Category Archives: Teaching Native American History

Teaching Native American History

How the Teaching of American History in New York State Upholds Settler Colonialism

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If you spend any time listening to conservative critics of social studies education, you would think that American teachers do little but preach to their students “woke ideology.”  The Trump administration considered the problem so severe that the President issued an executive order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Education” in January of last year.

When it comes to Native American History, however, history teaching in very blue New York State is quite conservative, and it has had the unfortunate effect of upholding “settler colonialism.” This, despite efforts to be more inclusive and to incorporate Indigenous history into the curriculum. I base this conclusion on my own experience teaching Native American history in New York for over thirty years, and speaking with literally thousands of graduates of K-12 schools in the state.  I base it as well on my experience as the parent of five children, the oldest in his late thirties, the youngest a high school sophomore, and looking over their shoulders at the work they did in middle school and high school. 

One of the most important things New York’s history curriculum overlooks is the stark reality that New York could only have become the Empire State through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that at times, and in places, violated the laws of the United States. New Yorkers do not share this history with their students and it is time for educators to push back.

New York’s learning standards for the social sciences ask that students learn something about Indigenous peoples. In eleventh grade, when high school students study American history, they are asked to examine “European contact with Native Americans, including the Dutch, the English, the French and the Spanish” and to “examine the impacts of European colonization on Native Americans, who eventually lost much of their land and experienced a drastic decline in population through diseases and armed conflict.” As the course moves forward in time, “Students will examine the impacts of the Revolutionary War on workers, African Americans, women, and Native Americans.” Indigenous peoples do not appear again until Andrew Jackson becomes president, when students are asked to “examine Jackson’s presidency, noting the ways it strengthened presidential power yet challenged constitutional principles in the case of Worcester v. Georgia (1832), including the controversy concerning the Indian Removal Act and its implementation.” It is one of a small number of Supreme Court cases students are expected to understand. Students are also expected to study “the effect of federal policies on Native Americans” after the Civil, war, including “reservation policies, the Dawes Act (1887), and forced assimilation efforts (Carlisle Indian School).” That’s it, until World War II, when students will examine the “contributions” of Indigenous peoples to the war effort. For the era from the 1960s to the present, students should look at the “successes/limitations” of Native Americans during these years, “(e.g., American Indian Movement, Russell Means, native identity, sovereignty, and land claims).”

Perhaps the outcomes ask of teachers too much. It would be an extraordinary feat for a teacher to cover everything in the outcomes in a single academic year.  When it comes to Native American history, the outcomes have a broad, generic feel to them. They are general rather than specific, episodic rather than comprehensive. Importantly, they ask teachers to speak about the history of Indigenous peoples in national terms rather than presenting to students the history of Indians in the lands that became New York State. As a result, in the implementation of these learning standards, instead of teaching the history of Indigenous peoples in a truthful and responsible way, educators in New York for the most part spend too much of their time teaching subjects that are irrelevant and pernicious. We can and must do better.

It starts early, in elementary school. Children are taught about the “Three Sisters.” Many used to make model longhouses. The effect of this is that from an early age, children in New York are taught to see Indigenous peoples as part of the past. Every year, I have students in my classes who did not know that Indigenous people still existed. Obviously, this is a problem.  Ask a crowd of students to draw you a picture or describe an Indigenous person.  I think you can anticipate the sorts of images that will appear. Teepees and horses and bows and arrows; leather and feathers and beads. When you teach students that Native Americans are part of the past, you make it more difficult for them to take seriously the very real grievances of Indigenous peoples in the present.

It does not get better in later grades.  There is little meaningful discussion of the power of the Haudenosaunee—the League of Five and, later, Six Nations–that controlled nearly all of the land that became New York state during the eighteenth century.  Indeed, my students arrive at Geneseo with no knowledge of how Iroquoia became the Empire state. We could talk about the Declaration of Independence.  They may know a bit about the entirely uncontroversial preamble to the Declaration, but they know nothing of the specific grievances which make up the real heart of the document. “Merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions”: this line appears as the last of those grievances, along with the accusation that George III has stirred up “domestic insurrections amongst us.” Hostility to Indigenous peoples is inscribed in our national DNA.

The way the constitution is taught does little to help.  It appalls me, as I am sure it appalls many of you, that it is possible to graduate from college in New York state without having read the Constitution in its entirety at any point in a student’s educational career. Some teachers, meanwhile, still present to their students the “Iroquois influence thesis,” which seems to be making something of a comeback. The “Iroquois Influence” thesis has been around for a long time. The argument goes: The Founders learned from Haudenosaunee diplomats the strength and value of an unbreakable union. These lessons were offered at treaty grounds and councils, where native peoples and European newcomers met. The Iroquois presented a workable model of democracy and confederation for the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Although it isn’t true, the theory had purchase and became popularized. In 1988 the United States Senate even approved a resolution acknowledging “the contributions made by the Iroquois Confederacy . . . to the formation and development of the United States.”

In reality, the Iroquois League was not a democracy, but a place for ritual condolence and consultation among the League’s Five (and later) Six Nations. League sachems sought consensus but did not operate on the principle of majority rule.  There is little about the Iroquois League in myth and historical memory that resembles the winner-take-all approach to politics engaged in by the American founders and their successors. So the version of Iroquois history that became so popular was simply wrong. Moreover, history shows that at the time of the founding, there were plenty of existing models for the new government; many of the colonies had a single executive and bicameral legislatures.

The entire discussion suggests that the American founders were more enlightened than they really were, that they were willing to learn from the people the Declaration shows us that they encouraged their followers to hate. The Revolution was, for Indigenous peoples who controlled much of this state, a nightmare. American forces, fighting for their own freedom, had no qualms about denying other peoples this same unalienable right. They invaded Iroquois territory during the Revolutionary War. The results were horrifying. In April 1779, New York militia forces struck Onondaga, the very center of the Iroquois League, burning the town and scattering its people. Onondagas said that the American soldiers raped women and murdered their children. Students learn none of this in New York State. Several months later, an American army invaded the homelands of the Senecas and Cayugas, the two westernmost Iroquois nations.  They burned 40 towns, boundless orchards and crops in the field. They contributed to people’s forced dispersal and migration and an Iroquois diaspora that continues to this day, with Iroquois communities in two Canadian provinces and three American states. Almost none of my students have ever heard of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign against the Iroquois.

These soldiers hoped to “distract and terrify” the Haudenosaunee and, in General Washington’s own words, “extirpate them from the country.” Before they marched, the American soldiers drank a toast promising “civility or death to all American savages.” To Indians, the Founders were not freedom fighters but invaders and “perfidious” and cruel “White savages.” They knew White settlers not as champions of liberty but as “butchers,” “killers,” and “mad men.” They called them “Long Knives,” a terrifying name that reflected the violence with which they long had been associated. Do students in New York learn any of this? No. Not one bit.

Those Indigenous people who confronted the Founders and the citizens of the young republic feared that the Americans acted with genocidal intent, and they said it again and again. And they felt this way for good reason: One solution to the “Indian problem” confronting the new nation was, for some settlers, extermination, and groups of Americans expressed this desire frequently. They also acted on these words in ways that confirmed Native peoples’ worst nightmares: the slaughter of innocents carried out by the Paxton Boys late in 1763, for instance, or the massacre at Gnadenhütten in March 1782. Gnadenhütten means “Huts of Mercy.” But American soldiers showed no mercy to the Christian Indians who lived, prayed and worked at this mission town in what now is eastern Ohio. The soldiers surrounded them, held a vote and determined to kill them all, men, women and children. They killed babies. This was, for many Native peoples, what American democracy looked like. Genocidal violence has no place in the history that is taught to students in this state.

The Founders saw nothing in the culture and society of Indigenous people of value, beyond the occasional rhetorical prop they could wield to critique and distinguish themselves from a refined and effete Europe. At best, some believed that some Indians might possibly become something else. The republic’s first presidents all pursued policies designed to transform Indians into replicas of White America acceptable to White Americans. With proper teaching, they hoped, some might progress from savagery to civilization. They would blend into the American population and disappear. They would give up their culture, and also their land. 

Indigenous land became the means to pay continental soldiers. New York, for example, which grew and expanded across the Iroquois homeland, became the Empire State only through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession, its government financed from the sale of lands fraudulently and illegally acquired from Indigenous peoples. To say that Haudenosaunee people gave to White America the gift of democracy in the end rests on the flawed assumption that Americans were prepared to learn from Indigenous people in any meaningful way. And the proponents of this view do not realize how conservative it actually is: poring through the writings of the Founders, looking for scattered sentences that support their views. It ignores sources from Indigenous peoples, which tell the stories of the communities they lived in and the historical traumas they experienced, endured and survived. They ignore how the Haudenosaunee people resisted conquest and continued to defy those who sought their destruction and dispossession.

In so much of this nation’s tortured discourse on racism and inequality, we are crusaders on the cheap. We claim that the Iroquois influenced the Constitution, without discussing the very real ways that Constitution justifies a colonial regime that limits Native peoples’ powers over how their communities are governed. Even efforts to be inclusive misfire.

The discussion of removal is another good example of the problems with the way history is taught in New York state. The Removal era is specifically mentioned in New York’s social studies framework. The framework mentions Andrew Jackson’s defiance of the Worcester decision. My students all have heard the story of Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears.  This is understandable because the Cherokees managed to make the removal debates all about themselves.  But why do New York teachers tell their students about Cherokee Removal and not about the removal of Indigenous people from this state? Why do they not explain how Oneida communities relocated to Green Bay?

I used a phrase at the outset of this discussion: settler colonialism.  Teachers, I suspect, are probably familiar with concepts like extractive colonialism—the seizing of land outside the homeland for the purpose of exploiting resources that can enrich the mother country.  Settler colonialism is something different. Here, the resource is the land. An Australian scholar named Patrick Wolfe laid this out way back in an essay called “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” The elimination of the native, in this sense, can come through cultural genocide—what we in this country often call “assimilation”– or the literal elimination or extermination of Indigenous peoples.

You can make Andrew Jackson the villain in the story if you want to, but removal began before he came on the scene and continued after he was dead. It would have happened whether or not he was elected president. We denounce the Founders and their successors for their support of “Indian removal” from comfortable homes that sit on Native American land. We are only too willing to overlook our own complicity in historical injustice and the bloody birth of the American Republic by clinging to comforting myths about who and what we are. We won’t talk about dispossession, but we will talk about how the Iroquois taught us about freedom; Removal was horrible, but Andrew Jackson was responsible for that, and eventually we will manage to remove him from the twenty-dollar bill.  That will fix the problem.

My point is that in every instance where a choice is made about what to include or exclude in Native American history, the decision always is made in such a way that it insulates New Yorkers from blame or responsibility, conceals the coercion, violence, and deceit with which New Yorkers conducted themselves, and lies to children of this state about their past.

Let me give you another example. My students will have heard something about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.  It operated from 1879 to 1918.  It was the most well-known of the federally-supported boarding schools.  Most of them have seen the famous Choate postcards, before-and-after pictures taken of Carlisle students.  But not one of them has heard of the Thomas Asylum, later the Thomas School, which operated for more than a century on the Senecas’ Cattaraugus Reservation beginning in the 1850s. There are people alive today who attended the Thomas School.  New York was in the business of government-run boarding schools well before Congress got involved.

Some of my students will have heard of the Dawes Act, or the General Allotment Act of 1887. Important, right? The New York social studies framework says it is.  But the Dawes Act did not apply in New York State.  The state undertook its own programs of allotment beginning well before the General Allotment Act. It pursued the policy on its own. What is my point? Nearly every bad idea in the history of American Indian policy has had its origins in New York State. Termination, for instance, came to New York before it became the general policy of the United States in the 1950s.

So what do we do about this? Here’s why this matters. I like to remind the people to whom I speak that “termination” was the “Indian policy” of the United States when I was born. Progress has been slow, but it is real. When I started graduate school in 1990, Americans were beginning to plan for the Columbian Quincentennial, a celebration of the 500th anniversary of the “discovery of America.” Native activists, scholars, and their allies pushed back.  You can see the effects of their work. Columbus will never be celebrated again. His reputation has been entirely destroyed, whether or not Columbus Day is entirely replaced with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Progress unthinkable just a few short years ago is coming on many fronts.  Because of the often unheralded work of Indigenosu activists and their allies, Americans are increasingly aware of the 4200 unsolved cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women in the United States, and they are calling upon the government to act. In places, and in small amounts, land is being returned to Indigenous Nations, a product of the #LandBack movement. Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota recently returned several thousand acres to the Mille Lacs band. The Onondagas in New York received more than a thousand acres back. These are small steps addressing a big problem, but the achievements here are significant.

Meanwhile, the Seneca Nation of Indians is the second largest employer in Niagara County and Cattaraugus County. The Oneida Indian Nation in central New York spent more than $305 million in payroll and benefits in 2025, and $542 million more in capital spending making it a massive economic power in the region. Students in New York schools learn nothing about the economic, political, and social significance of Indigenous nations in New York today. As a result, they often know little about their neighbors.

Despite military invasion, waves of epidemic disease, an illegal campaign of dispossession, and systematic efforts to eradicate Haudenosaunee culture, Haudenosaunee peoples are still here. They are living on lands they have occupied since long before the United States was born.  The Onondagas and the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, who still live under a traditional form of league governance, are the only Indigenous communities east of the Mississippi still living on their homelands under a form of government that predates the arrival of European colonists.

            A couple of years ago, as I was finishing up the book I was writing about the Onondaga Nation, I met with several elders at the Nation’s office complex.  I told them that I was nearing completion, and that I was uncertain how I should bring this massive story to a close.  One of the clan mothers, bless her, told me the answer was simple.  Tell them, she said, that we are still here.

I think of this often, every time a student expresses surprise that Indigenous peoples still live in New York state, or when they come to me shocked that they had never heard before some part of the story of the Indigenous past that I had just shared with them in class. 

            A friend once told my wife that I was an angry historian.  I immediately dismissed this when she told me about this conversation, but maybe that dismissal was rash. Certainly I believe the state’s education system must do better if we are to create a more just, equitable, and historically informed population.  New York became the Empire State not through conquest but by carrying out a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession. In places, this process violated federal law. Dispossession was not a product of conquest. It was not natural. It was not inevitable. Nor was it the American Nation’s “Manifest Destiny.” In places it was quite simply a crime against the laws of the United States. Even when the United States acquired lands in a manner that was “legal,” the practices deployed by the land companies and their allies should repel people of conscience. They used deceit and coercion.  Nobody who has looked at the historical record will deny this.  We who own land in this state, as a result, are the beneficiaries of an unjust process of dispossession. That we do not teach our kids about this seems more than coincidental and more than convenient. We have run up an enormous debt. The question, for me, really is not a matter of whether or not this debt exists, but what am I, and what are you, going to do about it.  The Trump Administration can pass laws proscribing the teaching of certain subjects. A majority of white Americans will join them in dismissing what I have described above as “woke” history. 

But that’s not an answer. It’s not an argument. It’s an abdication, and an admission, in my mind, of complicity in a crime that too many people in this state are too unwilling to talk about. And the kids who attend school in this state learn nothing of this.  Maybe teachers and administrators and the people who write learning outcomes know no better. Maybe they, too, are products of an educational system in New York that conceals the state’s crimes against Indigenous peoples. I can be remarkably forgiving, and I travel around speaking to as many audiences as I can to spread the word.  But, on the other hand, I feel that it is their job to know better, to challenge entrenched injustices, and to teach curiosity, critical thinking, and the asking of tough questions.  And I do not think they are doing that job very well. Maybe the concealment is deliberate.  A tension has always existed between history as an academic discipline and history as part of a civic education that produces citizens informed, loyal and obedient.  It is easier to blame removal, for example, on Andrew Jackson, than to address one’s own complicity in so enormous a crime. And it seems like it remains more important to teach civic pride than critical history. Your kids are allowed to think critically about the past, as long as doing so does not reflect poorly on New York State.

Current Events, Teaching Native American History

The Uselessness of the Chronicle of Higher Education

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            Another week, and another set of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education from professors at elite, Ivy-League institutions ruminating on the problems afflicting American colleges and universities. It’s an old song, and I am getting a little tired of hearing it. Yet the beat goes on.

            Jonathan Zimmerman argued that professors have exacerbated the significant problems caused by Donald Trump. “We know that growing numbers of Americans have lost faith in us,” he writes, “and so we tell ourselves that they are racist, or anti-intellectual, or so blinded by the Trump cult that they cannot see how good we really are.” The big problem in higher education, Zimmerman says, is that colleges have abandoned the “academic social contract,” and the idea that “propelled us to build up universities in the first place—the cultivation of citizens.”

            Zimmerman argues that “despite our rhetorical commitment to ‘critical thinking,’ we typically present only one side of an issue—the left-wing side, almost always—and call it a day. Such a practice is not simply a reflection of political bias, although it is surely that,” Zimmerman writes. “It is also a mark of bad teaching.”

            These are serious concerns. A student in New York state, for instance, can graduate from their K-12 and college programs without ever having read the United States constitution. Constitutional, historical or civic illiteracy reached dangerous levels long ago.  But at my college we have a new Mellon-funded program in civics and higher education that is innovative and exciting.  (At the same time, we had to walk away from another grant that would have funded a civics program melding scholarship, creativity and action because the college lacked the resources to support it and, unfortunately, faculty in some departments were unwilling to teach in the program). Zimmerman feels that these programs, separate from the broader curriculum, like teaching awards and teaching and learning centers, suggest an insincerity about the pursuit where it takes place. 

            Certainly we offer courses in some departments that would undoubtedly cause Zimmerman to point his finger and say, “you see?” We have more classes on gender identity, race, and inequality than we offered in the past. By far. Our history department offerings are not a celebration of the past, but neither should they be. And history doesn’t always break along lines of “left” and “right.” We spend a lot of time, for instance, teaching students to avoid the cardinal sin of “presentism.” And the critics who assert that historians too often present only the “left-wing side” of a question fail to show two important things: first, that the charge is true and, second, that a particular interpretation of the past that may be considered “left-wing” is factually incorrect or interpretively unsound.  In my courses in Native American history, for example, I often teach material that might be considered “left-wing.” It is certainly critical of the well-documented hypocrisy and cruelty of the United States towards Indigenous peoples.  I get little criticism along partisan lines, however, and when I do, I ask two sets of questions: First, “How is this interpretation wrong? What about it makes it left or right?” And, second, “how would the right-wing substitute, if there is such a thing, be a more convincing, compelling, and persuasive alternative?” Don’t judge a course by its title, I would tell Zimmerman.  Don’t judge the academy based on a relatively small number of faculty members who do take fringe positions that they fail to support adequately with evidence.  And, most of all, do not judge small public colleges like mine by standards set in the Ivy League.  Zimmerman’s world is not like mine at all. We do more than he will ever know to uphold the academic social contract. 

Not Us.

            Meanwhile, Professor Samuel Moyn at Yale says that as a group “Professors are too old.” We apparently set ourselves up for Trump’s attacks by being openly partisan, and we are too old to get out of the way of the resulting blast.

            Between 2000 and 2010, Moyn argues, the number of faculty over the age of 65 has doubled. In those same years, he found, Harvard had more tenured faculty over the age of 60 than under 50. This has played a role in two of the crises he sees on college campuses.  It is hard to achieve intellectual diversity when you have a phalanx of greybeards guarding the ivory tower. But more than that, he argues, “as older professors stayed around, and enjoyed the benefits of guaranteed employment, younger academics were subjected to the casualization of faculty positions and the shrinking of major fields, especially in the humanities.” And we all know how badly this sucks.

            Moyn’s essay comes across as the work as someone who feels compelled to say something whether or not that contribution is of any value.  He largely ignores the macroeconomic forces at work in American life that make retirement seem like an elusive dream to most of us.  Many faculty work beyond thirty years at my college for two reasons: first, they genuinely love teaching, but also, because they simply cannot afford to retire. It is tough out there, and that might be hard to see from Moyn’s perch in New Haven.

Nope. Still not us.

            Meanwhile, significant cuts to funding in higher education leave many of us well aware that the positions we hold will not be filled when we depart. Moyn and Zimmerman might have made a stronger argument by suggesting that some colleges have become more liberal in granting tenure and promotion out of fear that if they deny these advances to a colleague, they will not get a replacement faculty line. Better to give tenure to an unproductive junior faculty member than risk doing without. In some ways, a colleague who cannot produce may be better than no colleague at all because they can still advise students, serve on committees and teach a few courses.

            These problems are not directly caused by faculty. Indeed, these are the products of a world where state legislators do too little to fund their systems of public higher education, which often in the past were far more accessible and affordable than they are now.  I could attend college and pay my way on part-time jobs. (And even then, I was fortunate to have a family that helped me).  Now, it is nearly impossible for a student to work their way through school.  It costs too much.  The system is at a breaking point.  It is a remarkably stupid self-own by our political leaders, the largest and loudest of whom has proudly proclaimed how he loves the poorly-educated.

But neither Moyn nor Zimmerman have much to say about these problems.  Yale, Penn, Harvard and Columbia: they do not stand for American higher education. They serve a tiny portion of the nation’s most elite students. Their faculty teach less and have far more resources than their peers at colleges like mine.  Meanwhile, if they visited my school they might see that the age of the faculty is hardly a problem at all. Many of those teaching are adjuncts fresh out of grad school.  If I had a dollar for every time someone lamented the leftward leaning of higher education, well, I still wouldn’t be able to retire, but I would be substantially better off than I am now.  If they visited, and followed me around for the day, they would not be able to show me how my own biases aid the Trump regime and leave the families of the students I teach disenchanted.  But, perhaps, they would see that funding cuts to American higher education, by administrations both Democratic and Republican, are doing enormous damage to colleges and universities.  Majors at some public schools are eliminated. Departments are collapsed into one another. Growing numbers of courses are taught by contingent faculty, without benefits, with poor pay, and without the resources to commit much more to their college community than showing up to teach. Institutionally, we are starving, and that affects creativity, productivity, innovation and morale.  And it could all be so easily reversed. 

            I remember once a colleague who taught at an elite private university complaining that her faculty travel budget had not been replenished quickly enough.  I posted a reply: “What is a travel budget?”  Though all of my teaching career has been spent at public colleges, I suspect that the problems affecting higher education are very different depending on your perspective, and that they obviously look very different from the Ivy League than they do from the sort of college where I teach, and where the majority of American students study. We need to stop blaming the faculty for the problems afflicting higher education, just as we need to stop blaming K-12 teachers for the problems in their schools.  Imagine a bunch of professors, drowning in high seas needlessly churned up by short-sighted and malicious politicians who either fail to see the value of higher education or fear it.  The last thing we need to hear, as we struggle to hold our heads above water, is “maybe you shouldn’t have made them angry by telling the truth” or “it would be nicer if you were not so old.” Thanks, guys, and thank you Chronicle of Higher Education. I appreciate all your help.

Teaching Native American History

We Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

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Two stories. Both of them are true. One the Trump administration has chosen to commemorate as part of the American nation’s 250th birthday celebration; the other it wants unremembered, proscribed, and erased.  Let’s see if you can guess which one is which.

            In the winter of 1777-1778, George Washington’s army camped at Valley Forge. A short distance away, the British occupied Philadelphia, living in relative comfort. The Continental Army, meanwhile, was starving, and its morale reached rock-bottom.  The patriot’s revolution was in grave danger.

            In the spring, help arrived. Forty-seven Oneidas, including the redoubtable Polly Cooper, arrived from what is today central New York. They brought with them bushels of Iroquois corn. According to Georgia Halbritter, relating Oneida oral history, “Cooper worked for George Washington, showing the Americans how to cook the corn properly.” Washington wanted to pay Cooper, the story goes, but she refused because, Halbritter said, “it was her duty to serve her country.” So, after the war, Washington sent his wife Martha, along with Polly, on a shopping trip in Philadelphia.  The future first lady bought Cooper a black shawl, a hat, and a bonnet.  As historian Karim Tiro pointed out, “the documentary record bears out some of the story’s details but is silent in regard to others.” Still, he suggested, it’s a powerful metaphor for the Oneidas’ costly yet highly significant contribution to the patriot cause.

FAR TO THE WEST of the Oneida homeland, the so-called “Great Sioux War” began in America’s centennial year. Many Lakota Sioux spent part of the year on the Great Sioux Reservation but moved out onto the Plains of eastern Montana to hunt in the spring and summer. They resented the American failure to adhere to the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which guaranteed them exclusive control of their land, and especially the hordes of prospectors who began to intrude into the Black Hills following gold strikes there in 1874. The Lakotas ignored demands that they return to their reservation—why should they honor a treaty that the white people had ignored—and by the spring of 1876, four army columns began marching toward the Powder River Country to force the Sioux to return.

Much of the fighting that followed took place in Crow country in eastern Montana. With the removal of the forts along the Bozeman Trail several years earlier, no American military presence remained to prevent Sioux encroachment on lands to their west. Conflict between the Sioux and the Crows increased, and the size and scope of this warfare intensified. Plenty Coups, the great Crow leader who oversaw his people’s adjustment to reservation life, remembered that he and his followers “knew the white men were strong, without number in their own country, and that there was no good in fighting them.” The Crows calculated their best interest, and that meant assisting the American forces. “Our leading chiefs,” Plenty Coups said, “saw that to help the white men fight their enemies and ours would make them our friends.” Already at war with the Sioux and their allies, they might as well fight them now with the assistance of the Americans. “Our decision was reached,” Plenty Coups concluded, “not because we loved the white man who was already crowding the other tribes into our country, or because we hated the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho, but because we plainly saw that this course was the only one which might save our beautiful country for us.”

The Crow leaders recognized that the Americans faced a formidable enemy. Large numbers of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors gathered in the Little Bighorn Basin, led by such stalwart leaders as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall, Hump, and Lame Deer. On June 17, 1876, warriors led by Crazy Horse forced the American column led by General George Crook to withdraw at the Battle of the Rosebud. Crow horsemen formed a screen that shielded Crook’s men from Crazy Horse’s warriors and bought them the time they needed to withdraw. Eight days later, an American force led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer foolishly attacked the village along the Little Bighorn. Two thousand warriors camped there. They determined to defendthemselves and their families. Custer had no idea what he had stumbled into. Depicted so often in American myth as a famous “Last Stand,” Custer’s defeat was a rout. The Sioux and their Cheyenne allies mowed them down as they fled from a village so much larger than they had anticipated. The Sioux wiped out Custer’s command in the time, one Sioux observer later noted, that it took a hungry man to eat his dinner. Only Custer’s Crow and Arikara scouts, who recognized the power of the Sioux, survived.

The Lakotas won the battle, but they lost the war. Once again, winter campaigns drove the Sioux and their allies back the reservation. By the spring of 1877, most had returned. Crazy Horse surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency in May. He died four months later, stabbed to death during a guardhouse scuffle. Sitting Bull, who had fled across the border into Canada, held out until 1881, before he returned.

THE ONEIDAS were the Americans’ most important Indigenous ally, but they benefited little from their alliance. While the United States, in the 1784 treaty with the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix, promised to protect the Oneidas, the state of New York moved expeditiously to dispossess them. No holds were barred. The records of state treaty councils, where this dispossession took place, show clearly evidence of fraud and deceit. By the middle of the 19th century, the Oneidas retained only a couple of dozen acres of land and many of their people had accepted “removal” to new homes in Wisconsin where they hoped to avoid the racists and land grabbers who would take whatever the Oneidas refused to sell.

            None of that sordid history has kept the US Mint from placing Polly Cooper, shown presenting corn to General Washington, on the tails side of the 2026 Sacagawea dollar. The Native American $1 Coin Collection was authorized by Congress in 2007 to commemorate the historic contribution of Indigenous nations and individuals to American culture. As Cherokee Nation member and Republican senator Markwayne Mullin put it, the coins are intended to celebrate “those who helped establish a country grounded in freedom and self-determination.”

            Representative of the Oneida Indian Nation Ray Halbritter said that “Polly Cooper symbolizes courage that is not just found on the battlefield, but in compassion and willingness to help others, which is just a part of Oneida culture and hospitality.” Cooper, he continued, was an important forgotten ally. “The whole country,” Halbritter said, “reaps the benefit of Polly Cooper’s conduct because we won the conflict and the United States was born.” That, it went without saying, was a story worthy of commemoration.

I HAVE BEEN TO LITTLE BIGHORN NATIONAL MONUMENT many times. When I taught in Billings, I could get there in just over an hour.  As many as 350,000 people visit the site of Custer’s “Last Stand” every year.  The talented National Park Service employees who work there have attempted over the years to provide more of the Indigenous side of the story.  And that always has met with resistance. According to reporting that originally appeared in the Washington Post, signage at Little Bighorn that described American land hunger, territorial encroachment by gold-seeking whites on reservation land, and a federal boarding school system that “violently erased cultural identities and language” was removed because it did not comply with President Trump’s executive order from March of last year intended to restore “truth and sanity to American History.” In particular, Trump denounced a “revisionist movement” led by radical leftists who sought “to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision,” Trump continued, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Last week signage in Philadelphia outside the home where George Washington stayed during the Constitutional Convention describing the important role of slavery in the first President’s life was taken down as well.

We must not think bad thoughts.

And the sins we choose to forget can never be forgiven.

SOMETIMES I THINK THE UNITED STATES hates Indigenous peoples. It does so in ways that it does not fully comprehend. Americans may celebrate Indigenous contributions to America’s greatness. Both political parties express their support for “self-determination.” Many good people work for the federal government, and they do much good work even as fascists have seized control, who may talk of collaboration, but only to the point where it begins to cost them something.  Colleges and universities, meanwhile, revel in empty gestures, supporting a shallow “diversity” while reading “territorial acknowledgments” in rooms filled with white people. Too often they fall victim to ethnic frauds and “Pretendians”: Elizabeth Warren, Andrea Smith, Thomas King, and Lisa Brooks are just a handful of recent examples. They routinely fail to put their money where their mouths are, to match their words with deeds. When too many of your allies are at best crusaders on the cheap, and your enemies are the white supremacists who control all three branches of the federal government, it is easy to see the magnitude of the problem.  So the United States will celebrate Polly Cooper, who is historically significant–and acceptable to white Americans–primarily because she helped carry some corn to a starving army that fought the British, we must remember, at least in part out of their anger that King George III unleashed the “merciless Indian savages” upon American frontiers. Try to talk about violence and dispossession, how the Oneidas’ neighbors transformed New York into the Empire State through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession, and you will find yourself in trouble.  So teachers in very blue New York State are allowed and encouraged to tell their students about the Cherokees’ expulsion from Georgia, but not how their own state used bribery, coercion, and deceit to steal a homeland. They will never consider that their families have benefited from dispossession. It’s a problem bigger than liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. As Onondaga sachem Irving Powless, Jr. put it more than fifty years ago to a state legislative committee that visited his Nation, “the Indian problem is the white people.”

            One cannot truly and meaningfully comprehend the history of this continent without considering Indigenous peoples’ histories, across a vast and diverse chronological and spatial expanse. But unless these stories make white people feel good about themselves, teaching them is proscribed. Do not dare suggest that what this country has gained came at the expense of Indigenous peoples.

            It’s all so screwed up.  The Trump regime acts like a wife beater, a domestic abuser. ICE invades American cities and blames the protestors for the beatings its agents deliver. They don’t show proper respect, we are told. Indigenous peoples, who have been stopped by ICE agents because of the mere color of their skin, are welcome to the national dialogue, but only if they refuse to remind the majority of the sins of its ancestors, and its own. Democrats, meanwhile, act like they disapprove of the beatings their neighbor gives his wife and kids, but are too afraid to do what they know is right. White Americans, meanwhile, nearly sixty percent of whom voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and, incredibly, in 2024, mostly continue to express their sympathy for the guy who hurt his fist because he punched his wife.

Teaching Native American History

We Need to Talk About Genocide When We Teach Native American History

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            Bret Stephens wrote a piece in the New York Times a while back in which he asserted that what Israel is doing to Palestinians, despite its violence and the enormous loss of life, does not constitute genocide. Stephens’ logic is familiar to those of us who teach Native American history. Written under a headline that reeks of condescension, (“No. Israel is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza”) Stephens mounts several familiar arguments.

            If the Israelis really were acting with genocidal intent, why hasn’t their offensive in Gaza “been more methodical and vastly more deadly?” If it wanted to, Stephens argued, Israel could wipe Gaza off the map. It hasn’t, he says. “In short,” he writes, “the first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: why isn’t the death count higher?”

            Stephens can’t help himself. You see it, don’t you? He cannot write without dismissing the seriousness of the other side’s views. What he calls the “anti-Israel genocide chorus,” to others might more accurately be called “humanitarians,” or “people who think it is wrong to murder children or starve civilians.”  He does not care about what you think.

            Stephens next tries to make his case by relying on a strictly literal reading of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, which says that genocide is “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such”. Genocide, Stephens argues, does not mean “too many civilian deaths,” which he sees as just another unfortunate consequence of warfare.  Genocide, Stephens argues, is what the Nazis and Hutus of Rwanda did—they systematically tried to kill every person in a certain target population.  Israel is not doing that, he says, but Hamas surely did when it attacked young Israelis attending a music festival.  There are no death camps in Gaza, Stephens seems to suggest, and because of that, the Israelis cannot be considered guilty of genocide.

Stephens next dismisses what he sees as a “handful of remarks by a few Israeli politicians dehumanizing Gazans and promising brutal retaliation,” as inadequate to prove genocidal intent. But it wasn’t a handful of statements, a fact of which Stephens is surely aware. It was five hundred statements. Defense Minister Yoan Gallant called the Palestinians “animals.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Gaza “a city of evil,” its residents “monsters.” “This is a battle, not only of Israel against these barbarians, it is a battle of civilization against barbarism.” Nor is it only a matter of Israel’s words. The U.N. Convention, created after the World War II, saw genocide as more than killing, but also an attempt at “causing serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group,” or inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” You cannot watch the news and not see actions that meet these definitions. Gaza has been destroyed, its population is dead, gone or starving.

            And here’s another point. Stephens does not believe Israel is committing genocide. Many politicians in both parties would agree with him. Those people would also be unwilling to admit that America’s historic treatment of Indigenous people was genocidal. They quote the UN Convention. They think of what the Nazis did.  Nope, they say, this is not that.

            I have a different approach. At the American Society for Ethnohistory Conference in Florida in November of 2023, a colleague who I respect deeply asked me, quietly, “you’re going to talk about it, aren’t you?” Israel had just begun its campaign of retaliation, and we both heard how familiar the Israeli statements sounded. What Israelis said, blood-thirsty Americans said as well, before they launched their assaults on Indigenous people. So in my Native American survey course, we talk about genocide. How could we not? My students read Jeff Ostler’s fantastic essay that appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly back in 2015. Ostler cut through much of the debate over whether American conduct towards Indians was genocidal or not.  Listen to Indigenous peoples, Ostler said. They believed that the British, and then the Americans, operated with genocidal intent. Americans said it again and again, and they acted on those words just enough to make the belief that white people wanted to kill all Indians plausible.

            My plea is for people like Stephens to listen less to the perpetrators of violence, and certainly to take seriously those who denounce the actions of Israeli forces. Listen to those on the receiving end. Take what they say to heart. Stephens and those who share his views can strictly scrutinize the UN Convention, and quibble over the meaning of words, or they can simply listen to the people living in Gaza. I do not feel myself bound by the UN definition, written almost seventy-five years ago as people tried to make sense of a form of evil that remains still too common. Like so many Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Gazans are saying that the Israelis are killing us, with bullets, bombs, and now starvation. “They are killing us,” people in Gaza say. “They want us dead.” Who, watching what has happened over the past two years, can say that is an unreasonable assessment of their reality.  Israel is doing in Gaza what historians of Indigenous America have seen before. There is no excuse. It is vicious. And it needs to stop now.

Teaching Native American History

An Appreciation of Stan Grant

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As I make plans to teach my Indigenous Law and Public Policy course in Australia in December and January of 2026-2027, I have been reading what I can on the history of its Indigenous peoples. I have learned a lot, benefited from the reading, and become aware of parallels in the history of Indigenous peoples in North America and Oceania which are new to me. I am glad I am doing this work. It is good to be learning something new. Perhaps because I have spent so much more time this summer on the Pacific coast, my interests have been pulled westward.

            One of the books that has stuck with me is Stan Grant’s Talking to My Country, first published back in 2016. A former CNN journalist, well-respected in Australia, Grant came of age in a nation carved from the lands of aboriginal peoples it had murdered and otherwise attempted to erase. He wrote as Australia confronted, incompletely, its past and moved slowly towards “reconciliation,” itself a fraught and contested topic.

            Grant hoped to explain to Australians how he viewed “the Australian Dream.” At its worst, he wrote, it is a story of “babies buried in the sun and decapitated, women raped, men killed as they hid in the forks of trees, waterholes poisoned, flour laced with arsenic.” His ancestors faced genocidal violence. But they also faced the attempts to erase those who survived the slaughter and the epidemics. After the initial invasion, he wrote, “the Australian Dream abandoned us to rot on government missions, tore apart families, condemned us to poverty.” Grant recalls his community’s struggles in terms that are clear and urgent. “There was no place for us in this modern country and everything we have won has come from dissent, it has been taken from the reluctant grasp of a nation that for much of its history hoped that we would disappear”(25-26).

            Saying this in an American classroom in the dark age of Trump could get a teacher in trouble. The conditions Grant describes clearly transcend Australia’s bounds. “Being good and great,” he writes, “does not absolve you from a terrible sin, and a pain inflicted on a people who did nothing to deserve it. Remember that: the first people of this land, who have suffered for your greatness did nothing to deserve it.” And, Grant says, “a truly great country—if we truly believe that—should be held to great account”(26).

            He’s right. It’s one of many ways that MAGA movement is doing nothing to make the United States great. I would love to see American leaders engage with so powerfully stated an argument.

            Australians, like Americans, tell lies about their country’s past. Students learn stories in both countries of white people’s bravery and conquest of a wilderness but not the costs extracted from those in colonialism’s line of fire. The records to tell the truth about the Australian past, as in the US, are not hard to find. The accounts are clear and available. Grant discusses the work of some of the first Australians who described the Indigenous people the settlers encountered. They reveal the barbarism with which white people treated Australian natives: “food left out to lure the blacks who were then gunned down; hunting parties formed to drive black men, women and children over cliffs to their deaths. White observers, in Australia as in the United States embraced “the slow certainty of expected extinction” when they wrote about aboriginal peoples.

            Americans still tend to view Indigenous peoples as part of the past.  Donald Trump’s efforts to stir up white resentment by protecting Native American mascots in Massapequa and, more recently, in a discussion that mentioned the Cleveland Guardians and Washington Commanders, makes this intractable problem even worse.  And viewing Indigenous people as part of the past makes it more difficult for uninformed Americans to take seriously their very real grievances in the present.  Australian and American historians are doing wonderful work to uncover the past and make connections with the present, but so little of this is taught in schools in the two countries, and the public has been slow to absorb this knowledge. 

            Grant wants his readers to know what it has been like. He has written “a story so essential and salutary to this place that it should be given out free at the ballot box,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald. His family, Grant wrote, has “felt the brutality of Australia.” Indigenous people in North America would nod their heads in agreement, I believe.

“We have had our land—our inheritance—stolen. Our language was banned. Our children have been taken away. We have been herded onto missions. We have been forced onto the margins of society. We have lived in tin humpies and tents. We have been powerless before the state. Welfare officers and police have invaded our lives at will.”

Grant continues. “The weight of history in Australia suffocated us,” he wrote. “Our history leaves its marks on our bodies and our souls.” He is not the first person to make this observation. When I have taught this class in the past I have used Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian and Harold Napoleon’s Yuuyaraq. But he makes that point very, very well.

            It is so easy to walk through Australia and be blind to all of this, Grant writes, and he remains surprised by how often people approach him to say that they just did not know. If you teach or write about Native American history, you likely have heard similar things. Sometimes the people who say this are angry and feel betrayed by an educational system that has lied to them in the name of serving the interests of a nation jaggedly carved from Indigenous land. Others seek some sort of absolution. I did not have anything to do with it, they may as well say, even though the evidence is right there in front of them if they choose to look, and even though they remain the beneficiaries of their nation’s original sins.

Teaching Native American History

Resist

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Donald Trump is indeed “flooding the zone” with unconstitutional executive orders drawn directly from the pages of the chilling Project 2025 playbook.

Two days ago, on January 29th, President Trump reestablished the “1776 Commission,” which he first ordered into existence in November of 2020. A council of hacks and weirdos, still utterly transfixed by the late Howard Zinn, the commission released a cursory report in January of 2021. In its current iteration, it will promote what the Trump administration ominously calls “Patriotic education.”

This all is part of an executive order “ending racial indoctrination in K-12 schools,” that for strange reasons spends a great deal of time punching down on transgender youth and the adults who care for and about these kids. But it also calls for the elimination of federal funding for schools that defy Trump’s edict. Patriotic education, the order reads, will include an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.” Patriotic education will consist of “a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history,” and promote “the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper.” Criticize the republic, and you can wind up in trouble As I asked two years ago, when might we expect the book-burning to begin?

Though no specific examples are cited, much indeed seems to be at stake. “In recent years,” the order reads, “parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight.” As a result, “innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.”

Good Lord! That sounds terrible! It is also, plain and simple, a dangerous load of horseshit.

I am not a patriotic educator. I believe that America is a racist country, that inequality is hard-wired into the system, and in my classes we discuss the historic roots of these problems. How can we fix them, after all, without understanding them? To do any less would be historical malpractice. I suggest to my students that after the passage of 250 years, if we have not yet lived up to our “noble principles,” perhaps we do not hold those principles very closely at all. The same document that proclaims that “all men are created equal” denounces the “Indian savages” who fought to defend their homelands from white invasion and enslaved peoples who, from the beginning of this nation, pointed out the yawning gap between American ideals and reality and the emptiness of its founding rhetoric. The Founders, hardly a god-like group, created a constitution that counted enslaved people as 3/5 of a human being, and that would solve its financial problems through the massive expropriation of Indigenous land.

We should not laugh off these attacks on the integrity of our work. It is time to push back, and push back hard. It is not the job of the historian, we might suggest, to make you feel food about the past, to tell you comforting myths, that if this country just keeps trying, it just might get things right. It is, in fact, our job to point out how this administration is playing a very old game by trying to cement inequality in place, to uphold white supremacy, and that racism, in the country’s past and in this administration’s present, is fundamental to the story of the United States. Saying that, under this executive order, is now illegal.

There always has been tension between history-as-patriotic-education and history as an academic discipline that asks critical questions about the past and examines in a systematic manner processes of continuity and change, measured across time, in peoples, institutions and cultures. Teachers at the K-12 level wrestle with these tensions far more directly than do most college history professors. But we need to be involved. Talk to a history professor. Chances are she or he will tell you about the many times students have approached after class, and expressed their amazement and disappointment that nobody had taught them this material before. College students learn many things, but one of those is the lies they were told in high school. It happens in my Native American history class nearly every semester: students who attend school in New York State, for instance, learn about Cherokee Removal, but nothing about their state’s treatment, and removal, of much of its own Indigenous population. Even Deep Blue New York conceals from its students the truth of its own campaigns of dispossession, its own efforts to eradicate Indigenous peoples.

If you have followed the Right’s war on history, there is nothing new in this order. These perverts are obsessed with students’ sexuality; these racists are determined to halt discussions of race and inequality. They are working with determination to secure white supremacy and white privilege by outlawing any educator who teaches that “the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory.”

The Trump Administration demands that teachers lie about this country’s past. For Trump and his followers, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. If they can convince you to believe that this country past is different than what the documents clearly show, the can claim that what has always been unjust is just, what has always been exploitative is fair, and what has always been explicitly evil is good. On those rare occasions when they concede a shortcoming, they say we have never failed because we have not yet finished trying to fix problems that ought to have been fixed generations ago.

If Trump’s friends read this, they will say that I am part of the problem, that if I just stuck to the facts in my classes, and if I left out my biases, my revisionist inclinations, and my “anti-American ideas,” all would be well. I would challenge these people to point out something in a book that I have written, or a class I have given, that is factually incorrect. Fight back, my friends. Don’t let these fascists and trolls denigrate your vital work. Don’t stop teaching your students to ask tough questions, to search relentlessly for answers, to demand to see the evidence, and show courage in the face of those who despise them and the work you are teaching them to do.

There is a lot that is great in this country. Its political system and governing class are not. I’m not interested in unverifiable assertions that the United States is the greatest country on earth–we seem to lead the world only in military spending, women’s basketball, and the mass incarceration of people of color. The Trumpzis are entitled to their opinions. But let me just say this: if you have to lie to young people to get them to accept your vision for what this country is and ought to be, the problem is not disloyal or treasonous teachers. It’s you, and your ideas about this nation and its history.

Teaching Native American History

An “Unfinished Revolution” May Not Be Much of a Revolution At All

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            According to a recent story by Kathleen Moore that appeared in the Albany Times-Union last week, the State Board of Regents had a chance to look at the new way the New York State Parks department will depict the American Revolution.  The parks department’s new displays at several sites will “include powerful new videos detailing the lives of unheard people from that time.” One of the videos, which focuses on the struggles of an Oneida woman who fought the colonists in hopes of keeping her Nation’s land, ends with a black screen with the following words: “Since its founding, the United States has never upheld a treaty made with an Indigenous Nation.”

            That’s a provocative claim. (And a complicated one, but that’s another story.) In all, there are forty videos, which have not yet been released to the public.  The Board of Regents “immediately praised the new pieces, but worried that they would get another deluge of criticism similar to what happened when they approved diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.” They will need to be brave, and the Regents are readying themselves for combat. According to Chancellor Lester Young, Jr., “we are the body that is responsible for the education of all students and it’s important that we maintain the courage to do what’s right.”

            “The new way of viewing the Revolution, as designed by the State Education Department’s Office of Cultural Education and the State Parks Department is called ‘The Unfinished Revolution.’” The Revolution was “incomplete” in that it “did not include women as voters, obviously enslavement was allowed for decades, so how do we grapple with that history?” That is what Devin Lander, the New York State Historian, said when he spoke with Moore.  “The idea,” writes Moore, “is to see the revolution as the impetus for 250 years of striving to meet the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.”

Think about that. 

250 years.

Two and a half centuries.

A quarter of a millennium.

It’s a long time.  We have yet to fulfill the ideals of the Declaration after 250 years.

Maybe we are just not that into the so-called “ideals” of the Declaration. After all, Jefferson’s Declaration also expressed that nasty old hypocrite’s anger that the King was stirring up slave rebellion and bringing down upon the frontiers the “merciless Indian Savages.” Jefferson and the other “Founding Fathers” baked hatred of the other into the American Nation’s founding documents.

Framing the Revolution as “unfinished” will leave students ill-equipped to explain how it was that our supposedly ruthless imperial overlords in Britain managed to abolish slavery and recognize the right of women to vote well before the United States.  It may seem to these students that the enemies of the principles laid out in the Declaration were quicker to realize them than our new “Empire for Liberty.” That might seem strange to them, a real head-scratcher.

The Board of Regents requires that students in New York learn about Cherokee Removal.  The notion that New York could not have become the Empire State without a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that, at times and places, violated federal law will never be mentioned.  That New York continues to attempt to skim the cream from the barest hint of prosperity that comes to Indigenous nations in the state will never be mentioned. Continued treaty violations, today, are never addressed.  Hochul and Cuomo, both Democrats, were as bad as the Republican George Pataki.

That white New Yorkers, today, are the beneficiaries of this process of dispossession is as heretical a doctrine to racist dingbats as it is to the Board of Regents, who hardly are as courageous as they would like to believe.

In the last election, nearly 75 million people voted for a dim-witted tyrant whose followers, at a convention broadcast on national TV, held pre-printed poster with the slogan, “Mass Deportation Now!” The Republican Presidential candidate and his running mate repeatedly state the known falsehood that immigrants are eating dogs and cats. It’s a vile, racist, lie. And they do not stop. Police violence against people of color is an American reality. I read the history of the past 250 years and it is overwhelming.  The few occasions where this country’s leaders stood up for justice and equality came because people of color compelled them to do so. Maybe, just maybe, we do not value freedom and equality for all Americans. Many of us—too many—are comfortable with deeply entrenched inequality in American life.  Too many people turn away from too much injustice.  That, I am sorry to say, is a beat that runs through much of American history like a throbbing wail.  So instead of saying outright, that we have failed to create a just and decent society, we claim that despite the passage of 250 years, we continue to strive to live up to the ideals of an enslaver who could turn a nice phrase.  We have not failed because we have not had a chance to fail even though 250 years have passed and we have not succeeded. An unfinished revolution, you see, may not be much of a revolution at all.

Teaching Native American History

Rules for Historical Writing.

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I am marking some final papers this semester. Research. It is such a difficult thing to do, harder even than the students know. To start from nothing, and over the course of 15 weeks read enough to frame a meaningful question, to dive into secondary works that might be difficult for students to read, and, of course, primary sources, which can be extremely challenging. I tell them how difficult the process is. I tell them, half jokingly, that because we give ourselves seven years to write something meaningful and they have just a couple of months, in a way we hold our students to standards higher than we hold ourselves, especially as the demand on faculty to publish has become, sadly and apparently, old school. So some advice. This is not exhaustive. You might not like it. You might find it really helpful. If you want, place your own suggestions in the comments. I would love to read about how you help your students do this difficult work.

  1.  All historical writing begins with a question.  All good historical writing answers that question.  All good historical writing contains a thesis or an argument.  A sound thesis will provide an answer to the question under investigation briefly, in a sentence or two.  The rest of the text, whether it is a term paper, a dissertation, an article or a book, will demonstrate how that one sentence thesis is true.
  2. Some questions are better than others. Ideally, you will ask a new question, or answer an old question in a new way, or apply a broad question to a more narrow case where you can become an expert over that small piece of a larger whole. We value your perspectives and trust your creativity. When we read your papers, we hope to learn from you.
  3. All good historians read the footnotes or endnotes. Indeed, we are the people who read the notes.  We take notes on the footnotes, making sure we record sources, primary and secondary, that may be useful to us in our own work. We like footnotes to a degree that it makes some people uncomfortable.
  4. All good historians are interdisciplinary, or willing to become interdisciplinary. Historians are willing to do the grunt work for the other social science and humanities disciplines that are related to our fields.  
  5. Historians question nearly everything about the work of other historians. Historians are prone to disbelief—we are critical readers, and we should be ready to question all assumptions.
  6. Historians are relentless in their quest for sources, secondary and primary, and they recognize that the work of gathering sources and creating a bibliography is one that is never completely finished.
  7. No, you do not yet have enough sources.
  8. When your professor tells you to check out one source or another, you are obligated to do so.  It is not an option.  If you look at that source, and do not know how to make sense of it, it is your responsibility to learn, or to ask for help from your professor or from a library professional who might assist you. Those of us who are decent people love to talk to you about sources. Some of us especially love when you can explain why a source we recommend to you is not helpful. See? You are teaching us new stuff.
  9. Do not quote secondary sources unless your source says something so astoundingly clever that you cannot possibly do without it.  Leave historians in the footnotes. Some academic disciplines are really into quoting scholars. “As Dirk Broadaxe said in Logjam, his seminal monograph about lumberjacks…” and so on. It’s pretentious, does not read well, and, you know, footnotes. They are right there at the bottom of the page.
  10. History is a discipline.  There are rules.  Research papers should be formatted according to standards included in the Turabian Manual. If you do not know what the Turabian Manual is, you must learn.  Even if it seems to you that it is stupid. We are members of an undisciplined discipline, but you need to conform to some of these base level expectations. You must take the time to learn to format your footnotes and bibliography according to Turabian’s standards.  This is not optional.  It is required.
  11. As Collingwood said, (see above, No. 9), “nothing capable of being memorized is history.”
  12. Treat words like they cost you money.
  13. People with bad grammar hate America.
  14. The past tense of the verb “to lead” is “led.” There is no reason ever for you to use the word “plethora.”
  15. To use Chat GPT and similar applications to construct your research project is so much worse than dishonest. It is environmentally irresponsible, lends support to corporate overlords and soulless tech bros who value neither labor nor the life of the intellect, and deprives you of a chance to learn a craft that is, at the most fundamental level, the antidote to the worst qualities of artificial intelligence. Remember, good historians are honest. Good historians are not afraid of hard work and answering difficult questions.

Teaching Native American History

Dear Members of the Hiring Committee…

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Please, have some class.  Please keep in mind that there are scores of people who probably could do your job just as well as you do in the eyes of your students, but who will never get the chance because of the cruelties of the academic job market.  I have some former students and friends applying now, and the callousness with which they are treated is truly appalling.

When I began applying for jobs a long time ago, the system was very different from today. Credentials stuck in files at the AHA, or mailing in letters and a CV with letters of recommendation to follow. All carried out through the U.S. Mail. Administrators and their so-called efficiencies have changed the way we conduct searches.

My campus, like many, uses an online employment system. Applicants upload the documents we ask for (a letter, a CV, and a statement of teaching philosophy). The system generates automatic emails acknowledging receipt of the applicant’s materials. If we let it, the system will also generate automatic emails informing applicants that they did not get the job. This is the default setting, and too many of you choose to operate that way.  Think for a second how you would like to be treated.

It seemed so harsh and disrespectful to me, and so inhumane, that I chose to buck the system the last time I had an opportunity to conduct a search. These spineless robo-mails, or no message at all, have become the norm, after all. Applicants can be forgiven for feeling chewed up and spitted out, scorned and abused. It takes a lot of work to apply for an academic job. The opportunities are few and the stakes are high. An automatic email seems an unnecessarily callous ending in a world filled with callousness.

We must do better.

So as our last search reached its conclusion, I sent sixty-one emails personally, one to each of the applicants. It took a bit of time, but not much. I wanted the applicants to know that I appreciated the time and effort they put into their applications. I acknowledged the rottenness of the job market, and how I wished we could have interviewed more people. I told them how impressed my colleagues and I were with their credentials, and how difficult a time we had narrowing the applicants to a number of candidates we could meaningfully interview.

I expected nothing in response, but thirty-one of the applicants replied to my email. This surprised me. Though one was gently and reasonably critical of the time the search took, all were appreciative and thanked me for treating them with courtesy and respect. All of them either said, or strongly implied, that such minimal courtesy is all but unheard of in today’s academia.

I spend a fair amount of time on social media, so I read a lot from recent Ph.D recipients describing their searches for a tenure-track job. I hear from former students and friends. These are tales of desperation, despair and depression, and frustration and anger, with not a few instances of shabby treatment by hiring institutions along the way. We who are lucky enough to be tenured or on the tenure track must, and can, do better. Writing a personal message is only the start.

Decency matters.

Decency matters so much that it is worth the extra effort to treat job applicants as you would like to be treated. Yes, the market was brutal when I went out thirty years ago, but it is much worse now. Believe recent graduates when they tell you that.

We must recognize that we are so fortunate to have the jobs we have. Colleges and universities, I know, as workplaces can vary widely in quality. I spent the first four years of my career at a dysfunctional hellhole in Billings, Montana. But even in the midst of the shit-show that was that college, I enjoyed my students, the teaching, and the advising. I enjoyed the moments I squirreled away to work on my first book. Once I closed the classroom door or my office door, I was happy.

And even if you feel justified in whining about your place of employment, remember this: there are literally hundreds of people who would like to do what you are doing, but will never get that chance. This brutal reality imposes upon all of us the obligation to be the best historians and teachers we can be. You must remember, no matter how good you think you are at this work, no matter how paradigm-shattering you consider your research, it is almost certain that there is someone better than you, shut out by the brutality of the academic job market. One of my colleagues at the dysfunctional hellhole, who doubled as an associate pastor at a local Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, told me during my on-campus interview that being a college professor was the best part-time job in the world. I suspect that we all know people who take this approach to academia, who do not produce or take their teaching seriously, but I can think of no attitude more loathsome and disrespectful to the many hundreds of talented historians who will never get a chance.

We cannot undo all the macroeconomic changes in higher education. I recognize the magnitude of the fiscal challenges facing colleges and universities. But let’s push back against the increasing bureaucratization of the job search and the increasing role played by computers in the hiring process. Perhaps you have an Ivy-League pedigree, and you feel your research is so important that you cannot be bothered to pay attention to the lowly peons who want to join your department. Perhaps you went to a second-tier school and never looked back. Whoever you are, wherever and whatever you studied, there is no excuse for not being kind. Resist every institutional protocol, and every barrier, that keeps you from treating job applicants the way you would like to be treated. If you are that barrier, and find that you cannot find the time to treat applicants with decency, perhaps you ought to step aside. Be kind and be decent. Most of all, show compassion. It matters.

Teaching Native American History

Trauma-Informed Teaching in Native American History

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In conversations with colleagues across the country at the American Society for Ethnohistory meeting in Tallahassee, one thing we all agreed on was that our students seem to be reading less, and reading less closely. Participation in class discussions had declined, as had attendance.  I was disappointed in myself in that I had not succeeded in breaking through, in getting students to engage with the material and do the reading, but I was reassured, I guess, that I as not alone. Still, I had to try something new. 

It went really, really well.

We were discussing some particularly brutal stories from the Plains Wars during the Civil War Years, beginning with the Dakota Uprising in Minnesota and closing with the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. They could read about both events in Native America, but I wanted them to go deeper into the material.  I recently read a fantastic article by historian and artist Taylor Spence called “Rethinking the Colonial Encounter in the Age of Trauma.” He is a great historian. His essay appeared in a really useful volume entitled The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History. Both the article and the book are well-worth your time. Spence suggested to me a new way to teach this subject, a trauma-informed approach that could lead students to feel deeply the impact of the events they were reading about.  Following Spence’s lead, I assigned them Waziyatawin’s “Grandmother to Granddaughter: Generations of Oral History in a Dakota Family,” which appeared in the American Indian Quarterly back in 1996. Waziyatawin (Angela Cavender Wilson) wrote a searing piece of family history. I suggest you try it in your courses.

Waziyatawin’s grandmother, Elsie Cavender, had received a story from her grandmother that she shared late in life.  She told Waziyatawin of the family’s forced march after the Dakota Uprising, and how soldiers, in an act of irrational and senseless violence, murdered Elsie’s great-great-grandmother. It’s a brief essay, and Elsie Cavender’s account is roughly a page and a half.  I asked my students to tell me what happened. They gave me a competent summary of the story.  The Dakotas were marching towards imprisonment at Fort Snelling.  They confronted white people in towns “where the people were real hostile to them.” They white people threw rocks, and poured scalding water on them.  They camped at night, living on rotten provisions provided by the army.  They marched onward. They moved too slowly.  The soldiers grew angry, and stabbed Elsie’s Grandmother’s grandmother with a saber. She bled to death on a bridge. When her family returned later, the body was gone, but they saw dried blood on the wooden planks.

I told the students I wanted more. Go deeper. Summarizing what you read, after all, is no great achievement. Spence suggested that the students attempt to imagine deeply what it would have been like to be present when those soldiers murdered an elderly woman for no reason at all. So I told them to think of their senses. If they were on the bridge where the killing took place that day, what would they have seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt?

My students jumped into the assignment. You would smell the rotten provisions the soldiers distributed, one student observed. The relentlessly irritating sound of the squeaky wagon wheel, another pointed out. They would have heard that. The dust, the sight and smell and sound of the cattle would have been difficult to miss.  They were rolling now, but they were staying away from the violence.  It took them a bit, but they got there. The soldiers’ profanities, their angry, barking orders in a language the Lakotas did not understand; the screams in response to unbelievable and senseless violence; the blood pouring from a mortal wound.

Waziyatawin

We had spoken early that day about the reliability of oral testimony as evidence. One student predictably and appropriately suggested that it might be like the old game of Telephone, as a story changes as it is passed from one hearer to another. But think of each of the sensory events you just identified, I told the students.  I asked them to think of their earliest memories. What made those memories particularly powerful? Each of them, individually, affected the senses in a memorable fashion.  Each was easily capable of etching itself into the minds of successive generations of storytellers. The events that Waziyatawin recalled for us, I suggested, were of the sort that would not be easily forgotten.

We are not supposed to teach history in a way that makes our students feel bad about who or what they are. We should not make them feel guilty or uncomfortable about the past. That is what lawmakers in a growing number of red states have demanded. They have proscribed the teaching of certain topics. They have singled out the 1619 Project, and the histories of slavery, and racism, as topics that should not be taught in ways that make white people feel uncomfortable. These right-wing politicians have said much less about Native American history, but clearly they would be bothered by things I teach in my classes: the Paxton Boys, for instance, or the massacre at Gnadenhutten. These politicians are calling for an education fit for sociopaths. They want students to feel nothing but love of country.

My students felt badly about the history they read that day.  Again, some of them had tears in their eyes. When they read Silas Soule’s account of Sand Creek, in which he describes the mutilation of dead Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children, well, they felt this as well.


            But here’s the thing. They felt badly, to be sure, but they did not feel ashamed of their race. They did not feel guilty or responsible for the crimes of the past. This is what the Republican dingbats miss.  My students felt connected to people very different from them who lived a century and a half ago. They understood the meaning a past event at a much deeper level than they may have done previously, and the emotions were heavy indeed.  They grieved. They had, I would argue, learned a lot.  I sent a message to Dr. Spence to tell him how well his class exercise went, how much my students learned, and how thankful I was for his good work.

Let’s say you are walking down a crowded city street.  Your foot catches a person walking in front of you, and they trip and almost fall. Without thinking, if you are a decent person, you apologize. You are not debasing yourself when you do this. You worried that you might have hurt somebody, that they could have fallen and been injured. It’s not about you. You apologize because you are not a dick, because you care about other people, because you worry that your actions could have caused for someone pain or sorrow. You say you are sorry because you felt sorrow.

I have thought about this a lot when I teach. Why do we say sorry? I want my students to appreciate the past on its own terms, to feel a connection to the people they read about.  The students in my class obviously could not undo the past.  They could not apologize or express their sorrow to the Dakota woman murdered on that bridge. But they did understand something at a deeper level than they might otherwise have done, and that made them wiser and more capable of understanding other people.  They felt empathy. And they cared about this particular piece of the past more deeply that they would have done if I had merely told them about the Dakota Uprising and Sand Creek. They may not remember much of my class a couple of years from now but I am confident that they will remember this.