Publication Date

2025

Placement

Honorable Mention

Class Year

2025

Department

American Studies

Advisor

Ned Blackhawk

Abstract

This thesis examines Indigenous representation in twentieth-century American history textbooks. Chapter One contends that the most popular U.S. history textbook of the late twentieth century, The American Pageant, erased tribal nations from its narrative and its maps. Across twelve editions (1956-2002), The Pageant taught generations of students that “Indians” served only as barriers to building the modern American nation-state. While Indigenous erasure can be traced back to specific passages in The Pageant, erasure can better be understood as an iterative process, both textual and cartographic in nature. Beginning in 1983, The Pageant added new maps that depicted tribes and advertised a “new treatment of several topics, including American Indian life in the pre-Columbian era” (Bailey and Kennedy, 1983, vi). While new maps imbued the text with an appearance of change, nearby passages repeated and reinforced the textbook’s original representation of “Indians” as mythologized nomads who did not meaningfully occupy land. These revisions never answered scholars’ 1971 call for a “new Indian history” – a history that would center Indigenous sovereignty. Indeed, cartographic revisions distracted from the outdated scholarship that continued to shape The Pageant’s narrative.

Chapter Two suggests that Indigenous erasure was never an inevitability. As early as 1929, Choctaw historian Muriel H. Wright centered tribal nations in the Oklahoma history textbooks she wrote. Her textbooks contended that the Five Tribes built the modern state, forming the “first political organizations” in the “country now called Oklahoma” (Wright, 1929, xvii). Wright’s maps directly countered Indigenous erasure by prompting students to color in the territory that belonged to each tribal nation – the Seminole, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Choctaw Nations. “Coloring in” reinforced Wright’s notion that tribal nations added to, rather than detracted from, the American landscape throughout history. Moreover, her maps reflected both dispossession and a continuous Indigenous presence on land – powerfully rebutting the pervasive myth that Native peoples died out. Wright’s textbooks reveal that long before the 1970s, an Indigenous historian reimagined how tribal nations figured in the American story.

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