General, yet Essential Changes to United States Curricula
My education about the history of Indigenous people in the region and country was marked by chronic misrepresentation and omission of the violent circumstances under which colonizers took power on this continent. I learned a superficial cultural history of the fictionalized first Thanksgiving and the social arrangement of “Native American” tribes, and I learned the mythologized events the lead to the formation of our settler colonial state, but the in-between of how the land came to be controlled by those it does not belong to was simply not covered in detail. This settler denial of responsibility for historical and ongoing violences legitimizes and reifies colonial society as natural and justified.
The curricula of public schools in the U.S. must fundamentally alter their framing of the history of Indigenous peoples’ presence and expulsion from their own lands to honestly educate students on the violent origins of current social and political arrangements. They must also center and actually name the specific tribes their occupied land belongs to in histories of colonization to highlight the density of Indigeneity and avoid a monolithic view of Indigenous groups. Schools in New York City, for example, must be clear about the lack of mutual understanding between Dutch colonizers and the Lenape in the “purchase” of Manaháhtaan (now known as Manhattan). While students now might just learn that the Dutch bought this island for almost nothing, classrooms must highlight how the so-called purchase was actually understood by the Lenape as an exchange of goods for the right to peaceful co-occupancy by settlers. It is essential for students to understand how this “purchase” and ongoing occupation is illegitimate because settlers broke the terms of their agreement when they began to push the Lenape off their own land. They should learn of the persisting marks of colonialism, such as Wall Street and its origin as the path along the wall that kept the Lenape out of their land, enforcing arbitrarily imposed concepts of ownership that dominate our settler colonial society (Zunigha 2021). Resources like The Decolonial Atlas can further show students how the current arrangement of society and use of land on this continent is relatively new and very different from how it was under Indigenous stewardship for thousands of years. For students in NYC, images like those on this page can provide context:
This nuance and detail that informs students about the people of the very land they exist on must be integrated into curricula across the continent, and it must center the perspectives of those Indigenous people. History told from the colonial view only serves to reproduce colonial violences.
Also extremely important to change, information about Indigenous cultures and histories was presented in my education in the past tense. That is, “Native Americans” were presented as a “were” rather than an “are”. This framing positions Indigenous people as relics of the past, and it obscures the fact that they still face colonial injustices and fight for return of land and cultural property in the present day. Curricula should foreground modern Indigenous existence through collaboration with Indigenous people in order to make real the ongoing violences of the settler colonial state. They should highlight the work of contemporary and past Indigenous artists and scholars through organizations and resources that present this work on their own terms, such as the Lenape Center.
True decolonization requires meaningful actions which restore the Indigenous sovereignty that colonization attacks. The foundation for understanding colonial violences and the need for structural change must be built in the classroom, and instilling this understanding in future generations can be instrumental in their ability to support decolonial futures.
