indeed engage in a paper war of different colored spaces and

Last updated: 3/1/2024

indeed engage in a paper war of different colored spaces and imaginary borders during this period our textbooks reprint the imperial fantasy In stark contrast Indian names may remain on the map but they float free with no moorings and no borders subsumed under the authority of their presumptive new European overlords Taking this anticipatory geography to the extreme are the textbook maps that preordain the creation of the United States by backgrounding maps of early America with the borders of all forty eight mainland states drawn in gray scale Consider figure 1 1 Pre Columbian America already bears the imprimatur of a United States that will not exist even as a twinkle in Thomas Jefferson s for another 300 years eye tells our thus the map students implicitly and explicitly that the conquest of North America was a forgone conclusion even in 1491 Or examine map 1 1 charting the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition in the first decade of the nineteenth century and look for any sign of Indians The only hint comes from the location of the winter quarters of 1804 5 identified as Fort Mandan but if a student did not know Mandans were Indians he or she would have no idea that the expedition s survival that winter depended upon the hospitality and generosity of the Mandans and Hidatsas with whom its members traded for supplies More important the student would have no idea from the map that the expedition was at every point along the way transgressing the borders of Indian nations Rather the entire continent appears to be fully in the hands of the British Spanish and U S governments with U S appropria tion of territory an ongoing and inexorable process Students are again left believing that the greatest obstacles along Lewis and Clark s overland route were the rivers mountain ranges and distances traveled rather than the Native people who controlled the lands and thoroughfares through which they moved Adam Jortner s essay in this collection offers a compelling examination of how textbooks undermine if not erase Indian territorial legitimacy in the maps that accompany chapters on the nineteenth century United States If you scan through an entire U S history textbook looking at the maps from the colonial period through the present all in all you will find that they depict North America as a space preeminently defined by Europeans and then Euro Americans in motion First Europeans transformed oceans that had once been barriers into freeways of passage that brought them to morico Then they charted routes and passageways across the conti