Presenting natives as a 'doomed' race is comforting: "Feeling good is a human need, but it imposes a burden that history cannot bear without becoming simple-minded. Casting Indian history as a tragedy because Native Americans could not or would not acculturate is feel-good history for whites. By downplaying Indian wars, textbooks help us forget that we wrested the continent from Native Americans" (Loewen 133).

More liberal textbooks portray native persons as victims, but often as hapless victims. Such attempts at inclusivity smack of tokenism rather than a real, honest attempt to understand history. In fact, tokenism is also rife in addressing women's issues and issues of race: it is either ignored or bracketed into a safe, confined corner of the text. And history is always portrayed as getting progressively more liberal, rather than engaging in 'backsliding,' which certainly occurred during Reconstruction in regards to African-American rights. Woodrow Wilson, for example,...
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