Western Historical Quarterly Advance Access published October 20, 2016
“AND THE LONELY VOICE OF YOUTH CRIES ‘WHAT
IS TRUTH?’”: WESTERN HISTORY AND THE
NATIONAL NARRATIVE
JOHN MACK FARAGHER
A
couple of years ago, I got a call from my
oldest grandson, Jeremy. He was beginning middle school and taking his first class
devoted to American history. For their initial homework assignment the teacher asked
the students to speak with an older relative about their view of the American past and
report on what he or she said. When Jeremy mentioned that two of his grandfathers
were history professors (a complete coincidence, by the way), the teacher asked him to
interview both of us. “Here’s the question, grandpa,” Jeremy said. “What does the
United States of America mean to you as a historian?”
“Wow,” I stammered, “that’s big. Can you give me a little more direction?” I was
stalling. “I can tell you what Grandpa Lou said,” Jeremy offered. “That would help,”
I replied, grateful for a few moments to gather my wits. “He thought about it for a
while,” Jeremy said, “then told me that while America meant a lot of things to him,
most important was the proclamation of human rights in the Declaration of
Independence and the personal liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the other
amendments to the Constitution.” Grandpa Lou had taken the high road. “He’s absolutely right about that,” I said. “Those are the guarantees of our enviable rights and
freedoms.” Now it was my turn. “Since Lou emphasized the positive,” I offered, somewhat tentatively, “I’m going with the dark side. America is also about taking the land
from hundreds of Indian nations and enslaving millions of Africans.” Jeremy responded
with enthusiasm. “Thanks, grandpa! That’s great!” he exclaimed. “None of the other
kids will come up with those things!”
JOHN MACK FARAGHER is the Howard R. Lamar Emeritus Professor of History and American
Studies at Yale University. He wants to thank Brian Collier, Michele Hoffnung, Sharon C. Schwarze
and Jeremy Garskof for their assistance in preparing this essay.
The Western Historical Quarterly (2016): 1–21. doi: 10.1093/whq/whw196
C The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association.
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Western Historical Quarterly
1 Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston, 1979),
47. State history standards are accessible at the National History Education Clearinghouse website. See
“State Standards,” National History Education Clearinghouse, http://teachinghistory.org/teaching-mater
ials/state-standards?keys¼&tid¼All&tid_1¼All. For a survey of school history in other nations see
Mario Carretero, Mikel Asensio, and Maria Rodriguez-Moneo, History Education and the Construction of
National Identities (Charlotte, 2012) and Ann Low-Beer, “School History, National History, and the
Issue of National Identity,” International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching, and Research 3 (2003),
http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/historyresource/journal5/Low-Beer.pdf.
2 David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, UK, 1998),
119–21, emphasis in original.
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Jeremy later told me that when he reported in class the next day his teacher was
quick to point out that conquest and slavery were discussed in the textbook and would
be an important part of the course. But my grandson’s spontaneous comment surely reflected the American history he was—or was not—taught in elementary school. State
history standards for the elementary grades focus on conceptual skills (the passage of
time, chronological sequence, continuity and change) as well as content (people and
events in the American past). In many schools, state and local history are covered in
the social studies curriculum of one grade (often the fourth), U.S. history in another
(often the fifth). But a little time spent browsing the history standards of the states
makes it clear that the prime objective of the American history curriculum is reverence and respect for the nation’s foundational values and institutions. All the states of
the union utilize school history as a primary means of teaching patriotism, as do virtually all the nations on the planet. As Frances FitzGerald writes in America Revised
(1979), her classic examination of twentieth-century American schoolbooks, “history
textbooks for elementary and secondary schools . . . are written not to explore but to
instruct—to tell children what their elders want them to know about their country.”1
School history is public history of the most important sort. It is fundamentally distinct from the academic history done by scholars. “School history is more heritage
than history,” writes David Lowenthal. Heritage, he argues, “uses historical traces and
tells historical tales, but these tales and traces are stitched into fabrics that are open
neither to critical analysis nor to comparative scrutiny.” School history is not now, nor
has it ever been, an evidence-based account of the past. Rather, as Lowenthal writes,
“school history is a declaration of faith in that past.” Most history teaching at the elementary school level amounts to telling moral stories about past American heroes who
struggled to create a national identity, forge and articulate enduring national ideals,
and secure our rights and freedoms.2
But what about “those things”? What about conquest, slavery, and the legacy of racism? Long after the conversation with my grandson, I continued to wonder how
much of the dark side gets into the history curriculum of the upper grades. Searching
for an answer took me in a couple of directions. The investigation of school history
not only poses the question of what students have been taught about the American past
but also what they ought to be taught, an assessment that requires an understanding of
John Mack Faragher
3 Tony Waters, “The Sacred and the Profane in American History Curriculum,” Social Studies 98
(2007), 247. For “naı̈ve realism” and teaching history see Bruce VanSledright, The Challenge of
Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories, and Policy (New York, 2011), 64–6; Linda S.
Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Researching History Education: Theory, Method, and Context (New York,
2008); and Hilary Cooper, History in the Early Years (1995; repr., London, 2002).
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children’s intellectual and moral development. It also reemphasizes the critical importance of the history of the American West in the history of the nation and why we
Americans will never understand ourselves until we recognize the central place of indigenous peoples in the national narrative.
The problem of school history has been debated by teachers, educational
professionals, historians, and politicians for more than a century. In a recent
contribution to this exchange, sociologist Tony Waters distinguishes between what he
terms—employing the classic formulation of sociologist Emile
Durkheim—“the sacred
and the profane” in the history curriculum. By “the sacred,” Waters means the seamless
and seemingly exceptional narrative of America taught in the early grades, while
“the profane” stands for the complicated, ambiguous, conflict-laden histories of professional historians. “The idealistic sacred story needs to be told first,” Waters argues.
Young students must internalize the sacred before being confronted with the
profane. His argument rests on a widely held consensus that most young children are
“naı̈ve realists,” accepting as the unmediated truth whatever the teacher or the textbook says. The introduction of contrasting and/or complicating accounts confuses
them. They require clear exemplars to reinforce their emerging sense of social
right and wrong. “Children’s history textbooks could add problems to the American
story, but I do not recommend it,” Waters writes. “Textbooks are used to teach what is
good and moral in society and how heroes sacrificed to preserve that.” Introducing students in the elementary grades to the history of conquest and slavery would complicate
the teaching of American values and compromise the civic mission of
public education.3
There are several things that might be said in response. While it may well be true
that children do best with uncomplicated stories, my experience as a parent and grandparent suggests that they delight in the frisson generated when elements of danger or
conflict enter a story; although they certainly appreciate the relief that comes from
narrative resolution and “happy endings.” Moreover, and more importantly, children
require examples of evil to help them draw clear lines demarking the good. That is particularly true when the good, the bad, and the ugly come as a piece. We are a nation
founded by men who, as Edmund Morgan put it so well, “developed the dedication to
human liberty and dignity” at the same time they “developed and maintained a system
of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day.” The contradictory strands of our history are wound tightly together like “a twisted rope,” to employ
the metaphor of novelist Louise Erdrich. There seems to be no good reason why stories
3
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4 Edmund S. Morgan, American Freedom, American Slavery: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(New York, 1975), 4–5 and Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace (New York, 1995), 99.
5
65–6.
Waters, “The Sacred and the Profane,” 249–50 and VanSledright, Rethinking History Education,
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featuring Americans of all backgrounds struggling to overcome injustice would necessarily compromise the civic function of school history.4
But such caveats notwithstanding, the standard practice in American education is
to put off the introduction of profane history—the dark realities that so complicate the
exceptionalist narrative—until middle school, when, as Waters puts it, students are
better prepared for “new explanations acknowledging that individuals and society routinely fall short.” In adolescence children typically shift their perspective from naı̈ve
realism to “naı̈ve relativism.” As their growing awareness of the world produces a troubling dissonance between reality and their internalized ideals, naı̈ve relativism helps
resolve the conflict. As one student declared during a class discussion on a controversial topic, “history is based on opinions, and one opinion is pretty much as good as another. . . . We are all entitled to our opinion.” Simply reinforcing the sacred story at
this point induces skepticism and its evil twin, boredom. Skilled history teachers in
middle and high school, using directed reading and class discussion, compare sacred
and profane accounts of the past, helping students toward a stance of “critical pragmatism,” acknowledging the subjective nature of all historical testimony and interpretation but accepting the proposition that a careful weighing of the evidence can
produce a reliable account.5
Since most teachers rely on textbooks as the principal source of teaching material,
the success of this approach—introducing controversial or profane content about
American history in the upper grades—depends on the quality of the history texts
they use. Unfortunately, many of them fail to deliver. Consider their treatment of slavery. First, the good news. The subject is treated with considerably more candor today
than it was a half-century ago when I was a schoolboy. The discussion of slavery in
contemporary middle and high school textbooks focuses on the hard labor and harsh
treatment of enslaved men and women, the forced sale and division of their families,
and their attempts at resistance or escape. Textbooks also typically detail the way slavery dominated and divided American politics during the first half of the nineteenth
century. And most acknowledge slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War, which
was certainly not the case back in the day. Now for the bad news. A content analysis
of the most widely adopted high school textbooks conducted a few years ago by
Michael Henry, a consultant to the Advanced Placement Program of the College
Board, finds that despite these improvements, textbooks consistently fail to confront
slavery’s moral dilemma. “Every book noted that the revolutionaries believed ‘all men
were created equal,’” Henry notes, “but none directly raised the conflict between this
statement of personal liberty and the existence of slavery.” Not a single textbook he
surveyed discussed the fact that nearly half the men who signed the Declaration owned
John Mack Faragher
6 Michael Henry, “Sacred and Profane American History: Does it Exist in Textbooks?” History
Teacher 44 (2011), 409 and James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History
Textbook Got Wrong (1995; repr., New York, 2013), 142.
Sarah B. Shear, Ryan T. Knowles, Gregory J. Soden, and Antonio J. Castro, “Manifesting
Destiny: Re/presentation of Indigenous Peoples in K-12 U.S. History Standards,” Theory & Research in
Social Education 43 (2015), 68–101; Alysa Landry, “‘All Indians are Dead?’ At Least That’s What
Most Schools Teach Children,” Indian Country Today, 17 November 2014, http://indiancountrytoday
medianetwork.com/2014/11/17/all-indians-are-dead-least-thats-what-most-schools-teach-children157822; Rachel Zajdel, “The Indoctrination of Distortion: Native Americans in U.S. History
Textbooks” (2015), unpublished paper in author’s possession; Cyndi Mottola Poole, “The United
States: Learning about Native America History,” in Robert Guyver, ed., Teaching History and the
Changing Nation State: Transnational and International Perspectives (London, 2016), 141–58; Prentice
T. Chandler, “Critical Race Theory and Social Studies: Centering the Native American Experience,”
Journal of Social Studies Research 34 (2010), 29–58; Wayne Journell, “An Incomplete History:
Representation of American Indians in State Social Studies Standards,” Journal of American Indian
Education 48 (2009), 18–32; T. R. Sanchez, “The Depiction of Native Americans in Recent
(1991–2004) Secondary History Textbooks: How Far Have We Come?” Excellence and Equity in
Education 40 (2007): 311–20; and Frances V. Rains, “To Greet the Dawn with Open Eyes: American
Indians, White Privilege and the Power of Residual Guilt in the Social Studies,” in Gloria
7
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slaves. At best, they provided a perfunctory review of slavery’s impact on the drafting
of the Constitution, treating the Three-Fifths Compromise, for example, as a sectional
and political problem rather than a moral one. The scathing indictment made twenty
years ago by James W. Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) still stands.
“Slavery,” Loewen wrote, “comes across as an unfortunate but minor blemish compared to the overall story line.”6
The treatment of American Indians in school history is even more disheartening.
Content analysis of state history standards and widely adopted textbooks finds that
neither pays much attention to the wide variety of indigenous lifeways in North
America. Indians are nearly always lumped together as a single people or race rather
than members of distinct cultures. Only a handful of native nations get mentioned by
name; and while the basis of colonial claims to territory are carefully noted, there is
virtually no discussion of indigenous sovereignty. Nor are very many Native individuals identified by name. A content analysis of the history standards for nine states
found only one individual, Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull, mentioned in more
than one. Across all the state standards, 87 percent of references to Indians come in
the period before 1900. After the nineteenth century, in other words, Indians virtually
disappear. And, as with slavery, neither the standards nor the textbooks attempt to engage the moral dilemma presented by conquest. Conflict between Indians and settlers
is presented as a “failure to communicate” or simply as “inevitable.” Natives are portrayed as incapable of change, hopelessly mired in the past. They are not treated as historical agents but as victims—of disease, alcoholism, and cultural demoralization. In
state history standards and American history textbooks for the upper grades, American
Indian peoples and native nations play no role whatsoever in the master narrative of
American nation-building.7
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The young man speaking in the city square
Is trying to tell somebody that he cares
Yeah, the ones that you’re calling wild
Are going to be the leaders in a little while
This old world’s wakin’ to a new born day
And I solemnly swear that it’ll be their way.
You better help the voice of youth find
“What is truth?”
Ladson-Billings, ed., Critical Race Theory Perspectives on Social Studies: The Profession, Policies, and
Curriculum (Charlotte, 2003). My investigation was facilitated by the results of an unpublished
research project directed by Professor Brian Collier of the University of Notre Dame, in which undergraduates from Yale University and Notre Dame surveyed the treatment of the American West in
high school history textbooks.
8 Terrie Epstein, National History: Race, Identity, and Pedagogy in Classrooms and Communities
(New York, 2009), 98–9.
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The failure to fully engage middle and high school students in the contradictions between sacred and profane American history helps explain why kids lose
interest in American history. What’s more, students of color, who constitute
majorities in many of the nation’s classrooms, are alienated by a master narrative
that does not speak to the history of popular struggle they learn from their own
families. Distressed over how poorly students perform on tests of basic historical
knowledge, school boards double down, mandating that more detail be committed
to memory and regurgitated on multiple-choice exams. College-bound high school
students opt out of the standard course in favor of AP American history, which
must be taught with a college-level textbook. This often raises the hackles of
conservative school board members, who complain about the “negative” portrayal
of the American past in college texts.8
In 2014 three conservatives on the five-member school board of Jefferson County,
Colorado, west of Denver, proposed a revision of the AP history course. What they
wanted, they declared, was a course that presented “positive aspects of the United
States and its heritage”; promoted “citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the
free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights”; and that
did not “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife, or disregard of the laws.”
Several dozen teachers protested by staging a sick-out, and hundreds of students walked
out of their classes and lined a state highway, waving signs demanding that the board
allow their teachers to “Teach us the Truth.” “It’s our history,” they chanted, “don’t
make it mystery.” “You can’t make America seem perfect,” one protestor told a reporter.
The incident brought to mind the old Johnny Cash hit from 1970, “What Is Truth?”:
John Mack Faragher
9 Jenny Brundin, Mike Lamp, and Nathaniel Minor, “Colorado Students Protest Proposed
Curriculum Changes,” PBS NewsHour, 26 September 2014, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/
colorado-students-protest-proposed-curriculum-changes/; Jesse Paul, “Jeffco students walk out of 5
high schools in school board protest,” Denver Post, 23 September 2014, http://www.denverpost.com/
2014/09/23/jeffco-students-walk-out-of-5-high-schools-in-school-board-protest/; and Johnny Cash,
“What is Truth?”, https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tdt746wwnfw2e4vfstio5zkf5lu?lyrics¼1&u
tm_source¼google&utm_medium¼search&utm_campaign¼lyrics&pcampaignid¼kp-lyrics&u¼0#.
10 Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History (New York, 2016), 1;
Also see Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning
Stevens, eds., Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians (Chapel Hill,
2015); Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury, eds., A Companion to American Indian History (Oxford,
2004); R. David Edmunds, “Blazing New Trails or Burning Bridges: Native American History Comes
of Age,” Western Historical Quarterly 39 (2008), 4–15; and R. David Edmunds, “Native Americans,
New Voices: American Indian History, 1895–1995,” American Historical Review 100 (1995), 717–40.
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The conservative school board members pulled back, and a few months later
they were unseated in a recall election. Sometimes we overlook these
small victories.9
The impoverished treatment of Native Americans in history standards and textbooks for middle and high school stands in stark contrast to the wealth of new Indian
history produced by historians over the past four decades, what Frederick E. Hoxie—in
his introduction to the recently published Oxford Handbook of American Indian
History—describes as “a tidal wave of new books, scholarly articles, and essays.” This
scholarly tsunami was a reflection of the global insurgency of indigenous peoples to
seize control of their destiny from the forces of colonialism: the dramatic protests over
broken treaties and continued exploitation, the revival of tribal communities and governments, the eloquent calls for self-determination and sovereignty, the efforts to preserve and nourish Native language and culture, the renaissance in Native arts and
letters. The new Indian history, which has come fully into its own in the last few years,
is a manifestation of this political florescence.10
Exploring old sources and uncovering new ones, historians have reimagined the
American past from the perspective of indigenous peoples, replacing the colonialist
trope of “the vanishing Indian” with a powerful narrative of persistence, resilience,
and creative adaptation, a process Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor calls
“survivance.” Native peoples not only confronted invasion with stalwart defenses and
violent resistance but with skilled diplomacy, forging alliances with newcomers, and
adeptly pitting colonial powers one against another. In many instances, settlers indeed
overwhelmed native societies. But in others, Native influence reshaped the character
of settler society itself. Rather than be overwhelmed by change, Indians seized on new
technologies and adapted them to their own devices. They became active participants
in a global marketplace that thrived for several centuries. In the wake of population
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11
Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln, 2008).
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in John
Mack Faragher, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New Haven, 1999), 31; Leonard Thompson
and Howard Lamar, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New
Haven, 1981); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York, 2010); John
Mack Faragher, “Settler Colonial Studies and the North American Frontier,” Settler Colonial Studies 4
(2014), 181–91. For earlier global colonial comparisons see Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier
12
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loss and military defeat, they forged new hybrid identities, creating recombinant
cultures that frequently included individuals of mixed Indian, European, and
African ancestry.11
Following the American Revolution and the creation of the United States,
relations between Indians and the settler nation largely devolved into a story of
real estate. The problem of Native land—its seizure, ownership, governance, and redistribution—assumed center stage in American politics, from the Proclamation of 1763
to the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887. Indians responded in numerous ways, with
nation-building projects of their own, attempts to construct defensive pan-Indian confederacies, and movements of cultural renewal. Divided leadership, however, frequently left them vulnerable to manipulation. Treaty making became the occasion for
land cessions. The formation of settler communities demanded the destruction of
Native ones. Indian nations were encouraged to relocate westward, and when persuasion failed, the settler state readily turned to coercion. There was the ever-present danger of settler violence, which often assumed genocidal proportions. State-sponsored
ethnic cleansing, known as Indian removal, was followed by a program of intense
supervision, including deliberate impoverishment, severe restriction on movement
and mobility, suppression of language and custom, and the forcible removal of children
from their families of origin. The whole panoply of bureaucratic oppressions that characterized the treatment of indigenous peoples by colonial officials around the world
was directed at American Indian people as well. The new Indian history—profane history par excellence—charts a national narrative that is essential to understand but far
from exceptional.
Taking the new Indian history seriously requires a reimagination of the national
narrative. The Revolution was not the end of the colonial era but rather the beginning
of a new and even more aggressive phase of settler colonialism. Indeed, the frontier
history of North America is best understood as a chapter in the modern history of global colonialism. “American history has been in a large degree the colonization of the
Great West,” declared Frederick Jackson Turner in his field-defining essay of 1893.
And while historians have revised, redacted, and rejected much of what Turner proposed, his statement continues to resonate and provoke. It was the perspective taken
by my graduate mentor, Howard R. Lamar, and over the past thirty years it has been
further theorized and problematized by the transnational field of settler colonial studies. Today, more than ever before, the colonial relationship between Indians, settlers,
and the nation-state is the pulsing heart of western history.12
John Mack Faragher
(Boston, 1952); Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, eds., The Frontier in Perspective (Madison,
1957); David Harry Miller and Jerome O. Steffen, eds., The Frontier: Comparative Studies (Norman,
1977); Jerome O. Steffen, Comparative Frontiers: A Proposal for Studying the American West (Norman,
1980); and David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American
History (Wilmington, 1994).
13 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South,
1670–1717 (New Haven, 2003); Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln, 2015);
Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (New York,
2016); Howard Lamar, “From Bondage to Contract: Ethnic Labor in the American West,” in Stephen
Hahn and Jonathan Prude, ed., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation (Chapel Hill,
1985), 293–325; Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early
America (Cambridge, MA, 2010); and Pekka H€am€al€ainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, 2009).
Benton quoted in John Mack Faragher, “‘More Motley than Mackinaw’: From Ethnic Mixing
to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783–1833,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and
Fredricka J. Teute, ed., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi,
1750–1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998), 320; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York,
2014), 108; and John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West
(Charlottesville, 2007), 170.
14
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Slavery too has become a central concern of our field. The Atlantic slave trade
was the mainspring in the European colonization of the Americas. Without slavery
there would have been no plantations; no commerce in sugar, tobacco, or cotton; no
capital for colonialists and states to accumulate or plunder. Recent historical scholarship reinforces that understanding, documenting the importance of Indian enslavement throughout the colonies as well as the critical role of captive and bound labor—
what historian Andrés Reséndez calls “the other slavery”—in both colonial and
indigenous communities across the length and breadth of the continent. The
Comanche empire of the southern Great Plains, for example, rested on a material base
of human trafficking and enslaved labor.13
Moreover, recent scholarship has reemphasized the importance of African
American slavery to the territorial expansion of the American nation-state. There is a
direct linkage between Native American and African American history. Planters in
the early American republic demanded the seizure of more Indian land in order to
bring in more slaves to raise more cotton. “Extending the area of slavery,” Missouri
senator Thomas Hart Benton candidly declared, meant “converting Indian soil into
slave soil.” The forced removal of the indigenous from the Old Southwest was followed
by the forced migration of the enslaved. “The coercion and violence required to mobilize slave labor,” writes Sven Beckert, in his recent global history of cotton, “was
matched only by the demands of an expansionist war against indigenous people.” The
antislavery article of the Northwest Ordinance proved the exception rather than the
rule of territorial expansion (although it is often taught the other way). “In the early
American West,” writes John Craig Hammond, “slavery was already too entrenched,
its potential uses far too valuable, for slaveholders to accept any meaningful restrictions on their right to ‘an unlimited slavery.’”14
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15 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 245 and Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery
and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014), 413.
Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution
(Chapel Hill, 2016); Robert G. Parkinson, “Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American
Independence?” New York Times, 4 July 2016; Rensselaer Bentley, The American Instructer (Troy, NY,
1825), 199; Joel Dorman Steele, A Brief History of the United States (New York, 1880), 13–4. Ruth
Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, 1964);
W. C. Bagley and H. O. Rugg, The Content of American History as Taught in the Seventh and Eighth
16
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In the quarter-century following the War of 1812—during which American state
power crushed the organized resistance of native nations in the trans-Appalachian region—100 million acres were added to the public domain, at least 60,000 indigenous
people were forced from their homelands, and more than 250,000 enslaved African
Americans were driven from the Upper South to the Old Southwest, where they
labored to clear the forests; drain the swamps; and plant, chop, and pick millions of
acres of cotton under the most brutal conditions imaginable. The enslavers then
moved on to Texas, precipitating a war with Mexico that brought in vast new territories for expansion. “Southern planters understood,” writes Beckert, “that their cotton
kingdom rested not only on plentiful land and labor, but also upon their political ability to preserve the institution of slavery and to project it into the new cotton lands of
the American West.” California entered the union as a free state, but southern politicians were soon plotting to break it in two, creating a slave territory in the south.
Popular sovereignty captured Utah and New Mexico for slavery and struggled to take
Kansas. The 1857 Dred Scott decision of the nation’s Supreme Court turned the entire
West into a haven for slavery. The removal of Indians and the expansion of slavery,
argues Edward E. Baptist, “was the driving force in US history between the framing of
the Constitution and the beginning of the Civil War.”15
What a dramatic contrast there is between what we now know about the central
importance of conquest and slavery to American nation-building and the faint shadow
those subjects cast in the history curriculum of our children and grandchildren. It was
not always thus. American Indians were a significant presence in the schoolbooks of
the nineteenth century, albeit as implacable opponents of what the standard narrative
of nation-building celebrated as American progress. That role was initially scripted for
Native people by the Declaration of Independence itself, which excoriated the “merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of
all ages, sexes and conditions.” School readers, geographies, and histories fixated on
settler suffering at the hands of Indians. “Here savages in the pay of despotism cast an
infirm old man into the flames,” read an essay on the revolution in one school reader.
“[H]ere they dashed against the trees children snatched away from the breasts of their
dying mothers.” Yet there could be no doubt about the outcome. The Indian “opposes
the encroachments of the settler but he cannot stop the tide,” declared a history published in 1880. “He is doomed to destruction.” Authors did not worry about children’s
sensibilities. They were teaching moral lessons.16
John Mack Faragher
The savage sighs at the apprehension that his nation and race must
cease to exist. . . . His agonies at first seem to demand a tear from
the eye of humanity. But, when we reflect that the extinction of
his race, and the progress of the arts which give rise to his distressing apprehensions, are for the increase of mankind, and for the promotion of the world’s glory and happiness, that five hundred
rational animals may enjoy life in plenty and comfort where only
one savage drags out a hungry existence, we shall be pleased with
the prospective futurity.18
At the end of the nineteenth century, after the final collapse of Native resistance,
American Indians began to disappear from schoolbooks. The school histories of the fin
de siècle were commonly authored by the first generation of professional
American historians, scholars who focused their attention on the growth of American
institutions. Significantly longer and denser than the textbooks that came before, with
more exposition and less anecdote, they also included far fewer Indians. A 1916
Grades: An Analysis of Typical School Textbooks, University of Illinois School of Education, Bulletin No.
16 (Urbana, 1916); FitzGerald, America Revised; Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars
in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over
American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor, 2003); and Lawrence R.
Samuel, Remembering America: How We Have Told Our Past (Lincoln, 2015).
17
Mrs. Lewis B. Monroe, The Story of Our Country (Boston, 1880), 127–8.
John Lauris Blake, The Historical Reader: Designed for the Use of Schools and Families (Concord,
NH, 1825), 236; James Sullivan, “The Claims of Savages to this Country Considered,” in Joseph
Richardson, ed., The American Reader: A Selection of Lessons for Reading and Speaking (Boston, 1810),
123.
18
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Nor did the books shy away from depictions of settler violence against Indians.
One popular history, intended for very young students, took the form of a mother narrating the nation’s story to her children. In one chapter, she tells them of the infamous destruction of a large community of Pequots by settlers in 1637. “In a few
moments, the whole encampment was in a blaze,” she says. “Six hundred Indians—
men, women, and children—perished in the flames. . . . And the Connecticut settlers
rejoiced in victory.” Her sensitive daughter recoils in horror. “But, O, Mother, how
[the settlers] must have felt when they thought of the Indian mothers and little children burned to death!” To which her zealous older brother responds, “Yes, but their
own mothers and children would have been killed if the Pequods [sic] hadn’t
been destroyed.”17
Schoolbooks forthrightly argued the righteousness of the settler’s cause. “It has
been adopted as a principle of natural law,” asserted an essay in a reader of the 1820s,
“that Europeans had a right to take and occupy a portion of the American continent,
since it was not all needed by the natives.” The seizure of another nation’s land might
appear hard, another writer acknowledged:
11
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Western Historical Quarterly
19 W. C. Bagley and H. O. Rugg, Content of American History, 27–8, 38, 48 and Moreau,
Schoolbook Nation, 212.
20 Roscoe Lewis Ashley, American History for Use in Secondary Schools (New York, 1908), 17,
284, 327 and Bagley and Rugg, Content of American History, 58.
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analysis of two dozen textbooks commonly taught in American classrooms found that
in the most recently published cohort, the coverage of Indian affairs had been reduced
by half.19
The consensus of the new professional scholarship was that Indians had contributed little or nothing to America’s legal, economic, and political development and
could thus be safely ignored. Frederick Jackson Turner, an exemplar of this new professionalism, included virtually no discussion of Indians in his famous frontier essay or in
any of his subsequent works. His concern was the way older European identities had
been molded into a new “composite nationality” by the force of settler colonialism.
Turner never authored a textbook, but his ideas permeated the American schoolbooks
published during the first half of the twentieth century. “Frontier life, with its crude
conditions, its lack of huge estates or great fortunes, is a social leveler,” wrote prolific
schoolbook author Roscoe Lewis Ashley. “In the West accordingly democracy, political and social, was perfected at an earlier date than elsewhere.” Yet Ashley also asserted that the relationship of settlers and Indians was relatively unimportant. “It is no
part of our purpose,” he wrote, “to study the life and occupations of the Indian, except
to appreciate his attitude toward the whites and understand his influence on the colonization by Europeans.” That influence, he concluded, was minimal. “There was
never an important contest between the settlers and the natives that was not won by
the colonists.” Ashley agreed with Turner that what was significant about the settlement of the continent was the making of “a new race, . . . the beginning of a really new
nation, the American people.” The new schoolbooks employed a rhetoric that was
more abstract and seemingly more disinterested, but the primary function remained
the promotion of American nationalism—and Indians were not considered part of
that story.20
Another professionalizing trend of the early twentieth century, however, pushed in
a different direction. The progressive education movement—influenced by philosophical pragmatism and a new understanding of child development—pressed for a more
child-centered classroom, a more thematically integrated curriculum, and a pedagogy
emphasizing problem-solving and critical thinking. Coalescing out of these notions was
an interdisciplinary approach to teaching humanities and social science in the public
schools called social studies. Social studies gained in popularity during the interwar
period, and one of the most widely adopted of various curricular schemes was a series of
books for junior high school authored by Harold Rugg, a professor of education at
Teachers College, Columbia University. Rugg, an enthusiastic participant of the vibrant
New York cultural and intellectual scene of the 1920s, was greatly influenced by
John Mack Faragher
21 Ronald W. Evans, This Happened in America: Harold Rugg and the Censure of Social Studies
(Charlotte, 2007). Rugg and his curriculum recently have attracted a good deal of attention from education historians; for a historiographic survey and review see Robert W. Evans, “Harold Rugg and
Educating About Social Issues,” in Samuel Totten and Jon E. Pedersen, ed., Educating about Social
Issues in the 20th and 21st Centuries: A Critical Annotated Bibliography (Charlotte, 2012), 93–114.
22
462–3.
Harold Rugg, An Introduction to Problems of American Culture (Boston, 1931), 448, 458,
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philosopher John Dewey, anthropologist Franz Boas, and the “present-minded” history
of Charles A. Beard. Rugg rejected chronological surveys in favor of a topical organization that combined history and civics in a problem-and-issues approach. Students in the
middle and upper grades would confront the dissonance between social realities and
democratic ideals. Rugg termed it “the American Problem.”21
Rugg’s textbooks took on social problems of all sorts. A volume intended for ninth
graders devoted attention to race relations in the United States, including a substantial
unit on what Rugg termed “a third race—the Indians—whose affairs presented a problem to the American people.” That problem, wrote Rugg, had been on the nation’s
agenda ever since the founding: “Every president and every Congress confronted the
necessity of working out a policy of dealing with the red men.” The issue, Rugg asserted, was Indian land and how best to acquire it. Although President George
Washington and his immediate successors hoped to work out an accommodation between expansion and Indian sovereignty, Rugg made it clear that “the frontier settlers
themselves saw the matter in an entirely different light. . . . They knew only one
thing—there was rich land ready for the taking and they were going to take it.” With
the election of Andrew Jackson as president in 1828, the federal government unabashedly took the side of the settlers, many of whom “felt that the best way to deal
with the Indians was to kill them without mercy.” Indians were forced west and consigned to reservations. “This land had originally been considered undesirable for white
settlement,” Rugg wrote. But soon enough, settlers began lusting after reservation land
as well. Well-meaning people attempted to reform Indian policy in the name of social
justice, but they nearly always failed.22
This assessment was downbeat but realistic. As Ronald W. Evans writes, in his fascinating history of Rugg and his work, this was school history “with the warts on.” But
the most remarkable thing was the way Rugg’s text took Native Americans seriously.
The section on Indians in the ninth-grade volume included a series of study questions
intended to spark class discussion. “Were the civilizations of the white man and the
red man alike or unalike?” students were asked. “Did the two races understand each
other? . . . Was one side more ‘right’ than the other? . . . Would it be possible for two
such civilizations to exist side by side on the same continent without one dominating
the other?” When compared with competing history texts of its day (and allowing for
dated terminology), these were remarkable questions, calling on students to not only
13
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Western Historical Quarterly
2016
23
Rugg, Problems of American Culture, 448 and Evans, This Happened in America, 70.
24
Evans, This Happened in America, 191–2, 193, 195, 143–247.
Moreau, Schoolbook Nation, 263 and Mae M. Ngai, “‘A Nation of Immigrants’: The Cold War
and Civil Rights Origins of Illegal Immigration” (2010), Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton
University, https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/paper38.pdf.
25
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critically assess the reading but to consider it in the light of professed American values.
This is precisely the kind of confrontation between sacred and profane history that students in the higher grades require.23
Introduced in the 1920s, Rugg’s curriculum was immediately successful. His publisher, Ginn & Company, reported sales of more than 1 million volumes and nearly
3 million workbooks during the 1930s. But Rugg’s critical approach raised intense opposition from conservatives. In a campaign of slander and calumny, chillingly related
by Evans, a cabal that included the Hearst newspaper chain, the American Legion, the
National Association of Manufacturers, and other reactionary groups charged Rugg
with the subversion of American ideals. “Rugg’s philosophy is opposed to the
American way of life,” one critic declared. His series was “a subtle and insidious
scheme to poison and undermine the faith of our children in the American plan.”
Rugg himself had more faith in the moral reasoning of American kids. “I cannot tell
children all is well when they know this is not so,” he responded. “I cannot lie to
them. I believe we should let children see America, first seeing all the good there is in
America and then, at the proper ages, letting them see the things that are wrong.” But
his critics waxed nostalgic for the old schoolbooks. “All the old histories taught ‘my
country, right or wrong,’” one wrote. “That’s the point of view we want our children to
adopt. We can’t afford to teach them to be unbiased and let them make up their own
minds.” Under pressure from activists, local school boards rejected the curriculum. By
the early 1940s, adoptions had fallen off precipitously and not long thereafter, Ginn &
Company allowed the entire series to go out of print.24
The American history textbooks of the immediate postwar era were strikingly oriented to the consensus interpretation. “The America imagined by histories of the
1950s,” writes historian Joseph Moreau, was “united across class lines, tolerant, blessed
by equal opportunity for all, and ever looking forward.” Consensus textbooks
chronicled the slow but steady realization of the American ideals of human rights, political equality, and economic improvement. One innovation worth noting was the
increasing popularity during the 1960s of the “nation of immigrants” theme, a phrase
appropriated from the title of a 1958 book by then senator John F. Kennedy, written in
support of a liberal revision of the nation’s restrictive immigration laws. Adding the
contributions of immigrants to the American story allowed publishers to respond to
demands for inclusion by white ethnics without seriously altering the national narrative. That innovation did little, however, to address the historic experience of African
Americans or American Indians, who remained peripheral textbook figures.25
John Mack Faragher
26
Norris Hundley Jr., “John Walton Caughey,” Pacific Historical Review 65 (1996), 177.
John W. Caughey, John Hope Franklin, and Ernest R. May, The Land of the Free: A History of
the United States (New York, 1966), 49, 569 and Moreau, Schoolbook Nation, 290.
27
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Not until the sustained political offensive of the civil rights movement—when
groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the
Urban League began pressing textbook publishers for fuller treatment, and several state
legislatures responded by passing resolutions requiring the inclusion of minority
history—did people of color begin to appear in textbooks. In 1966 three distinguished
historians—John W. Caughey, John Hope Franklin, and Ernest R. May—responded to
a challenge from California’s State Board of Education to create a new eighth-grade
American history text with a cast of characters drawn from the complex reality of
American life. Caughey, who taught the history of California and the West at UCLA
(and in 1974 would serve as president of the Western History Association [WHA]),
headed the team. He recruited Franklin, a pioneering African American historian,
then on the faculty of the University of Chicago, as well as May, his former graduate
student and son-in-law, a professor of history at Harvard. LaRee Caughey, Caughey’s
wife and his lifetime intellectual and political partner, took charge of special features
and overall editing. The Land of the Free, published in 1966, was the first school history
that sought to include all Americans in the narrative, regardless of ethnicity. “If we
couldn’t integrate the class,” declared Caughey, a longtime liberal activist, “the least
we could do was integrate the curriculum.”26
Land of the Free reconfigured the national narrative as a continuous, ongoing
struggle to achieve the American promise. The nation’s founding, the book argued, set
in motion a boundless aspiration among the American people for freedom and equal
justice. The nation’s history indeed told a story of progress, “but progress won only by
continual and often painful struggle.” The text paid considerable attention not only to
African Americans but also to American Indians. “These first Americans were the first
to have their lands taken away from them,” the authors wrote, “the first to be segregated, the last to get the vote, and the last to share in the rewards of the American system.” The publisher—Benzinger Brothers, who specialized in Catholic religious
books—boasted that the textbook was forthrightly revisionist, “candidly treating a
number of subjects which other texts desperately avoid.” While frankly examining
the history of racial oppression, the book managed to maintain a resolutely patriotic
tone throughout.27
When the California State Board of Education approved Land of the Free for use
in all of the state’s eighth-grade classrooms, conservative groups sprang into action,
inaugurating a crusade of suppression echoing the struggle that had destroyed Rugg’s
curriculum thirty years before. “We do not believe that you can improve race relations
by continued emphasis on the injustices of the past,” wrote one critic. “Neither do we
believe that a generation of white students should be made to feel guilty.” A number
of school districts refused to distribute the book to students. The controversy coincided
15
16
Western Historical Quarterly
2016
28
Zimmerman, Whose America?, 107–8.
29
Caughey, et al., Land of the Free, 49–51.
Caughey, et al., Land of the Free, 49. For the criticism of Indian scholars see Rose Delia Soza
War Soldier, “‘To Take Positive and Effective Action’: Rupert Costo and the California based
American Indian Historical Society,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, 2013), 167.
30
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with the political campaign that elected Ronald Reagan California’s governor
and placed a conservative slate on the state board of education. Land of the Free
was not considered in the next round of approvals. A promised second edition
never appeared.28
Among the book’s opponents was an organized group of Native American teachers and scholars who objected to the treatment of Indians. That requires some explanation, since the text addressed the historical experience of Native people with
remarkable candor. And, quite notable for schoolbooks both then and now, Indians
did not disappear in the coverage of the twentieth century. A discussion of contemporary Indian reservations concluded with a striking set of exercises. “In your library learn
where some of these reservations are located,” the text instructed students. “Find out if
they are on good farming lands. Find out if they are within town limits and bustling
with business as many towns are.” This little research project was intended to expose
students to one of the most fundamental and persistent inequities in American life
and get them grappling with the moral challenge the treatment of the Indians presented to American values, very much in the spirit of Rugg’s American Problem. The
exercise continued: “List arguments in favor of the reservation system. List arguments
against it. Do the arguments convince you one way or the other? Can you suggest a different plan that might have solved the ‘Indian problem’?” Students were being encouraged to imagine an alternative history for the United States.29
Yet the authors themselves had difficulty seeing any alternatives. “America was
taken away from the Indians,” they wrote. But after making that forthright declaration,
they didn’t know where to take the story. “Today’s Indians,” they continued, “must be
tempted to think they would have been better off if America had not been discovered.” That provocative statement, as challenging as it surely was for students
imbued with the sacred American story, was distinctly at odds with the book’s theme
of progressive struggle. “In all probability,” they continued, “no human agency could
have prevented the take-over by the whites.” The outcome, in other words, was inevitable. Doom stalked Indians in Land of the Free, just as it did in other American history
textbooks. Was it any wonder that Native teachers and scholars objected?30
In the half-century since this controversy there have been numerous campaigns
against the inclusion of profane American history in the secondary school curriculum.
The transformation of historical practice—the democratization of the practice of history, as well as its subject, the greatly expanded cast of characters, the emphasis on social and political struggle from the ground up—has only widened the gap between
profane history and the sacred narrative. Perhaps the definitive episode of the past
John Mack Faragher
What do you know about American Indians? Silence. Do you know
any American Indians? Heads shake from side to side. What do you
think a reservation is? The discussion picks up. “It’s where the Indians
live.” Why? How did they come to live there? “They just live there.”
Why? “So they can be together.” But why do they live at that particular place? “They just picked that place because they liked it or because
it was away from the white people.”
The semester her students spend studying Indian history, Rand writes, is something
like a trip to Mars for them. By the end of the term, many are enthralled with the subject and inevitably one will ask, “Why didn’t our parents and teachers tell us this
stuff?” In the words of Johnny Cash, “the lonely voice of youth cries ‘What is truth?’”32
31 Buchanan, Limbaugh, and Dole quoted in Samuel, Remembering America, 126; Zimmerman,
Whose America?, 217. For accounts of the National History Standards controversy by participants see
Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching
of the Past (New York, 1997); Linda Symcox, Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in
American Classrooms (New York, 2002).
32 Jacki Thompson Rand, “Why I Can’t Visit the National Museum of the American Indian:
Reflections of an Accidental Privileged Insider, 1989-1994,” Common-Place 7 (July 2007), http://
www.common-place-archives.org/vol-07/no-04/rand/.
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thirty years was the conservative attack on the National Standards for History, drafted
by educational professionals, academic historians, and history teachers in the early
1990s to serve as a model for the strengthening of state history standards. The negative
rhetoric of this campaign of suppression was depressingly familiar. The standards were
“propaganda of an anti-Western ideology,” declared paleoconservative Patrick
Buchanan. They should be “flushed down the toilet,” ranted talk radio blowhard Rush
Limbaugh. The historians who drew them up must be “embarrassed by America,” said
Senator Robert Dole, 1996 Republican candidate for president. The U.S. Senate voted
99–1 to condemn the standards, the lone dissenting vote coming from a senator who
considered the language of condemnation insufficiently strong.31
So this is where we’re left: with a curricular approach that concentrates on the
teaching of an exceptionalist American narrative in the early grades and requires a
strong dose of profane history to balance the scales in the upper grades. As Harold
Rugg, John Caughey, and the kids of Jefferson County, Colorado, understood, “you
can’t make America seem perfect,” you’ve got to test the faith. But we’re stuck with
state standards and history textbooks that demonstrate a profound disregard and misunderstanding of Native American history. As a consequence, teenage students find
their American history courses irrelevant and boring, while students of color are alienated by them. The result is a public woefully uninformed about American Indian people. Jacki Thompson Rand, who teaches Native American history at the University of
Iowa, writes of the ignorance she finds among her college students at the beginning of
the semester:
17
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33 Brian S. Collier, “Committee on Teaching and Public Education: K-20 Scholars and
Scholarship at the Western History Association,” Western Historical Quarterly 47 (2016), 325–9.
Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom and Margaret D. Jacobs “Teaching American History as Settler
Colonialism,” and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, “Federalism: Native, Federal, and State Sovereignty,” in
Sleeper-Smith et al., ed., Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, 259–
72, 273–86.
34
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What is to be done? I’m afraid this is one of those addresses where the analysis of
the problem overwhelms the prescriptions. But our bailiwick as western historians
gives us singular purchase. We count ourselves among those who understand that without reckoning with the American Indian past there can be no real understanding of
American history. Some of us have, and more of us might shoulder, the task of authoring the textbooks used in public school, notwithstanding the risk of tumult and heartbreak that seems to go with the assignment. Most of us will keep doing what we do
best: revising and extending the evidence-based scholarship that over the past several
decades has recharted the American past. But I think we ought to lend more aid and
comfort to our teaching colleagues in the public schools. Many of us participated in
the Teaching American History project, created by Congress in 2001 as part of the No
Child Left Behind Act and terminated after Republicans took control of the House of
Representatives in 2011. While there is no prospect for the revival of the program, it
was a model of the kind of collaboration we might continue by bringing more history
teachers directly into our association, learning from them about the challenges they
face, and doing our best to assist them with ideas and materials. In that regard, here’s a
shout-out to the Committee on Teaching and Public Education of the WHA and its
cochairs, Brian Collier and Mark Johnson, for their valuable and ongoing work connecting the WHA and its members to history teachers.33
But this investigation also suggests to me that we ought to expend more thought
and energy on the ways our work contributes to the master narrative of American history. I realize this is uncomfortably familiar territory. The frontier myth was the most
important articulation of that narrative in the twentieth century, and steering clear of
it makes good sense. What textbooks once celebrated as progress many of us now interpret as the relentless expansion of the settler state. Yet the history of settler colonialism places the struggle of indigenous people at the center of our national story. That
story does not end with the Dawes Act or the Wounded Knee Massacre but extends to
the current moment, when tribes in many states and localities have assumed a permanent and powerful place in the complicated landscape of American federalism. We are
in need of a new national narrative that reimagines America in all its fullness, a new
national myth that fully incorporates Indian people not as victims but as actors, not as
opponents of progress but as Americans struggling for freedom, equality, and justice.34
Perhaps I’m grasping at straws, but I tell myself there is reason to hope for a better
American myth. For the past eight years, our nation has been led by a president who
eloquently argues for just such a new national narrative, one that takes its inspiration
John Mack Faragher
35 “Remarks by the President at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches,”
White House Office of the Press Secretary, 7 March 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-of
fice/2015/03/07/remarks-president-50th-anniversary-selma-montgomery-marches.
United Nations, “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” http://www.ohchr.org/
EN/Issues/IPeoples/Pages/Declaration.aspx and Barack Obama “On My Upcoming Trip to Indian
Country,” Indian Country Today, 3 June 2014, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/06/
05/my-upcoming-trip-indian-country.
36
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from the struggles of heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. Perhaps President Barack
Obama’s most expansive articulation of that narrative came in March 2015, at the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the 1965 attack on civil rights marchers at the
Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. The march on Selma, said the President,
“was part of a broader campaign that spanned generations.” America’s founding documents, he continued, laid out the terms. “‘We the People . . . in order to form a more
perfect union . . . hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’
These are not just words. They are a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny.” Selma reminds us, the President continued, that “America is a constant work in
progress. . . . Loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out
for what’s right and shake up the status quo. . . . Our march is not yet finished. But we
are getting closer. Two hundred and thirty-nine years after this nation’s founding, our
union is not yet perfect. But we are getting closer.”35
President Obama explicitly includes Native Americans in this narrative. In
December 2010, after consultation with the leaders of the nation’s 565 federallyrecognized Indian nations, he reversed the position of his predecessor and endorsed the
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which recognizes “the
rights of indigenous peoples to maintain and strengthen their own institutions, cultures
and traditions, and to pursue their development in keeping with their own needs and aspirations.” The President laid out his position in an open letter to the American Indian
people. “As I’ve said before,” Obama wrote in an open letter to the American Indian people, “the history of the United States and tribal nations is filled with broken promises.
But . . . we’re writing a new chapter in our history—one in which agreements are upheld,
tribal sovereignty is respected, and every American Indian and Alaskan Native who
works hard has the chance to get ahead. That’s the promise of the American Dream.”36
Peter D’Errico, a professor of Native American law at the University of
Massachusetts, objects. “Trying to squeeze Indians into the American Dream doesn’t
‘turn a corner’ or ‘write a new chapter’ in American history,” he writes. “It continues
the old chapters of assimilation and termination.” American Indians, argues D’Errico,
pursue “an Indian Dream,” a dream of their own sovereign nations. He makes a good
point. African Americans and American Indians occupy distinctive positions in
American society, and the goals of their respective struggles differ. The sovereign status of Indian nations is a proud historic legacy that is protected by the Constitution, by
19
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Western Historical Quarterly
2016
37 Peter D’Errico, “Obama Doesn’t Understand American Indian History,” Indian Country
Today, 14 November 2015, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/11/14/obama-doesntunderstand-american-indian-history; Lomawaima, “Federalism”; Kevin Gover, “American Indians
Serve in the U.S. Military in Greater Numbers Than Any Ethnic Group and Have Since the
Revolution,” Huffington Post, 22 May 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/national-museum-of-theamerican-indian/american-indians-serve-in-the-us-military_b_7417854.html.
38
Barack Obama, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters (New York, 2010).
39
Erdrich, Bingo Palace, 99 and Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves (New York, 2008), 243.
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congressional legislation, and by legal precedent. Indian nations are a structural fact of
our history as a settler nation, part of the contingent pattern of American federalism,
as K. Tsianina Lomawaima argues in an important recent essay.37
Nevertheless, both American Indians and African Americans are American citizens, protected by the same charter rights and liberties as everyone else. The sovereignty of native nations has not prevented Indian men and women from serving in the
armed forces of the United States in greater numbers per capita than any other ethnic
group in the country. Diversity united by a common struggle for human rights and values: there more than enough there for an inspiring national myth that can be taught
proudly, even to elementary school children. In this light, it is notable that President
Obama has written and published a children’s book, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My
Daughters (2010), in which he tells the stories of thirteen American heroes, including
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller and Jane Addams, Martin
Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Sitting Bull, among others.38
In attending to the larger narrative, we might take inspiration from creative artists. Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie are Native storytellers who write of an
America where the hope and the fear, the promise and the shame, are braided together. “There is no unraveling the rope,” Erdrich writes. “We’re all in this together.”
The stories of both these writers are set in the worlds they know well, Erdrich’s in the
Anishinaabe country of the western Great Lakes, Alexie’s in and around the Spokane
Reservation of eastern Washington state—local places that, like William Faulkner’s
invented Yoknapatawpha County, contain multitudes. Erdrich and Alexie write very
different kinds of stories, but both focus on Harold Rugg’s American Problem. And,
emphasizing the importance of teaching our children, both write for young people—as
President Obama has—most notably, in Alexie’s uproarious The Absolutely True Diary
of a Part-Time Indian (2007) and Erdrich’s poignant Birchbark House series, which
self-consciously emulates Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, but from the
perspective of a Native family.39
Or consider the work of singer/songwriter Johnny Cash, whose song I borrowed
for the title of this essay. The thousands of recordings Cash made over a nearly fiftyyear career include not only his definitive and distinctive hits of the 1950s and 1960s
but a series of imaginative concept albums. He made flag-waving tributes to the nation
like America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song (1972) as well as protest records like
The Man in Black (1971), including songs that identify with the poor, the imprisoned,
John Mack Faragher
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
To keep on going where we meant to go.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
Except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. . . .
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.42
40
Leigh H. Edwards, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Bloomington, 2009).
Edwards, Johnny Cash, 222 and Antonino D’Ambrosio, “The Bitter Tears of Johnny Cash,”
Salon, 8 November 2009, www.salon.com/2009/11/09/johnny_cash_2.
41
42 Miller Williams, “Of History and Hope,” Some Jazz A While: Collected Poems (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1999), 259.
Downloaded from http://whq.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on October 23, 2016
the disenfranchised, and the victims of an unjust war. His album Blood, Sweat, and
Tears (1963) celebrated the American working class, while Bitter Tears: Ballad of the
American Indian (1964) decried the dispossession of American Indians. In his talking
blues, “The Flint Arrowhead” (1973), Cash tells of finding an old arrowhead on his
farm. It is made with such skill that he is moved to wonder about his claim to the property. “That I inherited this ground,” he sings, “is denied by this stone that I found.”
Cash embraced both frontier mythology and Indian rights, and although these contrary impulses remain in painful conflict in his work, as critic Leigh H. Edwards writes,
they engage our most fundamental national paradox.40
In 1972 Johnny Cash was invited to the White House by President Richard
Nixon to discuss prison reform, a cause he cared deeply about. At one point, the
President asked if Cash would play a few songs, requesting “Okie from Muskogee” and
“Welfare Cadillac,” country hits of the day that disparaged antiwar protesters and the
poor. He wasn’t prepared to perform those tunes, Cash replied, but would be happy to
play a couple of others. He might have chosen “I Walk the Line” or “A Boy Named
Sue,” but instead he launched into “What Is Truth?,” followed by “The Man in
Black,” and closed with “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” a moving tribute to the late Pima
Indian veteran, one of the group of five Marines who raised the American flag on
Mount Suribachi at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Johnny Cash never spoke publicly about
his serenade of President Nixon, but years later, he remained proud of his protest songs.
“I don’t see much reason to change my position today,” he said shortly before his death
in 2003. “There’s still plenty of darkness to carry off.”41
Another Arkansas native, poet Miller Williams, spoke of the urgent task of leveling with our children in the poem he read at the second inauguration of President Bill
Clinton in 1997.
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