this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Lol some of these comments are completely ignoring the reality of why it was phrased this way. Its a textbook for school children probably below the age of 10. Do you really expect middle school public education teachers to explain genocide and ethnic clensing to eight year olds? They slowly introduce the truth come highschool when kids are older because its horrific and toddlers have no need for their childhood to be ruined with horrific adult truths. Weren't you allowed to believe pilgrims and Indians cam e together for Thanksgiving for a few years of your childhood?
No because I'm native american and was confronted with the reality of genocide and ethnic cleansing everyday
White children can handle it too
Most white adults can't handle it because of this.
"The European colonists forced the native population off of their land" is plenty understandable to a small child
I was also allowed to believe that gay people wanted to rape me and that farm animals live long happy lives out in meadows. Who the fuck benefits from children being lied to?
I can remember it, the lies I was told as a child have turned me into a very cynical adult who has serious issues trusting anyone about just about anything...
I appreciate your input, and I apologize for dogpiling. Not telling your daughter what happened to her is absolutely the right choice, but I do not think it's equivalent to instilling disinformation about the treatment of native populations in the Americas. Omitting the awful particular details is good, no child should know what rape and murder are, but we aren't just doing that—we're teaching our kids that "it's fine actually, the settlers and the native populations were best friends!" It contributes to a widespread ignorance of the New World's history well into adulthood.
I hate opinions like this. It pretends that children are too stupid to understand reality. Children are generally far more intelligent and capable of understanding things than people give them credit for. They just need it to be explained to them.
The reason this is an issue is because it creates this idea that it was mutual, and ingrains a mythos that makes it harder to learn the truth later. Sure, you can coddle them and let them believe everything was happy and peaceful as children, but that's how you end up with adults who believe America doesn't have horrors in its past and we were a pure and moral nation. It creates a conservative ideology where things were perfect before and we shouldn't change or try to fix issues.
Yeah, and it made learning the truth all the more horrific.
What other atrocities should we entirely reverse so as to have a 'pure' childhood?
Maybe we can whitewash Hitler, have Churchill and FDR swap cigars in Munich with him.
In US, curriculum's are different from state to state. SOME children eventually receive the truth, and having learned the truth realize they were lied to by their educators and lose trust in the education system. Other children never learn the truth, and instead argue that there was no genocide because thats what they were taught in school. If the country is willing to make bombs that get dropped on children around the world, then surely we can drop a few truth bombs on our own children.
I see where your coming from but I don't think whitewashing it is the answer...they could've just stated where the settlements were and that native people were displaced it doesn't have to say anything about genocide and can just cover that aspect of it later.
This just sets the wrong framework for the later education your talking about