“WHAT IF PEOPLE TOLD EUROPEAN HISTORY LIKE THEY TOLD NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY?” Robert J S Briggs on the Surrey Medieval blog linked to this essay by Kai on the Indigenous History blog. It makes for a startling change in point of view. The scant first three paragraphs of the post describe what the immigrants from Central Asia thousands of years ago would have thought of the “pre-contact Europeans” and the medieval Europeans who followed many years later. The post then challenges you to think of a textbook about North American history which has long chapters about North America before 1500, but with only those three scant paragraphs about European history before 1500.
Kai’s argument is that: “If…you don’t include equal description of the Mississippian coalescence and dispersal, Haudenosaunee-Algonquian relations, the Woodlands, trans-plains, and southwestern trade systems, the Mexica conquests and the Fifth Sun ideology with explicit naming of various places and leaders, then your [North American history] textbook is inadequate.”