less civilized than Europe. It was only different.” Link displays remarkable sensitivity because his population figures demand a recognition of the scale and complexity of native societies. Those at the other end of the spectrum exhibit a sharply contrasting view.
Thomas Bailey’s seven-edition grip on Mooney’s estimate could well be linked to his affection for the images that a small population figure conjures before him. “Most native settlements,” he writes, “were small, scattered and often impermanent. So thinly spread across the land was the North American Indian population that large areas were virtually uninhabited, with whispering primeval forests and sparkling, virgin waters.”
Thus, nearly two decades after Vogel’s original study, five of the thirteen books under review still cling to an outdated population figure and perpetrate inaccurate generalizations about native societies on the eve of Columbus’s voyage. Only one book explicitly recognizes the new scholarship in its narrative. The remaining seven books do not give an exact figure for North America, relying instead on vague references either to “many people,” or “sparse populations.”
Mistakes such as these continue to appear in texts, and they suggest a depressing conclusion: things haven’t changed very much. Why does this situation of ignorance, misrepresentation or apathy persist? Is there any way out of it? Why do we—as teachers and historians—appear to accept the situation? There are two answers to the last question: it’s us or it’s them. “Them,” are the publishers, editors, school boards, and college administrators who seem to control the textbook industry. “They” reprint Bailey’s whispering forest seven times, “they” won’t listen to new ideas and interpretations.
Attacks on publishers and authors might be justified, but they have so far proven ineffective. The persistence of inadequate and inaccurate treatments of Indians suggests deeper causes and more complex solutions. Producing accurate, sensitive, and comprehensive portrayals of Native Americans in both texts and classrooms raises a series of problems for authors and teachers, problems that are both narrowly historical and broadly conceptual. Addressing and resolving these issues will require far more from the entire historical profession that fusillades against textbooks. What is required will become clear once we better understand the problems associated with integrating Indian materials into the US history narrative. The following is a preliminary listing of those problems and some suggestions for resolving them.
Prehistory
The first problem, suggested already by the discussion of precontact population figures, is the subject of Indian “prehistory.” The problem is “where to start?” Most textbooks say something about who the Indians were and where they came from in their first chapters, but none of the books under review have developed a way to address the scale and complexity of precontact native societies.
The Great Republic by Bernard Bailyn and five distinguished colleagues takes the simplest and worst approach; they ignore the subject altogether. “The United States,” the authors announce on page one, “evolved from the British settlements on the mainland of North America, first permanently established in 1607.” As a result, their narrative proceeds without a description of native cultures prior to 1492. Three other authors dismissed the subject in a page.
The authors who devoted significant attention to the subject probably envy those who ignore it. How can one say something meaningful about 30,000 years of history? How can an author describe the evolution of several hundred language and cultural groups? One approach is to refer to the early arrivals as immigrants. Stephan Thernstrom argues that “in a sense, the Indians were immigrants too.” The effect is to reduce Indian people to the level of European immigrants, folks who had no more claim to the land than our immigrant grandparents when they were fresh off the boat.
Another tactic for describing the precontact setting is to print a map of North American Indian tribes alongside the text describing native cultures. Six of the books reviewed print such maps; none of the maps is accurate. All of the maps present locations for tribes taken from standard anthropology texts. A laudable effort, but most of those maps present the location of tribes in the nineteenth century. Thus America Past and Present contains a beautiful map entitled “Major Indian Tribes and Culture Areas in North America, 1500” that has the Crow on the Missouri River (they didn’t exist as a separate unit until the eighteenth century), the Sioux in the Dakotas (they spent the sixteenth century farming in Minnesota), the Shawnee south of the Ohio River (they were also north), and the Delawares on the coast of Maryland (they were not identified by that name in 1500).
In the body of the descriptions of precontact native history, several themes emerge. First, there is a striking absence of accurate information comparing Eurasia and the Americas. For example, chapter one of Current, Williams, Freidel and Brinkley’s text begins with this remarkable statement: “For thousands of centuries—centuries in which human races were evolving, forming communities, and building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia and Europe—the continents we know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and its works.” This is fantasy. The dispersal of the human species from Africa took hundreds of millennia. When evidence of early people is mapped globally, the arrival of those “first immigrants” in the Americas in about 30,000 BC fits with data gathered from sites in northern China and the Soviet Union. The peopling of the Americas was part of a vast process of human migration and dispersal. The Western Hemisphere was no more “empty” than Japan or Manchuria.
Because the narrative of Indian dispossession is both negative in tone and troubling in content, authors have great difficulty shaping the Native American Experience to fit the upbeat format of their books.
In addition, these references to primitive American continents are typically accompanied by references to their primitive people. John Garraty’s text, for example, lists the traits all Indians held in common. First, “being human,” they “suffered from all human feelings in one form or another.” They were also “terrible male chauvinists,” cruel in war, communal in land holding, and “they preferred a slow-paced, even existence.” Mean but laid back.
All of the authors concentrate on what the Indian lacked (writing, guns, horses) and pay little attention to what they had—technology, agriculture, religious systems, social structures and economic relationships. The fullness and complexity of precontact tribal life does not appear in the textbook descriptions under review.
Even if one could set aside or correct every inaccuracy, the textbook treatment of precontact Indian history would still be inadequate. The subject cannot simply be tossed off in a few maps or casual generalizations about the nature of “Indian” life. Nor is the Bailyn solution satisfactory. While the US national political system surely derived from British antecedents, law and government in states and localities have a much more diverse heritage. And the society inhabiting the political system is both diverse and unique. Given recent historiography, it seems surreal to point out that there is a social history of the US that is at least as important and interesting as our political history. Moreover, especially in the first years of contact and European settlement, the Indian component of that social history had a significant impact on political life. The precontact history of Indian communities is such a vast subject that survey courses and their texts simply must devote more time to it.
Coherence
The second problem textbook authors face is presenting Indian people as coherent historical actors. The task might be reduced to answering a simple question: What motivated the Indians? Textbooks are constitutionally uncomfortable with questions of this kind because their narratives speak to us from the center of the majority culture. They have difficulty with people who stand outside the complex, urban environment of the late twentieth century. To spend scholarly energy and precious pages on the internal workings of a tiny minority community seems unwise.
As a result, authors either ignore Indian motives completely, or Native Americans appear in the narrative as irrational primitives clinging tenaciously to a doomed way of life. Both views separate the Indians’ experience from the rest of US history and limit the Indians’ role to that of perpetual antagonist. Indians in textbooks either do nothing or they resist. Several examples can illustrate the point.
Despite a dramatic expansion of recent scholarship on the complexities of the North American fur trade, Stephan Thernstrom tells us that New Netherlands became a place for “obtaining fur from the Indians” and Richard Current describes “the lure of the forest and its furs.” Neither tells us about the industry that grew up in the woods to find, process, transport, and market the precious commodity or about the trade’s many cultural consequences. A diligent reader of Griggs and McCandless’s The Course of American History could probably come away from the text without knowing that Indians were involved in the fur trade at all. Some authors such as Morrison and Joseph Conlin mention the important role of the Iroquois Indians in trading, but the majority focus exclusively on Europeans and ignore the many ways in which the fur trade built economic, familial, and political ties between the races.
Descriptions of the first English settlement at Jamestown repeat the tendency either to ignore Indian motivation or to define it narrowly. The Powhatan Indians who lived along the Chesapeake tidewater were aware of the power of European technology and the danger of contact with whites long before John Smith landed in 1607. They had probably heard of the Roanoke colony and they certainly recalled their own violent encounter with Spanish missionaries in the sixteenth century. Reactions to the arrival of English settlers were further complicated by the Indians’ desire to expand the influence of their confederacy. All the famous events of early Jamestown (the uneasy truce, John Smith’s “rescue,” the food trade, the 1622 uprising) must be seen against this background of Indian ambition and fear. In addition, that ambition and fear existed in a society whose political and religious systems differed fundamentally from those of the Europeans.
Probably the worst account of the 1622 uprising appears in the 1983 edition of Current et al.’s American History: A Survey. Claiming that Jamestown “was soon threatened by hostile Indians,” Current goes on to tell students that the “Indians killed off the livestock in the woods and kept the settlers within the palisades” where they starved. Further more, the uprising of 1622 occurred after a period when “the Indians had given the Virginia colonists little trouble,” and “the Indians pretended to be friendly.” Current thus portrays the Powhatans as congenitally hostile, cruel and treacherous—not a very subtle portrait.
But also unfortunate is Stephen Thernstrom’s assertion that the 1622 uprising occurred only because the Indians “could take no more” white expansion, and The Quest for Liberty’s assertion that the tribe decided to “lash out blindly” at the whites. It is not helpful to see the attacks simply as a response to increased settlement and missionization. The Powhatans were not just responding to Europeans; they also had in mind interest groups within their confederacy and enemies beyond it.
The appeal of the “lonely settler in the howling wilderness” motif is also plain in descriptions of Plymouth Colony. Only three of the thirteen texts identify Squanto as the individual who stepped forward to save the colony from starvation in the spring of 1621. And of those three, only one (A People and a Nation) tells us that Squanto had previously been captured and taken to England. Without that information the Wampanoags who helped the Pilgrims appear stupid and naive. With that information, and the knowledge that Squanto returned from England in 1619 to find his village wiped out by an epidemic, we get a more complete picture of the man and his motives. For most authors, however, complexity of this kind only interrupts a good yarn; it is much more appealing to leave the Pilgrims erect on their pedestals with snow-covered faces turned towards the “whispering primeval forest.”
When the textbooks move out of the colonial era, the problem or presenting Indians as coherent historical actors is compounded. One cannot describe Indians in the nineteenth century as if they were unaware of Europeans or unchanged by the European presence. The continual expansion of non-Indian settlements placed new pressures on tribal leaders and contributed to the rise of people who traditionally might not have been so influential. Individuals like Molly Brandt, Tecumseh, Black Hawk and John Ross were products of their eras as well as of their cultures. Changes in family and social life, religion, diet, and health all affected tribal decision-making and greatly complicated tribal life. Thus to call Tecumseh “Chief of the Shawnees” (Current et al.) or to describe Cherokee removal without discussing internal conflicts among the Cherokee (Bailey and Kennedy), or to say that the Nez Perce “took to the warpath” in 1877 (Jones) is to obscure and distort historical reality.
Presenting Indian peoples as coherent, multifaceted actors in American history will require a number of changes in standard presentations of tribal life. These changes may not necessarily mean more space or time must be devoted to Indians. First, authors and teachers should acknowledge that Native American cultures are nonwestern. They are rooted in the obligations of kinship rather than the appeal of political ideology. They are not individualistic, Christian, or monotheistic. They are not secular; traditional values and ceremonies have both civic and religious ramifications. Moreover, distinctive (and diverse) cultural values affect a group’s reaction to military invasion, economic competition, and technological change. Indian communities cannot be analyzed as if they were smaller, backward versions of European villages.
Second, as historians, we must recognize that the Indian encounter with Europeans was usually cumulative; each engagement, each introduction of new elements was communicated across tribal boundaries and became a factor in subsequent interaction.
Third, organizers of textbook projects need to purge their books of misleading shorthand references to Indians’ behavior. Indians did not “wander” or “roam.” Tribes did not live in isolation. Many Indians experienced military defeat, and all Indians witnessed changes in their cultural life; these facts do not mean that Indian cultures were necessarily destroyed through contact with Europeans.
And thirdly, we would benefit from a heartier diet of cultural anthropology. It is the one discipline that has attempted to understand and explain the coherency in all cultures, which can contribute a great deal to the comprehension Indian history. At present, textbook footnotes are amazingly homogenous, with few references to anthropologists.
Presence and Absence
The third problem faced by textbook authors—one related to the issue of coherence—is the problem of presence and absence. Where do Indians appear in the narrative? When do they exit? Anyone who has read through a collection of texts has found an uncanny similarity in their organization. Indians appear at the time of discovery, in skirmishes accompanying early settlement, in the revolutionary war, in descriptions of the Old Northwest and the War of 1812, during removal, at the Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, as beneficiaries of the Indian New Deal, and as militants at Wounded Knee II and Alcatraz.
Not only does the typical organization reinforce the notion that Indians have no culture (after all, they only rebel, fight, and complain), but it creates the impression that Indians have somehow lived apart from the history of the United States. Native Americans seem immune to the people and events described elsewhere in the narrative. Texts ignore Indian missions or the gradual Christianization of native communities. Textbooks ignore Indian–white intermarriage and shifting patterns of native family and social life. Textbooks ignore the history of Indian farming and ranching and the evolution of Indian art. Their leaders, other than military, do not appear in these texts. There are virtually no Indian women in the texts following the death of Pocahantas (an event recorded by everyone). The long history of Indian participation in the American military fails to win attention, as does the history of Indian education, Indian law or the Indian migration to America’s cities.
How can one say something meaningful about 30,000 years of history?
The greatest gap in classroom presentations of Indian life seems to occur in the twentieth century. For the most part, Indians simply cease to exist after the battle at Wounded Knee. Six of the thirteen texts examined do not mention John Collier and the “Indian New Deal” of the 1930s. While that in itself is unfortunate, most historians of modern Indian life would look for other events they consider at least as important such as: the formation of the Society of American Indians and the National Congress of American Indians, the founding and spread of the Native American church, the extension of educational opportunities to Indians, the rise of Indian law as a vehicle for defending tribal interests, and the sways of policy from termination to self-determination. None of the texts under review discuss these topics. By ignoring contemporary Indian history, instructors and textbook authors transform historical selectivity into a stereotype. By presenting only a part of Indian life to students, they manufacture the idea that modern Indians are silent, helpless and only worthy of pity.
The Indian Legacy
The absence of Indians from many parts of the textbook narrative suggests a fourth and final problem: the problem of the Indian legacy. How should authors and teachers describe the Indian contribution to American history and culture? This is the most difficult issue to be addressed. There are obvious physical legacies: food, tools, clothing, words, place and animal names, games, and other inventions. But far more important to the survey narrative is the cultural legacy bequeathed to the broader society by Indians and their non Indian neighbors. Texts have difficulty admitting that American history is the story of many groups who met and affected one another in the North American environment. The beginning of that process of mutual influence occurred even before the first Europeans encountered their first Native Americans. When those encounters finally occurred, it was clear this would be a plural culture, and it would develop structures, values, and beliefs to account for and manage an unprecedented degree of diversity.
How a particularly American brand of pluralism evolved and subsequently affected other cross-cultural encounters is a central theme in the history of the United States. Because Indians were always here, because they were different from Europeans, and because they stood at the heart of an extended process of interchange and mutual influence, their experience is a major piece of the national history.
Resolving the problem of the Indian legacy in America should aid teachers and textbook authors at both the beginning and the end of their narratives. It is not enough to write as Richard Current and his colleagues do, that the “battle between Indians and whites” is a central theme in American history, for that in itself does not suggest ways of addressing the problems of presence and absence, coherence or prehistory. But recognizing that interaction with Indians took place in a variety of ways—both public and private—and that it contributed to an American culture containing many, disparate groups, suggests a series of responses to other problems.
Hence, if we are going to examine Indian–white interaction in a variety of contexts, we must examine the precontact era more carefully. If that interaction consisted of more than warfare, then coherent presentations of native motivation are essential to historical understanding. And if this interaction persisted and affected relations between other groups, then our narratives should be sustained and textbook authors should avoid pretending that native cultures withered and died some time in the nineteenth century. Coming to terms with the Indian legacy is the hardest task before us, but it is also the most exciting.
Consequently, addressing this issue promises to fuel a more constructive approach to the issue of Indians in US history textbooks and to open for other scholars a new universe of topics, people and events.
“Correcting” textbook presentations of Indians, requires more than introducing new information or railing against the ignorance of authors and publishers. It requires asking ourselves as historians why Indians are in US history at all. Are they there as targets, or moral lessons, or attractive exotics? They have seemed to be those things in the past; but today, as we try to devise new forms for the old narrative, we should seek more authentic and defensible answers. Defining a workable and honest view of the Indians’ role in the development of American society and culture is the key to integrating Indian materials into courses and texts on the history of the United States. Once we recognize the centrality of American Indians to the history of our development as a national culture, we can address and resolve the many problems that have haunted the historians who write and use textbooks.
An expanded (and footnoted) version of this essay is available on request from The D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, The Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., Chicago, IL 60610. The McNickle Center is sponsoring a conference on “The Impact of Indian History on the Teaching of US History,” October 2-5, 1985 in Washington, DC.
