An Update to Our HS US History Booklist
An image of an arrow pointing from the cover of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to the cover of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Jean Mendoza, and Debbie Reese with the words “U.S. History Update”
The TLDR version is: We are so sorry to share that we have removed our recommendation of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz from our book list for the high school edition of our U.S. History curriculum. The curriculum has been updated to reflect this change, both in the recommended reading sections and in related activity pages, and is available to re-download if you have already purchased it.
The long version: Our goal in writing this U.S. History curriculum was to use the highest quality own-voice books as spines, and we mistakenly believed that Dunbar-Ortiz was Native (she had self-identified as Cherokee, claiming that her mother was “part Indian, most likely Cherokee.” This “part-Indian mother” line is still included on the back cover of AIPHotUS). We learned a few weeks ago from friends in the Strictly Secular + Inclusive Homeschooling community, who in turn learned from Blair Lee (thank you, Blair!), that concerns about Dunbar-Ortiz’s claims to Indigenous identity have been raised by Indigenous communities and activists for years. In a 2021 interview on C-SPAN2, Dunbar-Ortiz herself said, “I never had ties with anything. It’s pretty certain that probably my mother was not Cherokee. … There’s no tracing it. … I certainly would not call myself Cherokee.” She has not as of yet (as far as we have been able to find) made a statement addressing her false claims of Indigenous identity. We are deeply sorry that we were not aware of these concerns earlier. At a minimum, we should have consulted resources like Pretendians.com before publishing our enthusiastic recommendation of Dunbar-Ortiz’ book.
We are not removing our recommendation of the young readers' edition of the book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, which was adapted by Dr. Debbie Reese (Nambé Owingeh), a tribally enrolled Native scholar, and Jean Mendoza (not Native). We now recommend that educators using the high school version of our U.S. History curriculum use the young readers’ edition of the book instead. In addition to being at least partially own-voice, the adaptation includes an excellent chapter on Standing Rock that is not included in the adult version. If you already own the adult version of the book, we leave the decision about whether to switch to the young readers’ edition to you. We know you trust us to recommend high quality own-voices texts, and we’re really sorry we let you down on this.
We read a number of books about the Native history of the U.S. in preparation for writing this curriculum, and had narrowed it down to Dunbar-Ortiz’ book and the young readers’ adaptation, Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, and David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present and the young readers’ adaptation of that text. We really wanted our elementary and high school levels to align, so mixed-aged families could do the curriculum together. So that was a point in Treuer’s and Dunbar-Ortiz’s favor. Blackhawk’s book is excellent, but it is a long and academically challenging text, and we knew we would be asking high schoolers to read at least seven other books. To add Blackhawk’s rigorous text, and then have to pair it with a totally unrelated text for the elementary/middle school edition, felt sub-optimal. Treuer’s book is smaller in historical scope (there is some background about pre-1890 that is well done but brief, but the majority of the text is focused on 1890-present. We liked the scope, topics, and readability of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and we really loved the young readers adaptation. In the end, the decision we made felt like the obvious one.
False claims of Indigenous identity—known as Pretendianism—are a form of ethnic fraud and cultural appropriation. The Indigenous Women’s Collective has described this practice as “an act of colonial violence.” Dr. Debbie Reese (Nambé Owingeh), co-author of the young readers’ edition of the book and founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature (AICL), has addressed this issue directly:
“At AICL we strive to include a person’s identity, relative to being Indigenous, whenever we name a person. For example, we say Debbie Reese (Nambé Owingeh) and Jean Mendoza (not Native). When we note that we have failed to do so, we edit the post to reflect the person’s identity.
We also feel it important to address questions regarding Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s identity. When her book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States came out, Debbie saw that leading scholars and Native writers had endorsed it. Sometime later, she accepted an invitation to adapt the book for young readers.
In her book Dunbar-Ortiz said her mother was “part Indian, most likely Cherokee.” During the adaptation work, we began to see concerns about Dunbar-Ortiz’s identity and subsequently asked her about it. Dunbar-Ortiz decided to remove that information from the biographical note for the adaptation. We hoped she would make a public statement but to our knowledge, she has not.”
The reading recommendations and activities in this curriculum have been updated to reflect the change in the booklist. We are really sorry we didn’t get this right. We are so grateful to our community for helping us identify and correct our mistakes.
We've made all the changes and the updated version of the MS/HS U.S. History curriculum is now available for download. If you haven't already printed and would like the revised zip file, here's what you'll need to do:
1. Check your email for the first email you received from Mint and Bloom after you ordered. The subject line will begin: "mint and bloom: Order Confirmed."
2. Push the "View Your Order" button in that email.
3. You'll be taken to a page where you can re-download your order. For reasons that are unknown to me, sometimes you have to enter your email on this page first and press "authenticate" but then you should be able to re-download the file. The curriculum has been updated to reflect the change to the Young People's version of An Indigenous People's History of the U.S., but we also fixed some typos (including a fully incorrect high school reading list for Week 17), and added an explanation of how to use the curriculum (pages 9-10).
