Lies My Teacher Told Me - Chapter 4 'Red Eyes' Notes

Red Eyes Historically

American Indians have been the most lied-about subset of the US population.
Michael Dorris: When learning about Native Americans, "One does not start from point zero, but from minus ten."
High school students start below zero due to textbooks presenting Native Americans through white eyes.
Indian history is interracial history.
Textbooks should improve their treatment of Native peoples.
1961: Rise of the American Nation contained 10 illustrations featuring Native people, focusing on primitive life and savage warfare.
25 years later: Triumph of the American Nation contained 15 illustrations of Indians, depicting them as participants in struggles to preserve their identities and land.
Included Metacomet (King Philip), Crispus Attucks, Sequoyah, and Navajo code-talkers.
James Axtell (1987) criticized textbooks for using terms like "half-breed," "massacre," and "war-whooping" and for biased interpretations that comfort descendants of the "settlers."

Looking at Indian history squarely may cause discomfort.
It is time for textbooks to provoke thought-provoking questions.
Textbooks try to be accurate about Indian culture.
Most textbooks devote more than five pages to pre-contact Native societies and recognize diversity among them.
Examples include the League of Five Nations, potlatches, cliff dwellings, and caste divisions.
Textbooks often focus on the unusual aspects of Native societies, neglecting the "regular folks" for student identification.
The authors of history textbooks are consumers, not practitioners, of archaeology, ethnobotany, linguistics, physical anthropology, folklore studies, cultural anthropology, and ethnohistory.
These fields are treated as dead disciplines to be mined for answers.

Only The American Adventure admits uncertainty and presents claims that humans have been in the Americas for {12,000}, {21,000}, and {40,000} years.
Estimates vary from {12,000} years Before Present (BP) to more than {70,000} BP.
Some believe in successive waves of settlers, while others believe most Natives descended from a single small band.
Most textbooks choose one position and present it as undisputed fact.
Nearly every textbook includes a statement similar to: “The water level of the oceans dropped sharply, exposing a land bridge between Asia and North America.”
While most except a Beringia crossing, evidence is slim.
Textbooks picture early Americans as primitives.
Many archaeologists believe people reached most parts of the Americas within a thousand years.
Textbooks offer no evidence upon which to infer these early Americans' alleged ignorance related to exploring a new continent.
“None of the groups made much progress in developing simple machines or substituting mechanical or even animal power for their own muscle power.”
Generalizing about gatherer-hunters.
The author betrays the influence of the old savage-to-barbaric-to-civilized school dating back to L. H. Morgan and Karl Marx.
Anthropologists challenged the outmoded continuum decades ago, determining that hunters and gatherers were relatively peaceful compared to agriculturalists.
Violence increases with civilization.