fandomhigh | American History: Lies Your Other Teachers Told You [Friday, October 31, 2014, 2nd period]

Josh was dressed up as John F. Kennedy today because of course he was.

"Ask not what candy can do for you," he said in a thick Boston accent (and he was from Connecticut, so he could do a pretty credible Boston accent). "Ask what you can do for candy."

That didn't make sense, but Josh wasn't the speechwriter for a reason.

"Anyway," he said in his normal voice, "we've missed out on a discussion of Native Americans because things kept coming up. You spent a class in the Museum of the American Indian, a place ~~with unlabeled exhibits~~ devoted to fixing the history books' attempt to keep the stories of Natives confined to a neat box labeled 'Pocahontas', 'Squanto,' 'Sacajawea,' or 'terrible John Wayne film.' There are hundreds of tribes with thousands of members living in every state in the Union and they have real problems right now that don't have anything to do with teaching white people how to grow corn or fighting back against the very real land-grab they were subjected to over the course of several centuries."

He leaned back against his desk. "So based on what you learned in previous classes, tell me the first word that comes to mind when you think of Native Americans, and we'll see if we can't do a little bit of deprogramming today."

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Kathy was also in costume today, so she saw nothing wrong with Josh's. If anything, she was just grateful that he was dressed up as pre-Dallas JFK.

She was, however, frowning. All of the words that came to her mind weren't about Native peoples, exactly. Instead, they were words about what the original settlers and later the government had done to them. And that wasn't very good.

"Screwed," she admitted reluctantly.

Josh's mouth quirked up. "You're not wrong," he said. "Do you think restructuring how we talk about Native Americans in school would help at all?"

"Well, we only really learn about them in relation to white people," Kathy said. "Maybe we could try to study them for themselves?"

Josh nodded. "It's a complicated history, but I think students can handle complicated."

"Any time we learn about a people only by comparing their history to someone else, we're not really learning about them, but more about how they're seen by the dominant culture."

"True," Josh agreed. "How would you integrate all of the various tribes? As they encountered Europeans?"

"What information do we have about them from before they encountered Europeans? Anything?"

Kathy hadn't studied Native history much, so she didn't really know.

"More now," Josh admitted. "For a few hundred years, no one but the tribe members themselves was all that interested in what they were doing."

American History: Lies Your Other Teachers Told You [Friday, October 31, 2014, 2nd period]

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