Thanks! I went on so long that I began to doubt anyone would read the whole thing, haha. I'm glad you liked it. Please do read the book.
I grew up in the Bay Area. From my school years, I retained the knowledge that the place I lived was originally the home of the Miwok. I recall having to memorize facts about how they processed acorns to make them good to eat. Of course, the Miwok are STILL THERE, and surely have done and are continuing to do far more than just process acorns, but you'd never have guessed it from anything our teachers told us!
It is especially shocking compared to how much more effort was made to teach us about the past and present of other ethnic groups in California. And outside California! (Not that those efforts were without their own problems, but when it came to Native people, they seriously didn't even try.)
Interesting that you mention the homogenizing of different Native groups, because Wiseman also discusses that, but from a different perspective. Pretty early on in the contact period, Abenaki people realized that Europeans had certain ideas of how "Indians" dressed and behaved, and some of them played into that, dressing as Plains Indians to promote their selling of crafts and souvenirs. Their actual traditional dress, of course, looked nothing like what they wore to impress their Euro-American customers.
Of course this doesn't suggest that it's somehow their fault, but rather that the problem has deep roots and we don't seem to have learned a lot since hundreds of years back.
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I grew up in the Bay Area. From my school years, I retained the knowledge that the place I lived was originally the home of the Miwok. I recall having to memorize facts about how they processed acorns to make them good to eat. Of course, the Miwok are STILL THERE, and surely have done and are continuing to do far more than just process acorns, but you'd never have guessed it from anything our teachers told us!
It is especially shocking compared to how much more effort was made to teach us about the past and present of other ethnic groups in California. And outside California! (Not that those efforts were without their own problems, but when it came to Native people, they seriously didn't even try.)
Interesting that you mention the homogenizing of different Native groups, because Wiseman also discusses that, but from a different perspective. Pretty early on in the contact period, Abenaki people realized that Europeans had certain ideas of how "Indians" dressed and behaved, and some of them played into that, dressing as Plains Indians to promote their selling of crafts and souvenirs. Their actual traditional dress, of course, looked nothing like what they wore to impress their Euro-American customers.
Of course this doesn't suggest that it's somehow their fault, but rather that the problem has deep roots and we don't seem to have learned a lot since hundreds of years back.