The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. How would you summarize the history of Indigenous peoples of North America as it is told by mainstream sources—middle and high school textbooks, movies, popular novels, and other traditional media?

Teaching Suggestion: If possible, students might bring in an assortment of textbooks, fiction, and films that treat this topic to share and briefly investigate through clips and excerpts. Students can work in small groups to complete a short summary, then share with the class. After each group presents, group members or the class as a whole can address these points: How do groups’ summaries compare? How are the example texts and sources represented in summaries? What, if anything, has changed in more recent media or texts?

• This article from Education Week expresses concerns about the depictions of Indigenous peoples in school history textbooks.
• This article from Zócalo Public Square shares both the personal experience of an Indigenous actor and historical background about depictions of Indigenous Americans in popular media.

2. What aspects of mainstream depictions of Indigenous peoples’ history do Indigenous historians likely find inaccurate or biased? How are their attempts to correct the record likely received by the larger culture?