Introduction
From the time I was a young student, I have always loved learning about our nation’s history. From Paul Revere’s midnight ride to Thomas Jefferson’s eloquently defiant Declaration of Independence, just the mention of these exciting events has, and continues to, make my heart beat just a little faster. And yet, as much as I love our nation’s history, a few inconvenient truths beckon from the darkened corners, calling for resolution. And, although America has endeavored to continually make strides towards Jefferson’s lofty ideals that “all men are created equal,” one of the more enduring paradoxes has been the treatment of American Indians from nearly the first European footfalls upon the shore of the “New World”.
Growing up towards the end of the golden age of television, like many in our society, I was programmed to see Indians not as people but as stereotypes. I can still hear the ominous music that played whenever an Indian menacingly appeared onscreen in a Western. Moreover, the iconic pop culture props, such as toy bow-and-arrow sets, feather-adorned drums, and the ever present cigar store Indian, certainly did not help to arrest the objectification of Native Americans. According to Seminar Leader, Ned Blackhawk, “Arguably at no other point in the nation’s history had such methods of visual communication so heavily impacted everyday life.”1 Clearly, Native Americans are not only the most enduring pop culture icons but also the least understood. In fact, this fascination with Indians can be seen at almost all epochs of American history and iconography, from rioting colonists masquerading as Indians at the Boston Tea party, to elements of Boy Scouts of America, to the shockingly racist portrayal of Native Americans in Disney’s Peter Pan. And so as harmless as my toy drum may seem, as Blackhawk asserts, by characterizing Indians as relics of the past, it has become easier for mainstream society to marginalize them as part of a vanishing era.
The Seven Years’ War is the main focus of this unit. It completely restructured the balance of power, disrupting not only the European power structures, but those in North America as well. This conflict loosened the grip on regional power held by Native Americans, especially the Iroquois Confederacy (also known as the Five or, later, Six Nation Iroquois). This war ultimately resulted in the ushering of Indians to the margins of American society and consciousness, an outcome that obviously had deleterious effects across the past few centuries of American history and culture, the effects of which continue to this modern age.
In our seminar, and through related readings, I have learned to see American Indian history in an entirely new light. It is a more realistic light in which one sees Native Americans as highly individualistic and, especially in the case of the Seven Years’ War, quite skilled in diplomacy. This conflict, and the ensuing policies and sentiments that followed, would serve to deny Indians their right to ascendant progress, an unthinkable development in a society that prides itself on freedom. Through the study of this unit, my students will come to see Indians as people with many of the same hopes and dreams as they themselves possess. They will learn that Native Americans were not the inherently “evil warriors,” nor the helpless “noble savages” portrayed across the American cultural landscape. Instead what will emerge is a vision of Indians as a vibrant people directly in the center of a global conflict that not only affected the North American continent, but the entire world.
It must also be considered that, given so many instances of conquest in all times and places across the arc of human history, conflicts over the North American continent seem inescapable. While not condoning this aspect of human nature, the unit will equip students to continually ask the deeper questions of how all inhabitants might have found a way to peacefully and equitably coexist, and how to chart a more favorable course for all parties as we continue to move forward through the modern era.
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