Lies My Teacher Told Me (Chapter 4)

Am I starting to get used to the shock Loewen dwarfed us with, or has chapter 4 been more mundane compared to previous chapters? Either way, I did not find many interesting pieces of information throughout this chapter. I was shocked by the number of wars waged by native americans though, I didn't know that they took a lasting stand. Textbooks definitely should have dealt with that. No wonder students in Loewen's college do not know about these wars. 

Loewen has brought up two major themes in this chapter. He uses about half of the chapter describing   how both European and Native American culture synchronized with each other, and concludes that there is a lot European Americans have learned from the Indians and there may be more still to learn from. Loewen suggests that the modern American lifestyle has learned a lot from native ones, and the equality in native communities has contributed significantly to the democratic ideal of present beliefs. I fully agree with Loewen that there was a two-way cultural flow between the Indians and European Americans. However, I am skeptic that a culture which has almost disappeared completely can have any more effect into the modern day culture. First of all, the number of "native americans" in the modern world is just to small to make any major change such as the democratic ideal. No matter how unique their culture, it is impossible to learn from it when the inheritors are so few in number. Secondly, their culture is no longer unique. Cultures change. Just like European Americans do not live the same lifestyle as their ancestors of the 1500s, no indians live like they used to five hundred years ago. They have been influenced by European culture so much, that they have lost their uniqueness. The two (with minor differences) are not as distinct as they used to back when the Europeans first landed in America.

The second theme Loewen expresses in "Red Eyes" is about why textbooks should include more stories on the indian side. Throughout the chapter, he gives numerous examples of how the truth is hidden, perverted, even straightly different from what historians perceive. One example talks about how the native americans first arrived in America. Loewen claims that the majority of the textbooks describe their "immigration" was completely by accident, and that they has "followed large animals to hunt for over the Bering straight". This, he claims, is absolutely different from what really happened. Even in the ice age, the Bering straight was too deep to simply cross by foot. The authors of the textbooks hid the fact that native americans had the technology to cross a large channel of water by boat, in order to depict they as "primitive" and "barbaric". Why do they do this? to give an excuse for European Americans to conquer them. "We tried to change them to our ways, but they would not listen. So we had no choice but to subdue them". Leaving aside whether it was right to subdue the natives because they did not adapt to the European ways(absolutely not), the Indians tried very hard to blend with the European culture. The English Americans would not let them. Loewen claims that textbooks need to tell both sides of the story (the European American side and the Native American side), not just the European side. Indian history reveals that Europe has done a lot of damage to the world, and we need to learn from these mistakes and make sure it never happens again.