Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
We’re so used to American history from an East Coast perspective, a kind of white movement West, but if you look at a Spanish map from 1776, you see that everything west of the Mississippi is Spanish. And the main people who get left out are the Indians. There is a rich Indian history there, says Deloria, but it is relentlessly ignored. Where are the bloody Indians?
Your next book is a modern one, published in 1995, by Vine Deloria Jr, Red Earth, White Lies.
This is completely different. Vine Deloria was a very polemical, anti-Anglo-American Native American historian, who sadly died in 2005. I would love to have met him. He wrote a book called Custer Died For Your Sins. My other choices are all contemporary sources from which the history of America has always been written. It is basically European history. What Deloria asks is: why hasn’t anyone used Native American material and myths to write the histories? All the original sources have political and cultural perspectives and agendas, but it is the Indian sources that are dismissed as untrustworthy oral history.
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Dr Robert Goodwin lives between London and Seville. He was educated at Westminster School and King's College, and also studied at the universities of Granada and Seville and the School of Oriental and African Studies. He has a PhD in Spanish Art, Literature, and Society, is a respected historian of Spanish colonial history and is currently a Research Fellow at University College London.
