Nic Runnels: Researching the Teaching of Native American Hard History

B&W two people sitting and one standing behind them

Spurred a recent Southern Poverty Law Center report entitled “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” I’m researching how and to what extent Native American history is taught in American schools. I began in June extensively researching Native history from the ancient era through the present, reading history books, textbooks, reportage, and Native fiction in order to identify the key concepts on which Native American history hinges and of which the average American with a basic education ought to know. I’ve also been compiling statical data from the U.S. Census, Pew Research Center, and numerous Native agencies in effort to show, in my final publication, what systematic racial inequality looks like averaged on the page. For example the median household income for Native Americans is $39,719, while the averaged American’s is $55,775, and the averaged white American’s is $71,300. That’s nearly half. And the inequalities don’t end in economic comparisons. Natives’ are statically more likely to be incarcerated; lack health insurance; have a high school diploma (or equivalent); have a bachelors degree; have a graduate or professional degree; be unemployed; suffer from obesity; suffer from diabetes, so on.  So my research is looking at linking the lack of teaching the often hard history of Native American – U.S. relations to such present racial inequality, for without a complete historical education addressing the inhumanities we as a nation were once capable of, we’ll never be able to realize racial equality or understand why we presently lack it.

In the Southern Poverty Law Center report Hasan Jefferies writes “we the people have a deep-seated aversion to hard history because we are uncomfortable with the implications it raises about the past as well as the present. We the people would much rather have the Disney version of history, in which villains are easily spotted, suffering never last long, heroes invariably prevail and life always gets better. We prefer to pick and choose the what aspects of the past to hold on to.” My research is looking at extending the incredibly moving work of the SPLC’s report from slavery into Native American hard history. For when I read the SPLC’s report for the first time last winter I took great issue with the line in its preface, again by Jefferies, that goes “it is often said that slavery was our country’s original sin, but it is much more than that. Slavery is our country’s origin.” This misconception, though well-meaning, is very much to the point. Even Jefferies, chair of SPLC’s Teaching Hard History Advisory Board and a Ph.D in American History, fails to see Native American history as this country’s origin. In order to address the racial inequality in this country, we must reorient our perspective of American history. It did not begin on the Mayflower or the Niña or the Pinta or the Santa María. Nor did it begin with Columbus, Vespucci or Coronado. Native American history is not just the history of Native Americans. It’s the history of America, of Americans.

Winona LaDuke once wrote that “People lose perspective. It is a cultural trait in America to think in terms of very short time periods. My advice is: learn history. Take responsibility for history. Recognize that sometimes things take a long time to change. People in this era forget that.” Much like the idea that there’s immense hope and beauty in African Americans’ resistance to slavery, I think there’s something severely brilliant in Native Americans’ persistence to survive in this country. Against violence, disease, famine, abduction, deception, oppression, entrapment, banishment, sterilization, forced assimilation, forced relocation, property theft, massacre, exclusion, and ethnic cleansing, Natives persisted. What a hard and magnificent story to teach our children.

I’m presently working on finalizing my Student Survey on Native history that I’m hoping to get to numerous high school classrooms across the country, along with a Teacher Survey. I’m also attempting to look at the popular textbooks used in the country, in order to investigate and evaluate how they teach Native American history. I’ve also gotten into contact with a woman who has her Ph.D. in Native American history, and am looking for more experts to work with and offer guidance. Besides that, I feel pretty on course and enthralled with this research, and am eager to see the final product.

The first 8 of 25 questions on the student survey to be distributed.
Isleta delegates with a U.S. representative. The Isleta had loaned the U.S. government $100,000 in gold and silver to pay for U.S. troops stationed in New Mexico during the Civil War. This photo is a from a book of photography documenting the first photography exhibit on at the Smithsonian in 1869 entitled “Photographic Portraits of North American Indians.”