Lies My Teacher Told Me (14 page)

Thanksgiving dinner is a ritual, with all the characteristics that Mircea Eliade assigns
to the ritual observances of origin myths:

1. It constitutes the history of the acts of the founders, the Supernatural. 2. It is
considered to be true. 3. It tells how an institution came into existence. 4. In
performing the ritual associated with the myth, one '"experiences'

knowledge of the origin“ and claims one's patriarchy. 5. Thus one ”lives" the myth, as a
religion.

My Random House dictionary lists as its main heading for the Plymouth colonists not Pilgrims but Pilgrim Fathers. The Library of Congress similarly catalogs its holdings for Plymouth under Pilgrim Fathm, and of course fathers is capitalized, meaning “fathers of our country,” not of Pilgrim children. Thanksgiving
has thus moved from history into the field of religion, “civil religion,” as Robert Bellah
has called it. To Bellah, civil religions hold society together. Plymouth Rock achieved
iconographic status around 1880, when some enterprising residents of the town rejoined
its two pieces on the waterfront and built a Greek templet around it. The templet became a
shrine, the Mayflower Compact became a sacred text, and our textbooks began to play the same function as the Anglican Book ofCommon Prayer, teaching us the meaning behind the civil rite of Thanksgiving.

The religious character of Pilgrim history shines forth in an introduction by Valerian
Paget to William Bradford's famous chronicle OfPlimoth Plantation: “The eyes of Europe were upon this little English handful of unconscious heroes and
saints, taking courage from them step by step. For their children's children the same
ideals of Freedom burned so clear and strong that ... the little episode we have just been
contemplating, resulted in the birth of the United States of America, and, above all, of
the establishment of the humanitarian ideals it typifies, and for which the Pilgrims
offered their sacrifice upon the altar of the Sonship of Man.” In this invocation, the Pilgrims supply not only the origin of the United States, but
also the inspiration for democracy in Europe and perhaps for all goodness in the world
today! I suspect that the original colonists, Separatists and Anglicans alike, would have
been amused.

The civil ritual we practice marginalizes Indians. Our archetypal image of the first
Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their
starched Sunday best next to their almost naked Indian guests. As a holiday greeting card
puts it, “I is for the Indians we invited to share our food.” The silliness of all this
reaches its zenith in the handouts that schoolchildren have carried home for decades,
complete with captions such as, “They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The
Indians had never seen such a feast!” When the Native American novelist Michael Dorris's
son brought home this “information” from his New Hampshire elementary school, Dorris
pointed out that “the Pilgrims had literally never seen 'such a feast,' since all foods mentioned are exclusively
indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.”

This notion that “we” advanced peoples provided for the Indians, exactly the converse of
the truth, is not benign. It reemerges time and again in our history to complicate race
relations. For example, we are told that white plantation owners furnished food and
medical care for their slaves, yet every shred of food, shelter, and clothing on the
plantations was raised, built, woven, or paid for by black labor. Today Americans believe
as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation
on earth in terms of foreign aid, j overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from
almost every Third World nation runs coward the United States.

The true history of Thanksgiving reveals embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not
introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for
centuries. Although George Washington did set aside days for national thanksgiving, our
modern celebrations date back only to 1863. During the Civil War, when the Union needed
all the patriotism that such an observance might muster, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed
Thanksgiving a national holiday. The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until the
1890s did they even get included in the tradition. For that matter, no one used the term Pilgrims until the 1870s.

The ideological meaning American history has ascribed to Thanksgiving compounds the
embarrassment. The Thanksgiving legend makes Americans ethnocentric After all, if our
culture has God on its side, why should we consider other cultures seriously? This
ethnocentrism intensified in the middle of the last century. In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman has shown how the idea of “God on our side” was used to legitimate the
open expression of Anglo-Saxon superiority vis-a-vis Mexicans, Native Americans, peoples
of the Pacific, Jews, and even Catholics.7 Today, when textbooks promote this ethnocentrism with their Pilgrim stories, they leave
students less able to learn from and deal with people from other cultures.

On occasion, we pay a more direct cost: censorship. In 1970, for example, the
Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoags to select a speaker to mark the
350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. Frank James “was selected, but first he had to
show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw
what he had written, they would not allow him to read it.”77 James had written:

Today is a time of celebrating for you . . . but it is not a time of celebrating for me.
It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. . , . The
Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the
graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans, . . . Massasoit, the
grear leader of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yei he and his People welcomed and
befriended the settlers , . , , little knowing that. . . before 50 years were to pass, the
Wampanoags . . . and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns
or dead from diseases that we caught from them. . . . Although our way of life is almost
gone and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts.. .. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work toward
a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.

What the Massachusetts Department of Commerce censored was not some incendiary falsehood
but historical truth. Nothing James would have said, had he been allowed to speak, was
false, excepting the word wbeai. Our textbooks also omit the facts about grave robbing, Indian enslavement, the plague,
and so on, even though they were common knowledge in colonial New England. For at least
a century Puritan ministers thundered their interpretation of the meaning of the plague
from New England pulpits. Thus our popular history of the Pilgrims has not been a process
of gaining perspective but of deliberate forgetting. Instead of these important facts,
textbooks supply the feel-good minutiae of Squanto's helpfulness, his name, the fish in
the cornhills, sometimes even the menu and the number of Indians who attended the
prototypical first Thanksgiving,

I have focused here on untoward detail only because our histories have suppressed
everything awkward for so long. The Pilgrims' courage in setting forth in the late fall to
make their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed. In their first year the
Pilgrims, like the Indians, suffered from diseases, including scurvy and pneumonia; half
of them died. It was not immoral of the Pilgrims to have taken over Patuxet. They did not
cause the plague and were as baffled as to its origin as the stricken Indian villagers.
Massasoit was happy that the Pilgrims were using the bay, for the Patuxet, being dead, had
no more need for the site. Pilgrim-Indian relations started reasonably positively. Ply
mouth, unlike many other colonies, usually paid the Indians fot the land it took. In some
instances Europeans settled in Indian towns because Indians had invited them, as protection against another tribe or a nearby competing European power.79 In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England,
Russia, Indonesia, or Burundibut neither is it exceptionally less violent.

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive
history. If textbook authors feel compelled to give moral instruction, the way origin
myths have always done, they could accomplish this aim by' allowing students to learn both
the “good” and the “bad” sides of the Pilgrim tale. Conflict would then become part of the
story, and students might discover that the knowledge they gain has implications for their
lives today. Correct!

taught, the issues of the era of the first Thanksgiving could help Americans grow more
thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than more ethnocentric.

Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous. The genial
omissions and the invented details with which our textbooks retail the Pilgrim archetype
are close cousins of the overt censorship practiced by the Massachusetts Department of
Commerce in denying Frank James the right to speak. Surely, in history, “truth should be
held sacred, at whatever cost.”

To understand the making of Anglo-America is impossible without close and sustained
attention to its indigenous predecessors, allies, and nemeses.

James Axtell The invaders also anticipated, correctly, that other Europeans would question the morality
of their enterprise. They therefore [prepared] . . . quantities of propaganda to
overpower their own countrymen's scruples. The propaganda gradually took standard form as
an ideology with conventional assumptions and semantics. We live with it still.

Francis Jennings1 Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually,

memory yields.

Friedrich Nietzsche There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who does not cringe in anguish and
frustration because of these textbooks. There is not one Indian child who has not come
home in shame and tears.

Rupert Costo

Historically, American Indians have been the most lied-about subset of our population.
That's why Michael Dorris said that, in learning about Native Americans, “One does not
start from point zero, but from minus ten.”5 High school students start below zero because of their textbooks, which unapologetically
present Native Americans through white eyes. Today's textbooks should do better,
especially since what historians call Indian history (though really it is interracial) has
flowered in the last twenty years, and the information on which new textbooks might be
based currently rests on library shelves.

There has been some improvement in textbooks' treatment of Native peoples in recent years.
In 1961 the best-selling Rise of ih( American Nation contained ten illustrations featuring Native people, alone or with whites (of 268
illustrations); most of these pictures focused on the themes of primitive life and savage
warfare. Twenty-five years later, the retitled Triumph ofthe American Nation contained fifteen illustrations of Indians; more importantly, no longer were Native Ameri
cans depicted as one-dimensional primitives. Rather, they were people who participated
in struggles to preserve their identities and their land. Included were Metacomet (King
Philip), Crispus Attucks (first casualty of the Revolution, who was also part black in
ancestry), Sequoyah (who invented the Cherokee alphabet), and Navajo code-talkers in World
War II.

Nevertheless, the authors of American history textbooks “need a crash course in cultural
relativism and ethnic sensitivity,” according to James Axtell, who criticized textbooks in
1987 for still using such terms as half-breed, mdisacre, and war-whooping6 Reserving milder terms such as frontier initiative and settlers for whites is equally biased. Even worse are the authors' overall interpretations, which
continue to be 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.”

Our journey into the history of Indian peoples and their relations with European and
African invaders cannot be a happy excursion. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a
good time and see exotic cultures. “What we have done to the peoples who were living in
North America” is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin,”7 Ifwe look Indian history squarely in the eye, we are going to get red eyes. This is our
past, however, and we must acknowledge it. It is time for textbooks to send white children
home, if not with red eyes, at least with thought-provoking questions.

Today's textbooks at least try to be accurate about Indian culture. All but two of the
twelve textbooks I surveyed begin by devoting more than five pages to pre-contact Native
societies,8 And to their credit most of the textbooks recognize diversity among Native societies.
They tell about the League of Five Nations among the Iroquois in the Northeast, potlatches
among the Northwestern coastal Indians, cliff dwellings in the Southwest, and caste
divisions among the Natchez in the Southeast. In the process of presenting ten or twenty
different cultures in six or eight pages, however, the textbooks can hardly reach a high level of sophistication. So
they seize upon the unusual. No matter that the Choctaws were more numerous and played a
much larger role in American j history than the Natchezthey were also more ordinary.
Students will not find among the Native Americans portrayed in their history textbooks
many “regular folks” with whom they might identify.

American Indian societies pose a special problem for textbooks.9 The authors of history textbooks are consumers, not practitioners, of archaeology,
ethnobotany, linguistics, physical anthropology, folklore studies, cultural anthro
pology, ethnohistory, and other related disciplines. Scholars in these fields can j tell
us much, albeit tentatively, about what happened in the Americas before Europeans and
Africans arrived. Unfortunately, the authors of history textbooks j treat archaeology et
al. as dead disciplines to be mined for answers. These fields study dead people, to be
sure, but they are alive with controversy. Only The j American Adventure admits uncertainty: “This page may be out of date by the time it is read,” Adventure goes on to present claims that humans have been in the Americas for 12,000, 21,000, and
40,000 years. As a result, although Adventure \ is one of the oldest of the twelve textbooks, its pre-Columbian pages have not j gone out
of date.ia Most other textbooks retain their usual authoritative tone. On the matter
ofthefirsthumansettlementoftheAmericas,estimatesvaryfrom12,000years I before the present
to more than 70,000 B.P.11 Some scientists believe that the I original settlers came in successive waves over
thousands of years; genetic sitni! larities convince others that most Natives descended
from a single small band,lz The majority of the textbooks choose one position or the other and present it as
undisputed fact. Every textbook says something like this, from American History: “The water level of the oceans dropped sharply, exposing a land bridge between Asia and
North America.” Actually, while most scholars accept a “Beringia” crossing, actual
evidence is siim, so we cannot rule out boat crossings, accidental or purposeful. Even if the first Americans arrived on foot, they were just as surely explorers as
Columbus. Nonetheless, textbooks picture them as primitives, vaguely Neanderthalian.

This archetype of the primitive savage, not very bright, enmeshed in wars with nature and
other humans, drives some of the certainties that textbooks impose on the ancient past. American History tells of “the wanderers” who “moved slowly southward and to the east. . . . Many thousand
years passed before they had spread over all of North and South America” Actually, a
significant number of archaeologists believe that people reached most parts of the
Americas within a thousand years, too rapidly to allow easy archaeological determination
of the direction and timing of their migration. “They did not know that they were
exploring a new continent,” American History goes on, offering no evidence upon which to infer these early Americans' alleged igno
rance. The depiction of mental torpor persists as American History continues: “None of the groups made much progress in developing simple machines or
substituting mechanical or even animal power for their own muscle power.” In Europe and
Asia, most pre-1492 machines depended on horses, oxen, water buffalo, mules, or
cattlebeasts that were unknown in the Americas, after all.

American History then generalizes: “Those who planted seeds and cultivated the land instead of merely
hunting and gathering food were more secure and comfortable.” Apparently the author has
not encountered the “affluent primitive” theory, which persuaded anthropology some
twenty-five years ago that gatherer-hunters lived quite comfortably, American History completes the evolutionary stereotype: “These agricultural people were mostly peaceful,
though they could fight fiercely to protect their fields. The hunters and wanderers, on
the other hand, were quite warlike because their need to move about brought them
frequently into conflict with other groups.” Here the author betrays the influence of the
old savage-to-barbaric-to-civilized school dating back to L. H. Morgan and Karl Marx in
the last century. The authors of history textbooks may well have encountered such thinking
in anthropology courses when they were undergraduates; it is no longer taught today,
however. Decades ago, most anthropologists challenged the outmoded continuum, determining
that hunters and gatherers were relatively peaceful, compared to agriculturalists,

and that modern societies were more warlike still. Thus violence increases with
civilization.

Today's textbooks do confer civilization on some Natives. Like the Spanish conquistadors
themselves, The American Adventure equates wealth and civilization: “Unlike the noncivilized peoples of the Caribbean, the
Aztec were rich and prosperous.” Textbooks invariably put the civilization far away, in
Mexico, Guatemala, or Peru. By comparison, “Indian life in North America was less
advanced,” says The American Pageant. It seems thai, despite good intentions, textbooks cannot resist contrasting “primitive”
Americans with modern Europeans, Part of the problem is that the books are really
comparing rural America to urban Europe Massachusetts to London. Comparing Tenochtitlan
(now Mexico City) to rural Scotland might produce a very different impression, for when
Cortez arrived, Tenochtitlan was a city of 100,000 to 300,000 whose central market was so
busy and noisy “that it could be heard more than four miles away,” according to Bernal
Diaz, who accompanied him.14 Moreover, from the perspective of the average inhabitant, life may have been equally as
“advanced” and pleasant in Massachusetts or Scotland as in Aztec Mexico or London.

For a long time Native Americans have been rebuking textbook authors for reserving the
adjective civilized for European cultures. In 1927 an organization of Native leaders called the Grand
Council Fire of American Indians criticized textbooks as “unjust to the life of our
people.” They went on to ask, “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.”15 Even an appreciative treatment of Native cultures reinforces ethnocentrism so long as it
does not challenge the primitive-to-civilized continuum. This continuum inevitably
conflates the meaning of civilized in everyday conversation“refined or enlightened”with “having a complex division of
labor,” the only definition that anthropologists defend. When we consider the continuum
carefully, it immediately becomes problematic. Was the Third Reich civilized, for
instance? Most anthropologists would answer yes. In what ways do we prefer the civilized
Third Reich to the more primitive Arawak nation that Columbus encountered? If we refuse to
label the Third Reich civilized, are we not using the tetm to imply a certain comity? If
so, we must consider the Arawaks civilized, and we must also consider Columbus and his I
Spaniards primitive if not savage. Ironically, societies characterized by a complex
division oflabor are often marked by inequality and capable ofsupporting large specialized
armies. Precisely these “civilized” societies are likely to resort 10 savage violence in
their attempts to conquer “primitive” societies.

Thoughtless use of the “etherizing” terms civilized and trvilizttifm blocks any real inquiry into the world-view or social structure of the “uncivilized”
person or society. In 1990 President Bush condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait with the
words, “The entire civilized world is against Iraq”an irony, in that Iraq's Tigris and
Euphrates valleys are the earliest known seat of civilization.

After contact with Europeans and Africans, Indian societies changed rapidly. Native
Americans took into their cultures noi only guns, blankets, and kettles, but also new
foods, ways of building houses, and ideas from Christianity. Most American history
textbooks tell about the changes in only one group, the Plains Indians. Eight of the
twelve textbooks I surveyed mention the rapid efflorescence of this colorful culture
after the Spaniards introduced the horse to the American West. It is an exhilarating
example of syncretismblending elements oftwo different cultures to create something new.

The transformation in the Plains cultures, however, was only the tip of the
cultural-change iceberg. An even more profound metamorphosis occurred as Europeans linked
Native peoples to the developing world economy. Yet textbooks make no mention of this
process, despite the fact that it continues to affect formerly independent cultures in
the last half of our century. In the early 1970s, for example, Lapps in Norway replaced
their sled dogs with snowmobiles, only to find themselves vulnerable to Arab oil
embargoes.'" The process seems inevitable, hence perhaps is neither to be praised nor
decriedbut it should not be ignored, because it is crucial to understanding how Europeans
took over America,

In Atlantic North America, members of Indian nations possessed a variety of sophisticated
skills, from the ability to weave watertight baskets to an understanding of how certain
plants can be used to reduce pain. At first, Native Americans traded corn, beaver, fish,
sassafras, and other goods with the French, Dutch, and British, in return for axes,
blankets, cloth, beads, and kettles. Soon, however, Europeans persuaded Natives to
specialize in the fur and slave trades. Native Americans were better hunters and trappers
than Europeans, and with the guns the Europeans sold them, they became better still. Other
Native skills began to atrophy. Why spend hours making a watertight basket when in
one-tenth the time you could trap enough beavers to trade for a kettle? Even agriculture,
which the Native Americans had shown to the Europeans, declined, because it became easier
to trade for food than to grow it. Everyone acted in rational self-interest in joining
such a systemthat is, Native Americans were not mere victims because everyone's standard
ofliving improved, at least in theory.

Some of the rapid changes in eastern Indian societies exemplify syncretism. When the
Iroquois combined European guns and Native American tacRED EVES

tics to smash the Hurons, they controlled their own culture and chose which elements of
European culture to incorporate, which to modify, which to ignore. Native Americans
learned how to repair guns, cast bullets, build stronger forts, and fight to annihilate.19 Native Americans also became well known as linguists, often speaking two European
languages (French, English, Dutch, or Spanish) and at least two Indian languages, British
colonists sometimes used Natives as interpreters when dealing with the Spanish or French,
not just with other Native American nations.