Every textbook tells that people lived in the Americas before Christopher Columbus landed. However, when authors swing into what they see as their main story– the settlement of the Americas by Europeans–Native Americans pretty much drop out of some books. The omissions begin with their presentations of Columbus. American Indians play bit parts in the Columbus story textbooks tell.
The 2005 edition of A History of the United States, by Daniel Boorstin, former Librarian of Congress, and Brooks Mather Kelley, former chief archivist at Yale University, devotes almost two thousand words to the story of Columbus’s four voyages to America. This is the longest account in any of the 22 books I surveyed. Yet in this account, Native Americans get only five words: “The natives called it Guanahani, and Columbus named it San Salvador.”
Boorstin and Kelley do go on to allot their next two pages of text, one page of photos, and a map to American Indians. This small section of 1,250 words tries to cover 40,000 years and more than 400 societies, from Peru to the Arctic, in less space than Columbus gets!
Several books do much better. Five books devote their first chapter to Native Americans.The American Adventure gives three chapters–40 pages–to “The Earliest Immigrants.” Nine books, including five of the six newest, also supply interesting information on Native Americans in the twentieth century. They show that the issues that Columbus raised are not yet settled.