As a Native American now heads the park staff for Mount Rushmore, the presentation moves to include some of the history of broken treaties that liter our westward expansion.[1] The Indians quoted here are absolutely right, there is a tendency to whitewash that pattern of expansion, war, treaty, broken treaty that defines that era of American History. There is also however, an even stronger tendency to whitewash Indian history, to paint it as some green utopia. The reality of that life was at least as different from the pattern of public perception and public presentation as "Manifest Destiny" was and is. I wonder if they are also teaching the tourists and children about the torture and incessant war that made up the lives of many tribes. I wonder if they are teaching about hunting buffalo by inciting them to stampede over cliffs, or where cliffs lacked, over gullies where they would break their legs (if cliffs, their necks as well). Perhaps they used all of a buffalo, but they killed far more than they needed to get that one. I wonder if they are teaching both sides of the wars, as our soldiers killed entire tribes, and their warriors did the same to settlers. For that is the true history of that time, but its not one I think the tribes would like known, they are far more happy to simply further the notion that the white man is always evil.
[1] http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/632/05-13-2005/64fd001cd70b7c94.html