this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Yes.
It really isn't that hard. "The European colonists forced the native population off their land." You can spare the rape and murder until the kids are older, but don't just outright lie to them
I did my best to explain slavery to my daughter when she was 6 because due to COVID, we were basically home schooling her...
Yeah, middle school is literally where it was hammered in for me. I think around ~4th grade we started to get some more serious "We treated the Native Americans really poorly", but I remember very starkly from 6th grade on that we got a pretty robust view of the historical-scale resolution of the genocides, even though they weren't referred to as such. Invasions, broken treaties, massacres, and backstabbing.
Better than the washed-down history I got, which made it dull & pointless: why do they think children like to draw boring pilgrims or waste mindspace on insipid, antiquated shit drained of all significance?
A minor exception was elementary school lessons on the holocaust & genocide by the Nazis. They showed us death camps, piles of shoes, masses of corpses, read & played Anne Frank's diary, and they invited survivors to speak & show their tattoos. An odd point was when they showed photos of Nazi artifacts made from human remains & asked how that made us feel: some kids (recalling an earlier lesson treating native americans positively for resourcefully using every part of the animal) were confused & drew comparisons.
Then what, explain why we dont actually give the land back because nobody actually cares outside of virtue signaling?
Where's the hard part?
Don't explain, "I don't know", or "ask them" goes far. Better than telling garbage to unlearn.