“A Century of Progress” : The Portrayal of Indians in American History Textbooks

How might the stories about Native people told in American history textbooks be different if images such as these were included?

Listen to Professor Fred Hoxie talk about the images on this page...including the one above.

 

Cahokia as a thriving metropolis

Indian and Russian traders at Vancouver

 

Sinisquaw, a Potawatomi woman, and her daughters

A ??? village scene in Indiana, date?

 

Deaf Man's village, run by a Delaware man and Frances Slocum, his white "captive" wife, near what is now Peru, Indiana

An Indian child being taken to boarding school (by a man the Crows called "Boy that Grabs")

 

Crow men (in Western dress) observing a white photographer and painter recording an "authentic" traditional village

An obviously modern and stylized painting of a "traditional" warrior

 

A buckskin parasol with traditional Ojibwe designs

A grandmother and her grandchild at a powwow in 1960s Chicago

 

Another urban powwow scene

What do you see in these pictures that you rarely find in History textbooks when they discuss Native Americans?

Family? Modernity? Women? "Civilization"?

Perhaps most importantly, we find various Indian points of view...

Listen to a classroom discussion about the differences between images like these and the ones found in most textbooks.

Including such imagery complicates the story that historians tell...but they enrich it as well. They force readers and students to recognize that history is far more complicated than we generally recognize...and that Native American people do not fall quite so readily into the category of "savages" as a century of textbook authors have implied.

 

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