Generation Z was wrongly taught that Native Americans lived in peace and harmony before whites arrived

Generation Z was wrongly taught that Native Americans lived in peace and harmony before whites arrived

The Iroquois exterminated a neighboring tribe, the Huron, killing almost all of its 30,000 men, women, and children. Torture was a commonplace practice in America before white colonists arrived. As Nathaniel Knowles of the University of Pennsylvania noted in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, “The Indians of eastern North America evinced great emotional satisfactions from the prolonged tortures often inflicted on war captives.” As True West Magazine notes,

Long before the Euro-Americans arrived Indian tribes were constantly at war with one another. Captives were often put to death. While being tortured, they were expected to show self-control, bragging of their prowess as a warrior, showing defiance and singing their “death songs.” These were public events and the entire village attended, including the children. Some even participated in the torture, especially the women whose husbands or sons had died in battle. It was not uncommon to burn the captives. Execution of a captive, especially an adult male, could take several days and nights….Nearly all the tribes tortured their captives to some degree. Some, like the Plains tribes and the Apache were especially brutal. Rape was pretty common for women as was disfigurement.

Before Spanish invaders put a stop to it, the Aztecs of Mexico employed human sacrifice on a vast scale, killing at least 20,000 people per year and extracting their hearts. Vast numbers of subject peoples ruled over by the Aztecs were killed to provide human sacrifices. One scholar estimates that 250,000 people were killed annually by the Aztecs in the 15th Century in human sacrifices.

But thanks to woke textbooks that falsely depict Indian tribes as peaceful environmentalists, members of Generation Z think Indian tribes lived in harmony with each other before the wicked white man arrived. At least 70% of Zoomers agree with the false statement, “Prior to the arrival of the European settlers, Native American/ Indigenous tribes lived in peace and harmony.” Only about 40% of Boomers, who grew up before wokeness and political correctness in the schools, believe this false statement.

The false statement is overwhelmingly believed by progressives. As the Skeptic Research Center notes, “‘Very liberal’ respondents agreed the most” with the false statement that “”Prior to the arrival of the European settlers, Native American/ Indigenous tribes lived in peace and harmony,” with “over 70% agreeing with the statement.”

I am a member of Generation X, and I grew up in a time when people were less woke and more honest. I was taught in school about how the Iroquois exterminated the Huron. My daughter, a member of Generation Z, wasn’t taught that unpleasant truth. She was given a rosier, and less accurate, depiction of how Native American tribes interacted with each other. American schools now sugar-coat the history and accomplishments of black and indigenous peoples.

Progressives teach students false claims about how great life was in Africa before white colonists arrived, peddling the false idea that African countries are underdeveloped due to colonialism. In reality, colonization made Third World countries more economically advanced, as the father of modern Liberia, William Tubman, noted. Tubman, who served as Liberia’s president from 1944 to 1971, observed that Liberia was economically poorer than its neighbors because it had not had “the benefits of colonization.” Colonization of Africa made it more agriculturally and economically productive and eventually curbed slavery. Colonization also abolished barbaric practices like suttee (the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres) in India. Most people in many pre-colonization African societies were slaves: For example, the slave population accounted for more than two-thirds of the total population of the Songhai Empire. That empire was the successor of the similarly heavily-enslaved Mali Empire celebrated in progressive high-school textbooks, whose most famous leader, Mansa Musa, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage of 12,000 slaves to cater to his every desire.

Over the last decade, the “Great Awokening” made progressives more woke, which resulted in schools using textbooks that downplay or omit human-rights violations by non-white cultures. But even before the Great Awokening, textbooks already looked at black and indigenous cultures through rose-colored glasses. That was true to some extent even in “Red States.”

For example, my young daughter in Arlington, Virginia was assigned the book “Our World Far and Wide,” used in conjunction with the Virginia Standards of Learning. The book did not contain the anti-American left-wing messages found in textbooks used in progressive states. But it still told history in a way designed to make people of color feel good, rather than tell the truth.

It depicted a nation in Africa that had little effect on the world as one of the world’s three great civilizations. It depicted the relatively short-lived Empire of Mali in West Africa as one of the world’s three great civilizations, along with ancient Greece and Rome. The Mali empire arose both too late (in the Middle Ages) and was too ephemeral to have any real impact on modern civilization. It contributed nothing to modern thought or technology, and today, Mali is one of the world’s poorest countries. Mali left behind no pyramids, no great wall, and no philosophical innovations.

Progressives argue that conservatives oppose the teaching of critical race theory in schools because they oppose “honest history.” But it is progressives who teach dishonest history, not the history textbooks of America prior to the Great Awokening. For example, in my childhood of the 1970s and 1980s, I was taught graphically about the evils of slavery, such as being shown images of a black man whose back was a mass of ugly scar tissue from a savage whipping. I was taught three times about how a racist white mob described “Black Wall Street” in the Greenwood district of Tulsa. Blacks rebuilt Greenwood after it was destroyed, and it finally came to an end to due to “urban renewal” decades later, when it was paved as part of a highway project.

The progressive notion that students are not being taught about the negative aspects of U.S. history is absurd. In fact, so much attention is devoted to historical evils such as slavery that “4 out of 10 Gen Z’ers believe that the founders of the United States are better described as villains than as heroes. Somewhere along the line, a significant portion of young adults developed the idea that America’s founders were more evil than good,” notes the book Generations.

K-12 classes influenced by progressive critical race theory use books that teach pernicious and false “concepts, including race essentialism” and “anti-capitalism.” “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism….Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says the best-selling book How to Be An Antiracist, used in some high-school classes. It advocates discrimination against whites, saying, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination [against whites]. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate. It is read by some students in my daughter’s high school.

The progressive Arlington County schools have students read books by critical race theorists such as Ibram Kendi, author of How to Be An Antiracist. Arlington distributed hundreds of copies of Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students at Wakefield High School. The book contains many errors and celebrates a Marxist anti-Semite. It also peddles conspiracy theories and is dismissive about Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. At Arlington’s Washington-Lee High School, most students in 9th grade English were assigned to read either Stamped or a much longer book that would require more work to read. Virtually all students chose to read Stamped as a result. 30 copies of Stamped are found in my daughter’s English classroom.

Progressive coursework doesn’t just disparage capitalism and whiteness. It also attacks virtues such as planning ahead. The St. Paul schools cite cite the protocol “Courageous Conversation” as part of their Critical Ethnic Studies class required for graduation. That CRT-influenced protocol has “guided school districts to deem traits such as the ability to plan ahead and ’emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology’ as attributes of ‘whiteness.’” Schools have also disparaged individualism and planning ahead as signs of “cultural racism,” under its baneful influence.

The Colorado Education Association recently passed a Marxist resolution declaring that capitalism inherently exploits children and harms education. The resolution declares that “CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.”

The teachers union claim that capitalism harm education is contradicted by the fact that capitalist countries tend to be better at teaching students useful skills than Marxist countries. Communist regimes may be able to teach basic literacy, but they are very bad at teaching students to think creatively or do complex or mentally demanding tasks. Eastern European countries have lower IQs than Western European countries, directly proportional to the stultifying nature of their school systems under communism. Albania, which suffered under the worst communist regime in Europe (which outlawed religion and killed most of its clergy), has the lowest average IQ in Europe, while Romania, which had the second most oppressive regime in Europe, has the second-lowest average IQ in Europe. By contrast, Albanian-Americans and Romanian-Americans exhibit perfectly normal intelligence and include many innovative people like John Belushi and John DeLorean.

The teachers union is wrong to depict capitalism as bad for children. Communist regimes have much higher child death rates than capitalist countries. Millions of children died in Communist China’s Great Leap Forward, an artificial, man-made famine. One example was when a starving “teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother” to survive during the famine. Communist North Korea suffered a famine in the 1990s that killed millions of people, while capitalist South Koreans right across the border had plenty to eat.

Hans Bader

Hans Bader

Hans Bader practices law in Washington, D.C. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law. He also once worked in the Education Department. Hans writes for CNSNews.com and has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.” Contact him at hfb138@yahoo.com

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