The truth is, "Indians" are from India. They factually fit the second line of thought. So why is it that when I asked my sister, two of my friends and my aunt, most of them said that they first thought of the first description when thinking about the word "indian?"To fully develop this train of thought, we need to know a bit of historical information. When Christopher Columbus "discovered" America, he thought he had sailed around the world and was in India. That is why he labeled the Native Americans he saw and enslaved as "Indians." Although the term is factually wrong and even a little racist, people and text books use it to this day.
Its the text books that I have a problem with. In school we are given The US History text books that take us from colonization to present day. Although they are supposed to teach us what happened before we were alive, these text books gloss over many of the gross and unpleasant pieces of America's history.
When I read Howard Zinn's amazing and thought-provoking young adult non-fiction book, "A Young Peoples History of the United States" it opened up my eyes. I finally saw how my text book didn't give me all of the information about our world. For example, the text book talks about Christopher Columbus as a brave explorer, who did enslave some natives, but gave them work and paid them. The text book does not speak of the massive numbers of native who were killed, whole tribes driven to extinction as a result of Columbus' endless thirst for gold and other precious metals hidden in North America that Zinn's book does. Another example is slavery. Of course the text book does not justify slavery, but it never mentions some of the gorier details that were involved in it. One example, it was extremely common for female slaves to be raped and sometimes impregnated by their masters, who forced them to engage in sexual activities because they "owned" them. One of these men was none other than one of our "founding fathers," Thomas Jefferson. The textbook speaks of his ingenuity in penning the Constitution and his political role, but not the slave he impregnated.
I think that it is wrong for text books to gloss over details that might not be deemed "age appropriate." History is supposed to be about facts, not half-truths that don't include all of the details. I would rather know about the bad in people as well as the good things that they contributed to America. Because, as proven with the word "indian," people take generalizations and factually wrong things they read in text books and remember them, and truth is lost.
