Native American History

[Jubal]

http://indigenoushistory.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/what-if-people-told-european-history-like-they-told-native-american-history/

This is a really interesting article on Native American history and how it's often presented. Any thoughts?

[TTG4]

http://indigenoushistory.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/what-if-people-told-european-history-like-they-told-native-american-history/

This is a really interesting article on Native American history and how it's often presented. Any thoughts?

It's always quite interesting to have your ignorance shown to you. Though it would be interesting to see if different ethnic groups have a bias towards their own history, I imagine in countries like south korea or japan they probably focus more on the history on that area?

Do we actually have many records of native american history? I'm pretty sure they had writing, but whether it survived or not is a whole other issue.

[Jubal]

Records are much, much less good than for Europe at the time, particularly for the pre-colonial period. Most of the original peoples of America didn't have a formal writing system, and whilst their oral tradition is perhaps more impressive than that of Europe it's been badly recorded and obviously has something of a Chinese whispers effect. That said, we know a lot from archaeology, and certainly far more than the few paragraphs some textbooks devote to them. One of my main criticisms of the Cambridge history course is that its paper structure still ingrains some of these old attitudes; the North American History papers have only just had their start date shifted back even into the sixteenth century, with the previous version even ignoring Spanish exploration that occurred before British colonisation let alone older Native histories.

Asia has more Asian-centric history curricula, of course - the issues there are more similar to the ones we have here, about the relative presentation of issues. For example, most Japanese textbooks heavily underplay Japanese war crimes in WWII, whereas Chinese textbooks cover them in full and gruesome detail, leading to a lot of political issues where ordinary young Japanese people don't understand Chinese anger. I don't know what the situation's like for China's ethnic minorities (Manchus, Mongols, Uighurs, Tibetans, etc) and whether their history gets fudged over in state textbooks.

[comrade_general]

I am a native American.

[Will]

I'd bet my future house on the fact that Tibetans etc. are not well represented.