chapotraphouse

i'm glad you were taught some actual history. as someone raised in the south we never covered literally any of that. it was just manifest destiny, "the first thanksgiving!" then a hard cut directly to the civil war, and then from there to WWII with nothing in-between. no genocides, no wars, no nothing.

In my school, we touched on some of that but with the undercurrent that it's all ancient history. I got through history class with the impression that these were bad things done long ago, and I assume it's the same for you.

As an example to illustrate my point, were you taught in school about the forced sterilization of many indigineous women that began in the 70s?

Was it rightfully identified as an intentional genocide?

Your teacher was based. I did not grow up in North America but somewhere else within the NATO bubble. Our teachers were basically Viet Nam "veteran" ""expats"" justifying nuking civilian cities during WWII and their favorite topic was North Korean haircuts. The upside down world we live in.

We had battles against them

This is a good example of the problem. This is a ludicrous way to talk about a genocide. Yes there were battles, but that was a tiny part of the history and most of those battles were just massacres anyways. Should we talk about the Holocaust in these terms? I'm sure some Jewish person managed to kill a Nazi between 1933 and 1945. Should we discuss the battles between Jews and Nazis?