Rights, conflict, and removal: depictions of Indigenous groups in Californian and Texan history textbooks, 1836-2019

ABSTRACT

Formal schooling in the U.S. has a long and violent history towards Indigenous peoples, today morphing into exclusion and erasure. Using a novel longitudinal dataset of U.S. textbooks (n = 193) from California and Texas, published from 1850 to 2019, we seek to shine light on the issue through a comprehensive analysis of depictions of Indigenous peoples in high school history textbooks. Despite extensive violence, over time, we find parallel increases in mentions of Indigenous rights in the two states. We complement this longitudinal analysis with a detailed snapshot of the linguistic nuances in a sub-set of the contemporary books in the sample (n = 33) via natural language processing (NLP). We again observe similar patterns between states, but we find that most of the discourse sentiment is negative and focused on historic conflicts with the state and settlers. Although rights are mentioned, it is only in passing discussions. Our findings illustrate that the rise of liberal narratives of equality still permit a high degree of marginalization of minorities. Further, the similarities between states supports theories that view the production of this curricular content is primarily a product of national or global processes.

KEYWORDS:

• curricula
• textbooks
• American history
• Indigenous
• social studies

Disclosure statement

No human subjects research was conducted as a part of this study. The authors do not have any financial interests in any textbook publishing companies. Funding for the study was provided by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Notes

1. Textbooks came from the following sources: 76 from the collections at libraries at Stanford University, 57 from the University of Texas at Austin, 32 from Abilene Christian University, and we purchased or downloaded 32 additional textbooks (some older textbooks with expired copyrights are freely available for download). This sample includes the most widely used books in contemporary classrooms plus all relevant books we could find from the largest university repositories we identified.

2. In California, the governing board of each school district is responsible for textbook purchases and adoptions for high schools. Only textbooks that comply with the California Education Code (EDC) and the California Department of Education (CDE)’s standards may be adopted by local district boards (CDE, 2021). In contrast, the Texas textbook adoption process is a centralized, state-run process led by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), the Texas Education Agency (TEA), and the Commissioner of Education, a position appointed by the Governor of Texas and confirmed by the Texas senate. This group both selects and adopts all textbooks, working directly with publishers. Local districts can then select and order from the adopted materials (TEA, 2022).

3. To arrive at 20 topics per state we reviewed outcomes of varied numbers of topics using multiples of 5. When drawing on only 5, 10, or 15 topics, the connecting theme or event of the topic was unclear. For example, the following generated topic may refer to a range of historical events or discussion topics (e.g.- nativ, european, american, spanish, america, african, mexico, north, pueblo, world). At 30 topics several dissonant words per topic began to be included in the selection (Chang et al., 2009), which may indicate an oversaturation of topics (e.g.- men, man, famili, ship, son, born, day, immigr, today). However, at 20 topics each topic could be matched with a distinct historical event or discussion topic (e.g.- sioux, leader, reserv, nez perc, armi, chief, lakota, sit bull, led, south dakota) without discordant words or topics.

4. Four themes focus on Conflict and situate Indigenous people in the past: ‘Conflict with Settlers/Colonists’, ‘State Removal from Land/State Policies’, ‘Indian Wars’, and ‘Historic Wars’. These themes represent the greatest proportion of the discourse related to Indigenous groups in textbooks in California and Texas.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence .