August 15, 2010

Indians in Christian textbooks

Here's an Analysis of Two Popular Christian High School History Textbooks Regarding American Indians. Author Michael W. Simpson provides about 10 pages of analysis of the stereotypical, misleading, or false "information" in these textbooks. Among the problems:

  • They begin US history in 1492.

  • They describe the land as empty, sparsely populated, or not used productively.

  • They refer constantly to Europeans discovering or exploring things.

  • They tend to describe Indians as warlike, on the warpath, pagan, cruel, fierce, hostile, brutal, renegade, savage, committing massacres, going on rampages, scalping and torturing, etc. In other words, they treat Indians as obstacles to or problems for the "natural" expansion of whites.

  • They "portray the killing by whites as justified by some atrocity committed by the Indians."

  • They reinforce the idea of the vanishing Indian. "Weak recognition of a few paragraphs in the 20th century simply does not replace the great absence of the narrative."

  • They treat Indians as just another minority and don't discuss tribal sovereignty or their unique relationship with the US government.

    The textbooks do note the help of friendly good Indians. They occasionally admit that the Indians weren't totally savage and beastlike. And they occasionally describe a massacre of Indians with such terms as "unfortunate" or "unsavory." But as you can tell, the overwhelming impression is negative.

    To be fair, this isn't much different than the non-Christian textbooks James W. Loewen analyzed in Lies My Teacher Told Me. And I believe these textbooks were published in the mid-1990s. Things may have changed since then. (They may have gotten worse.)

    A representative passage

    Simpson provides one book's "best statement" on Native land and religion:The native Americans, like most early people, forsook the things they once knew about God. Rather than worshipping the Creator, they worshipped creation, particularly things they could not understand such as thunder, wind, fire and the sun. They also believed that spirits lived in the mountains, waters, trees, plants, and animals around them. Because superstition kept the Indians from working together to develop the land in which they lived, America would remain an untamed wilderness until the Europeans arrived.Wow. So much wrong here:

  • How could Indians forsake what "they once knew about God"? Is this book seriously suggesting that Indians descended from a lost tribe of Israel? That Jesus visited them at some point and they spurned his message?

  • It's more correct to say Indians worshiped the Creator and creation, or the Creator through creation. And there's nothing wrong with that.

  • No one understood "thunder, wind, fire, and the sun" until a couple centuries ago. In 1492 Europeans were as ignorant about these things as Indians were.

  • Why would worshiping creation or spirits keep Indians from working together? There's no connection between the two.

  • With their clans, moieties, and societies, Indian tribes were the epitome of working together for a common goal. Most tribes were more unified than European villages of the same size. Indeed, that's why conservatives call them "socialist" or "communist"--because they supposedly put their community ahead of individuals.

  • Indians did work and change the land, of course. They burned forests or prairies and farmed the land. They built irrigation channels, villages and cities, pyramids and temples, burial mounds and other earthworks, etc. They just didn't do enough of it to satisfy the textbook writers.

    Undeveloped, developed...didn't matter

    Of course, we know what happened when Europeans encountered the Aztec and Inca empires--full-fledged civilizations as complex and sophisticated as their own. They deemed them decadent, corrupt, pagan, unholy--regular Sodoms and Gomorrahs of sin and depravity. Even though these Indians had developed the land, they had to go too.

    You can bet this would've happened in the US and Canada as well. The Europeans didn't care what they found because they were bent on expansion and conquest. If disease wiped out the Indians and left the land unpopulated, great. If the Europeans had to coexist with Indians until they could cheat them and steal their land, no problem. If they encountered massive roadblocks such as the Aztec or Inca empires, they slaughtered the Indians and destroyed their civilizations. All in the name of Christ.

    This is why blaming Indian deaths on disease is a dodge. The Europeans killed or enslaved Indians whenever they needed to. Their actions show a genocidal intent regardless of the diseases' effects.

    While most Indians died of disease, Europeans committed genocide against the rest of them. This happened before, during, and after the waves of illness. Disease was merely a "provident" tool of the genocidal onslaught. Had millions of Indians not sickened and died, they would've received the same treatment as the Indians of the Caribbean, Central America, and the Andes.

    Simpson's conclusion:The two textbooks reviewed here are popular among Christian schools and home schoolers. The textbook remains a central artifact of what is taught. College teachers can expect more of these students in their classes [who are] motivated to speak by their perceived victimization from humanist secularism. Teachers dealing with American Indian issues will be confronting students taught from texts that glorify discoverers and explorers and depict native peoples in very negative ways.Yep. This is what's behind Arizona's move to curtail ethnic studies. The nationwide protest against mosques. And much of the conservative agenda. It's all about maintaining white, Christian control over America.

    For more on this conservative Christian propaganda, see:

    "A savage people" in 1996 encyclopedia
    Villaraigosa's pro-California propaganda
    Custer's Last Stand and ethnic studies
    Replacing Jefferson with Calvin
    Conservatives want Christian textbooks
    White History Month needed?
    Educating Tony about genocide

    For more on how to really educate students, see:

    Washington curriculum tackles ignorance
    The right way to teach about Indians

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