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

This exceptional set of chapters explores what should be common sense—that American Indians cannot be either completely ignored or carelessly added when teaching U.S. history. Additionally, the many stories cannot be disregarded for eleven months each year only to have teachers attempting to cover all things Indigenous, from Penobscot to Pima and from the Trail of Tears to the Trail of Broken Treaties, in a single “Native American” month (November). Sleeper-Smith, Barr, O’Brien, Shoemaker, and Stevens have brought together impressive scholars from a broad range of fields to reflect on the fact that there would be no U.S. history were it not for American Indians.

The editors of this volume recognized the need to go beyond the usual retelling of U.S. history to incorporate the added dimensions that come with interdisciplinarity. All of the scholars focus on Native American and Indigenous Studies (nais) within their fields, which include environmental studies, education, law, anthropology, and English. These backgrounds inform their discipline-specific research methodologies. For example, Miller, a law professor, revisits the Doctrine of Discovery and its use to justify Manifest Destiny in the United States. Both conceptions have been precariously balanced against American Indian rights, international and U.S. law ensuring that the U.S. government would always be in the winning position.

Acknowledgment of the broad range of disciplines that are relevant to nais is important not just to the content of the volume but also to inform readers that American Indians should not be relegated to the fields of history and anthropology. As a result of this limitation, many people look at American Indians only in retrospect. The contributors do a wonderful job of explaining the problems with this perspective and challenging the ways in which we consider the larger themes of U.S. history. For example, John J. Laukaitis provides an alternative understanding of self-determination during the civil-rights movement, noting, “A rethinking of how one approaches history—from learning facts toward analyzing the past—needs to take place” (198). Attempting to teach U.S. history, particularly at the college level, without including an analysis of the past provides students with a redacted version of history. Not only were American Indians the first inhabitants of this country; they did not leave in 1492 or 1776 or 1812. Ignoring their continuing presence shortchanges all students.

Sleeper-Smith et al. are not the first scholars to call attention to the fact that most of the teachers of U.S. history provide little/no information (or, worse yet, misinformation) about American Indians peoples.¹ They are, however, the first for whom the stated goal is to be “a resource that should help college teachers see the connections between American Indian history and the entirety of American history and enable them to recast their survey history classes from that vantage point” (1). To accomplish this goal, the volume is organized, like many survey courses, chronologically. It includes sixteen chapters divided between pre- and post-1877. Three additional chapters address settler colonialism, federalism, and global indigeneity. They offer ideas about how to build American Indian history into a particular segment within the larger narrative of American history.

Many of us who grew up in the United States learned little in school about American Indians. The fact that events such as the Sioux Uprising and the Trail of Tears might have been mentioned but not placed in their proper context demonstrates the importance of reaching K-12 teachers while they are in college. This volume serves that purpose by removing American Indian history from the vacuum in which it is often placed. For example, its discussions of the Sioux Uprising (Stevens) and the Trial of Tears (Adam Jortner and Jeffrey Ostler) provide details that rarely make it into...