Lies my Teacher told me

new book! "Lies My Teacher Told Me-Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by James W. Loewen: There are getting to be more writers who question the whole history of Indian-white relations and history in America-This book has a section on Indians that attempts to expose the hypocracy of American history classes taught in public schools, and set the record straight for once. A traditional verse goes "In fourteen hundred and ninety three Columbus stole all he could see." The writer's thesis is that history is a hated subject for many Americans, and especially Indian students because as written it is a record of five centuries of Indian defeat, but in reality it is a record of Native American survival and perservance under genocidal conditions. There is a graphic description of small pox in the book-the first I have come across that accurately depicts an outbreak, it is hard to read and is gory but is necessary for us to understand the small pox outbreaks effects on the Blackfeet in 1870 coupled with the massacre of Heavy Runner's band: The introduction of whiskey in 1870 created a twin horror on top of the small pox horror of Blackfeet killing Blackfeet in their sorrow and misery and the breakdown of tribal social structures that I fear we have not recovered from yet today. We need tribal ceremonies of reconciliation and reconstruction and acknowledgment of our ancestors great courage and perserverance in the face of extinction. We owe them at least the fight for our land that they died for in the forced patents.
William Bradford wrote of the horror of the small pox epidemic around Plymouth, "A sorer disease cannot befall the Indians, they fear it more than the plague. For usually they that have this disease have them in abundance, and for want of bedding and linen and other helps they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and matting and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason of thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. And then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep."
The members of Heavy Runner's band were suffering an outbreak of small pox when Baker's troops fired into their lodges multuplying their terror and horror when their children were gunned down by drunken army troops, and chased through the river brush. One skeleton of a 12 year old Piegan girl was found and recently rediscovered by an Indian student at the U of M in Missoula. The little girls skull had a bullet hole in her forehead right above her eyes. You know she saw her executioner, a drunken white man. You would think the Blackfeet college would be interested in recovering that little girl for a proper burial instead of lying in a metal drawerer in the geology dept.
I really don't think the modern Blackfeet people think the white man still desires to take their remaining lands and to put them into a greater poverty to force more land sales. The failure of tribal leaders to take up the issues of BIA land frauds, state encroachment onto the reservation, and BIA corruption plays into their plans. In 1928 government reports documented the Indians desire to remain Indians, to preserve what they inherited from their ancestors, and to be free of white rule. I think we have the same goals today. We are getting close to mounting an effort to bring our claims to Congress with the full backing of the tribal council. That is progress out of the recent past when Chairman Old Person absolutely refused to help us bring our claims to Congress. He was a BIA pet who sold out his people. I can see the new thinking of the younger tribal council members who do not have his defeated attitude. Thanks be to them. B.Juneau