Why You Can’t Teach U.S. History without American Indians

For generations U.S. historians wrote the nation’s story as if Indians did not exist, or at best, they marginalized Indian peoples as unimportant actors in the national drama of revolution and democratic state formation. Despite the large number of faculty trained in American Indian history very little has changed and most college level students who enroll in large survey courses in U.S. history learn about Indians during the initial stages of encounter and then, Indians are often depicted as succumbing to epidemic diseases or being pushed off their lands by westward expansion.

The mission of this symposium is to change how historians teach U.S. history. Today, we are fortunate to have a large number of faculty who teach American Indian Studies and the knowledge base that these scholars possess is profound, thoroughgoing, and expansive. These new perspectives need to be better incorporated into the interpretation and writing of history. Repeatedly, we hear faculty proclaim that they would include Indians if they were more central to mainstream history. This symposium intends to challenge that perspective and to provide a new expanded resource for college level faculty.

Scholars will present papers that suggest how Indians can be better integrated into the way we teach and study US history in a symposium to be held at the Newberry in Chicago. We hope that this symposium will provide a public, academic forum for new interpretations of past events, from an Indian perspective, and we plan to publish selected papers in a volume that will be geared toward classroom teaching. We also hope to create a website for the faculty who teach courses in American Indian Studies and US History to post syllabi and engage in a public forum where faculty who wish to develop similar courses can draw on this reservoir of experience.

More information:
http://www.newberry.org/why-you-cant-teach