Pretty much this, growing up in California in the 60’s and 70’s. We had some field trips and projects where we weaved baskets & did a bunch of nature walks so we could see how & where the native americans lived, but they didn’t mention the plague, genocide or dark side to pretty much everything until high school or college.
In elementary school, we learned a little about the Native Americans in regards to the Pilgrims and colonies. No news of any strife though. By high school we learned about the Trail of Tears and how most Indians had been wiped out by Old World diseases but nothing about the full scope of American action against the Indians. Somewhere in there we also learned some basic facts about major tribes (These guys had teepees, these guys had wooden longhouses, these guys lived in caves in the Southwest).
Oh, and we learned a scant bit about the Spanish conquest of the Southwest on down, including the decimation of the Aztec and Inca empires. Sort of in the context of “These hundred Spanish guys with horses and muskets were GODS among the stone age natives”.
In college I took a History of Native Americans course which went into much more detail of the taking of the West, the various laws forcing integration of Native Americans and attempts to destroy their culture, etc.
Back in the 60s/early 70s basically that they were here and we brought them civilization while also sort of pushed them around.
Today, outside of a little in cultural diversities, not very much. They are mentioned so incredibly neutrally in history you may as well be talking about the trees or grasslands.
At the age of ten, I went from a Catholic school in Nashville (which focused on how grateful the Indians were to be converted to Christianity, and they did cool stuff like camp and hunt with arrows) to a public school in northern Virginia, which did not hold back on how evil the white man was and how blameless and victimized the Native Peoples were. Um, a lot of my new teachers in Virginia (DC area) were just a few years off campus and had been radical hippies, whereas my Catholic school teachers were old ladies, nuns or both.
I learned more than I expect to be usual about the Menominee Indians, who occupied the area where I grew up (before the white man came). I remember re-enacting Jean Nicollet wearning a Chinese robe and firing off two pistols to scare/impress the local natives upon first contact. That was in first grade, circa 1963.
Then in high school was part of the first wave of revulsion against the cowboys vs. Indians idea of American history, so I got more Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and smallpox blankets (even though that is mostly an urban legend) than those a few years older than I.
My folks liked to take us to the museum which had scads of displays about Amerindian life of the area. One of the statues of Indian women had bare boobs.
Museums are educational.
Regards,
Shodan
I grew up in New Jersey, too, in the 1960s. It was considered essential for us to know about the original inhabitants, so there was always a section on the Lenni-Lenape (Delaware) in school. The NJ state museum had exhibits on them, and they had their own section in the commemorative NJ Tercentenary Volume that came out in 1964 (and from which we cribbed for homework).
we were taught basic info about the Indians in New England (First Thanksgiving!), the Iroquois League in upstate NY, and the Plains Indians. Because I went to Catholic school, we learned about the French Missionary martyrs like Isaac Jogues (who mostly went up into Canada). You learned about a few Indians by name – Massasoit, Squanto (although not his amazing history), Sacajawea, Powhatan. Details about their poor treatment by the settlers weren’t really broadcast – you picked that up elsewhere. In the late 1960s-early 1970s, it was hard to miss – there were films like Soldier Blue and Little Big Man, books like Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for your Sins and Dee Wallace’s Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee, and events like the AIM takeover of Alcatraz. In the mid-19070s I found out about the fate of Weequehela, who had supposedly lived where my home town would later be, and whose cause would become something of a cause celebre in 1727. I learned thuis from the typescript history of our town, which didn’t have a bibliography. Working on my own, I tracked down the sources of the story and foun d out the truth – it actually happened in the next town over, and he was treated even worse than I’d realized. I wrote the story into a play. Much later, I turned it into an article.
Pretty much the only time Indians were even mentioned in my history classes, other than Squanto, Sacajawea, and the line from the Schoolhouse Rock song “Elbow Room” (“There were plenty of fights to win land rights, but the West was meant to be / 'Twas Manifest Destiny”), was that one year was pretty much dedicated to learning about the various western and southwestern tribes. However, the material was almost entirely in narrated filmstrips, so we weren’t really expected to “learn” very much.
You guys talking about smallpox seem to think learning about it was a revelation when you were probably taught things that were falsehoods or misstatements at best. TL;DR: one guy proposed it but there is no evidence that he did it, and anyway accidental infection was plenty effective. An aside: it is also common but false teaching that “ring around the rosie” is about the plague.
Also, the vast majority (90%!) of native deaths occurred due to accidental disease from before the Pilgrims even landed. Similarly, just from a “ain’t that cool” standpoint, it seems odd that Squanto was so able to help the Pilgrims and teach them basic agriculture. It’s almost like he spoke a European language! Well he did, having crossed the Atlantic and back previously. He did it 6 times in his life (3x both ways)! But it is implied that European history in the Americas started with the Pilgrims/Jamestown and Squanto. School implied that it was like a montage of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
And Pilgrim != Puritan.
California has a emphasis on teaching about the Missions, so we did a lot of that in IIRC 4th grade.
I wish I had learned more about the diversity of the tribes. I think the Plains Indian traits dominate in our conception. It would’ve been nice to know more about the individual cultures and not pablum about them being noble and using every part of the buffalo dominated. They were/are people and thus had all types. Some tribes hated each other and allied with the Europeans, were capable of brutal massacres, some wore suits, some did not farm, some did not hunt much.
I did so much reading on my own when I was a kid that it’s hard to separate what I learned in school from what I learned on my own. I knew about Pontiac, Sequoyah, Black Hawk, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, Geronimo, Quanah Parker, &c, &c, but the only things I can definitely say were covered in school were Pocahontas, Squanto, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
I don’t recall being taught much about Aboriginal Canadians, either. We went on a field trip to Batoche once, though. I did go to high school with quite a few Native students, though.
As for sweeping things under the rug, you can’t really discuss Aboriginal issues in Canada at this point.
Same experience here in Kingston, Ontario. We were taught essentially nothing beyond some references to the aboriginals
- Existing in there somewhere, and
- Allying with either French or English, as supporting characters, in the Seven Years’ War.
Later on we did start to get some of the hard truths. I learned about the Beothuks in Grade 8, IIRC.
Today the kids learn more about them.
I am really impressed with your school.
In grade school we got the basic happy Native American story. A noble people! Wise in the ways of nature! I went to school in New York State, so a substantial amount of time was spent on the Iroquois Confederacy, and how great it was that the “first constitution” had been created in New York. New York State is really big on this.
By high school, we learned about the conflicts related to the white settlement of the west, mostly wrapping up with Little Big Horn. I think the school did an okay job of presenting this as a fairly complex issue, but the overall message was still along the lines of “how sad, but time marches on, dontcha know.” We never got ANYTHING about modern Native American people or issues in the US, AIM was never mentioned, and I’m old enough that the movement was still extremely contentious when I was actually in school, so it could reasonably have been covered in current events.
I think I had only the vaguest sense that there were still Native people existing in the present day. There are Native people who lived in the area where I grew up – my grandmother had a very good friend who was Seneca and fairly active in local tribal issues, but this lady still seemed like my grandmother, you know, an old lady who lived in a house in the neighborhood and offered you weird hard candy. It was very striking to me the first time I visited a reservation in the west, and realized the people there had a very distinct culture and lifestyle.
It never really occured to me Canada had any natives, as a kid. There were USA Indians, and Eskimos, but Canada was just English and French who colonized the space between the two.
When I was in middle school, my social studies classes didn’t spend a lot of time on aboriginal people, but when it did, it was mostly the residential schools. I imagine that’s what your rug-sweeping comment alludes to.
Same experience here. Toronto in the 60s-70s.
LOL. That’s brilliant!
Damn those Brits, and their wagon trains. Thank goodness the Americans came later.
Your statement about 90% of native deaths being due to accidental disease is misleading. You surely mean that 90% of the deaths just before the Pilgrim’s landing in that area, because otherwise the figure is absurd. And, indeed, there had been a plague there before that devastated the region, and which was well-known in Europe (there are many references to it). But the source of that highly deadly plague was almost certainly Europeans – there were plenty of contacts before vthe Pilgrims landed (as your statement about Squanto’s many passages – which I also referred to above – attests.
I attended a Montessori elementary school in the '70s, which is about as granola as one can get, and yes, we were taught a considerable amount about the oppression of the native people. I learned Jim Crow in high school, but I recall history class running out of time at the end of the semester somewhere around WWI.
Went to school in the 50s-60s in Alaska. The Native American story was pretty much the white-washed version. Custer was a hero and the Indians were savages. Even worse, there was zero (no, that’s not hyperbole) taught about the Alaska Native cultures. The only thing I “knew” about Natives was that a lot of them got drunk and hung out in downtown Anchorage.
That’s kind of funny, because Canada is where all the natives who got chased out of the US went*. 
*In a VERY rough nutshell.