Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians ed. by Susan Sleeper-Smith et al. (review)

This volume consists of nineteen short essays in which prominent scholars in Native American studies provide ideas for incorporating discussion of indigenous peoples into courses on United States history. The product of a 2013 symposium hosted by the Newberry Library, the book offers what the editors call a “toolbox” for university instructors who want to include more Native American content in their teaching but worry that Indian subjects lie too far outside the grand narratives of United States history to be addressed in general courses (p. 2). In particular, the authors take the U.S. survey as their target, hoping to convince instructors to draw more Native American material into the broadest American history classes.

The authors take several different approaches to this task. Some critique common practices in the survey that minimize the significance of indigenous peoples. Juliana Barr and Adam Jortner, for instance, describe how the maps used in survey textbooks either empty the North American continent of indigenous people or treat the conquest of Indian nations as a foregone conclusion. Other essays explain how instructors can employ Native American history to complicate traditional topics in a survey course. Paul T. Conrad, for example, offers ways to use the recent scholarship on Indian slavery to transform discussions of American slavery. Scott Manning Stevens suggests teaching the Civil War from Indian country, a particularly useful move for instructors hoping to disrupt master narratives of the American past. Some of the most valuable contributions come from the essays that deal with more recent subjects. As the editors note, most survey classes manage to include Native Americans in discussions of European colonization and early American expansion. Native people tend to disappear, however, in the second half of the survey. Essays like Mindy J. Morgan’s discussion of the New Deal and John J. Laukaitis’s treatment of the civil rights era offer ways to bring Indian people into crucial chapters of modern political history, resisting the tendency to relegate Indians to a more distant past.

The volume concludes with several essays that go beyond discussing particular episodes or topics and instead suggest new models for teaching American history as a whole. Perhaps the most useful of these is Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom and Margaret D. Jacobs’s discussion of settler colonialism. This approach treats the domination of indigenous peoples and their replacement with settler communities as the foundation of American nationhood. The essay defines the elimination of Indian peoples as landowners and sovereigns as a central dynamic of American history. The authors argue that using settler colonialism to organize an American history course requires one to keep Native people at the center of the story. This approach also invites students to examine persistent legacies of colonialism, since settler domination continues to shape Native American lives.

Understandably, the essays focus on historical content, since the task here is to encourage readers to incorporate Native American material into more general courses. The volume would benefit, however, from greater discussion of teaching methods, which only a few of the contributors address directly. In reading the essays, I wanted to know more about the strategies the authors considered most effective for teaching these subjects. What intellectual skills can we help our students practice using Native American material? Are they the same skills we associate with the discipline of history, in general, or can we pursue some forms of learning more effectively with Native American subjects than others? Still, the collection succeeds admirably, providing a variety of tools for incorporating Native American history in ways that promise to challenge and excite our students. It deserves to be read widely, and it will reward those teachers who take its message to heart.