I’ve had this conversation many times. Teaching a sugar-coated version of the actual relationship between Native Americans and Europeans is much more harmful to young children than letting them know the truth behind the horrendous acts committed by white colonizers. All throughout elementary school, we are taught this heartwarming story of different people coming together to celebrate and feast. We are told about how they exchanged gifts and appreciated one another’s culture. We are told that the Native Americans welcomed Europeans with open arms (probably the only part that is true), and in exchange, Europeans introduced more westernized materials. And of course we praise Christopher Columbus. Oh, how heroic he was for sailing across the ocean and reaching “India.” This false narrative has children glorifying and praising murders and rapists for years before they finally learn a little bit of the truth.
As kids, we simply accept this narrative as truth. To give us this story and then wait six years until we are in middle school to tell us the real history diminishes what the Native Americans were forced to endure. No matter how hard the education system tries to change the narrative when we are older, the “history” we were taught as children still sticks in the back of our minds. So yes, even though we are told the truth eventually (a very small, if not entirely accurate portion of it), it becomes hard to understand what the Native Americans really went through.
Until I was thirteen years old, I don’t think I heard anything about what Christopher Columbus had done. The little section in my 8th grade history textbook that slightly mentioned, “oh by the way Christopher Columbus was not the nicest guy, and he forced Native Americans to leave their homes” was not all that impactful because I had previously only learned about all the “good” this guy had done. My middle school had no in-depth history of Columbus as a murderer and rapist, and there was no complete teaching of what Native Americans went through. A tiny paragraph on the last page of the Native American section in the history textbooks is not enough to teach children of the horrendous acts committed by colonizers and the ongoing effects that colonization continues to have on Native Americans.
Telling the true history behind colonization is much less harmful than creating a version that is deemed acceptable and then trying to completely change the narrative once society decides children will understand. The true history should be taught all throughout our educational years, including elementary school. For all the pain colonization has caused, the least this country can do is teach its children and take accountability. Children are much more open to new infromation than they are given credit for, and teaching them history as it occurred allows for them to understand that Christopher Columbus’s actions were not “heroic.”