Sebastian Chavarro’s Reviews > Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong > Status Update

Unfortunately just not what I need in life right now. I will return.

“Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentric of American exceptionalism... Indian history reveals that the U.S. and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this - not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again. We must temper our national pride with critical self knowledge…”

“The answer to minimizing the Indian wars is not maximizing them. Telling Indian history as a parade of white villains might be feel-good history for those who want to wallow in the interference that America or whites are bad. What happened is more complex than that, however, so the history we tell must be more complex.”

Acculturation between whites and natives was not an altogether impossible goal, as evidenced by whites assimilated into some native cultures. The narrative that natives simply couldn’t acculturate into white society fails to acknowledge that they were never given the opportunity to voluntarily assimilate - only forcibly removed.

Had never considered how interesting roads not taken throughout history might be.

“If we recognized American Indians as important intellectual antecedents of our political structure we would have to acknowledge that acculturation has been a two-way street, and we might have to reassess the assumption of primitive Indian culture that legitimates the entire conquest.”

‘Thoughtless use of the “otherizing” terms civilized and civilization blocks any real inquiry into the world-view or social structure of the “uncivilized” person or society.’

Somewhat contrary to what the author is saying, Chapter 4 is just convincing me of the global lack of civility.

“The ideological meaning American history has ascribed Thanksgiving compounds the embarrassment. The Thanksgiving legend makes Americans ethnocentric. After all, if our culture has God on its side why should we consider other cultures seriously?”

Not trodding any new ground but this book is recontextualizing the importance of history for me. It’s one thing to vaguely know that history is important for the light is casts on the present - it’s another to understand why. Understanding that Columbus (in some ways) set the precedent for domination of one culture by another, and that Eurocentrism in general history education begins with him, is important.

Deep down, our culture encourages us to imagine that we are richer and more powerful because we're smarter... Since textbooks don't identify or encourage us to think about the real causes, "we're smarter" festers as a possibility. Also left festering is the notion that "it's natural" for one group to dominate another. While history brims with examples of national domination, it also is full of counterexamples.