Native Education Now! - Book Review: AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Reviewed by: Vaughn Mitchell

10/11/2022 Native Education Now! - Book Review: AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Reviewed by: Vaughn Mitchell 1 COMMENT Picture ​A video from the early 2021-22 school year displays a California math teacher teaching the popular trigonometry acronym SOH-CAH-TOA with a demonstration that clearly mocks Native dresses and dances. Her loud stomping, high-pitch chanting, and drawings of teepees on the whiteboards that represent right triangles could not serve as a more offensive caricature of Indigenous culture. Yet, more broadly, plenty of colonialist myths have permeated throughout American society that are acquired earlier on in school. “Maybe the Native Americans were destined to be overpowered, just look at how advanced their conquerors were.” “If anything, the Native Americans needed to be colonized; they weren’t civilized.” “You want to teach these kids about Native history? That’s Critical Race Theory!” These erroneous claims are a product of a culture that ignores the struggles of Native Americans felt throughout history and on reservations today. Perhaps one of the most genocidal campaigns of the United States was the forced assimilation and movement of Native Americans, a history of conquest seldom taught in today’s schools. In fact, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz aptly fills these gaps by describing the sophisticated languages, government structures, agricultural techniques, and living conditions of Native Americans pre-colonization in her book An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. For the future of understanding the colonialist project built on murder, torture, rape, war, stolen land, and myths to colonize Indigenous nations, a widespread revamp of educating American students is imperative to understand the truths about how Native people lived and how the U.S. government destroyed thriving cultures.

The typical argument against expanding the teaching of Native history is that such material is too violent and morbid for children to process and that it places indirect blame on the students for the unchangeable actions of the past. The extent to which Native history is taught in grade school mainly includes Columbus’ arrival and Thanksgiving, speaking from personal experience. As children, processing the dense history of Native conquest would be both cumbersome and tough to digest, but outright bans on such material have no place in realms of education. Governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis have signed anti-CRT legislation under the reasoning that it would make students feel “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” for learning about the actions of those who share their race or national origin. While this notion concedes the U.S. government’s role in the slaughter of Indigenous people, further education of students is necessary to clear simplistic understandings of Native history. In fact, disappointing research from Reclaiming Native Truth found that only 36% of Americans surveyed believe that Native people are significantly discriminated against. To put it simply, a lack of inclusion of Native history creates unintentional bias against Native Americans from people who don’t understand their struggle. In the case of many high schools throughout the country, a comprehension of what the Trial of Tears was simply does not suffice to understand the severity of their treatment over time.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers historical evidence beyond what’s included in the school curriculum that documents the brutal magnitude of Andrew Jackson’s operation. For instance, she includes a primary source from a Confederate general who described watching the forced migration when he was a younger volunteer as worse than anything he saw in the Civil War. “I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew,” (Dunbar-Ortiz 113). These minor tweaks added to school curriculum when teaching Native history are perfect for understanding the development of U.S. colonialism. They also hold great power in clearing cultural misconceptions about terms that find themselves woven into American culture. Dunbar-Ortiz examines the origins of the name “redskins”, the name of Washington’s NFL team until it was changed in 2020, which comes from the skinned bodies of Native people when colonial governments would place bounties on targeted natives (Dunbar-Ortiz 64-65). Bounty hunting in the early colonies acted as a lucrative trade wherein colonists were reimbursed if they showed proof of decapitation. Other myths such as placing false hostility on Native people to justify their assimilation and domination are also prevalent.

Later in history, as land was slowly taken by the U.S. government in the name of Manifest Destiny, assimilation campaigns began with the introduction of Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Created to “kill the Indian and “save the Man”, this boarding school entailed rampant sexual assault and forced assimilation of Native students according to Dunbar-Ortiz's primary sources from previous students. They were forced to forget their languages, wear Anglo-American clothes, and convert to Christianity. Former student Sun Elk testified, “We all wore white man’s clothes and ate white man’s food and went to white man’s churches and spoke white man’s talk,” (Dunbar-Ortiz 212). On the sexual assault topic, Indigenous women remember “We had many different teachers during those years; some got the girls pregnant and had to leave,” (Dunbar-Ortiz 213). Ultimately, elements essential to Natives and Native history were deliberately erased by the United States government, even to the extent of bodily autonomy. Because the current teaching of Native history is purposely simplistic to vindicate blame from the U.S. government, a new approach such as including Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People’s History of the United States in today’s curricula is indispensable for a better understanding of how Native Americans live today resulting from the colonial actions of the past.

With regards to how Native Americans are subject to abysmal living conditions in the modern day, an enhancement of modern curriculum to include Indigenous teachings is necessary. Sure, it can be understood that Native Americans face overwhelmingly low life expectancies, low standardized test scores, high unemployment rates, and high crime rates on reservations, but such statistics are meaningless without a historical analysis that provides a framework for understanding how they came to be. Take the current state of the Pine Ridge Reservation discussed by PBS Newshour. Nestled in the southern part of South Dakota’s Black Hills, the Pine Ridge Reservation faces among the worst socioeconomic barriers compared to the rest of the United States. Males, on average, live to about 48, and females live to about 52. Nearly half of people aged above 40 have diabetes, and unemployment rates lie above 80% throughout the region. Further evidence corroborates these statistics and characterizes the issue as all-encompassing of Native people instead of limiting to one reservation.