this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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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.