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Myths & Misconceptions About Native Americans: Ep 3 of Crash Course Native American History

YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=InZacsO8ico
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Duration:12:35
Uploaded:2025-05-27
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MLA Full: "Myths & Misconceptions About Native Americans: Ep 3 of Crash Course Native American History." YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 27 May 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=InZacsO8ico.
MLA Inline: (CrashCourse, 2025)
APA Full: CrashCourse. (2025, May 27). Myths & Misconceptions About Native Americans: Ep 3 of Crash Course Native American History [Video]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=InZacsO8ico
APA Inline: (CrashCourse, 2025)
Chicago Full: CrashCourse, "Myths & Misconceptions About Native Americans: Ep 3 of Crash Course Native American History.", May 27, 2025, YouTube, 12:35,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=InZacsO8ico.
From sports mascots to “the First Thanksgiving,” bland representations of Native Americans are everywhere. In this episode of Crash Course Native American History, we’ll tackle common myths and misconceptions about Native people and uncover the truth behind tribal casinos, government handouts, and more.

Introduction: Super Bowl XXVI 00:00
"The First Thanksgiving" 0:38
Westerns & Native Invisibility 4:20
Native Mascots 5:28
Casinos & Government Handouts 8:26
Review & Credits 11:13

Sources:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g1BpQk_2qXtFeQBffoAT-rrogcKRaA2eNjeRCpmCrJ8/edit?usp=sharing

Want to know more about how this series was made? Learn more here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17yp3u28s40TdjyrJniIf4U9YA8wPtvQ1g1B-HSHQ2Q4/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.6vtzps565m2

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 (00:00) to (02:00)


Che Jim: For decades, the former name of the Washington Football team was a source of anger and frustration for many Native Americans. Vernon Bellecourt, a leader of the American Indian Movement, put it this way, “We welcome all you good Washington football fans, but we don't welcome the chicken feathers, the paint, the cheap Hollywood chants [...] Leave our culture, leave our spiritual traditions alone.” But what was the big deal? Didn’t the team name honor Native Americans? Or is that… just a myth? Hi! I'm Che Jim, and welcome to Crash Course Native American History.

[0:34] [THEME MUSIC]

[0:38] [Mysterious music plays]

[0:48] Che Jim: For a long time, this is how Native Americans were commonly represented. If they weren’t out hunting buffalo, they were gathered around a table with some Pilgrims, eating turkey, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce. As someone who has worked a lot of retail in my life, my Thanksgiving meal is usually  whatever’s left in the breakroom fridge. This version of Nativeness is about as nuanced as a brick wall. And it comes from a variety  of myths and misconceptions that have spread like wildfire from the colonial era to the modern day—with real, concrete consequences. Take the “First Thanksgiving,” for instance. Countless school plays and classroom crafts have presented it as truth. But the real story of that meal is a lot more sinister. Before we get into that, let me take care of something real quick. Katie, smash box, please.

[1:30] [marching drum rolls]

Che Jim: Myths like the First Thanksgiving are so widespread, fighting them takes serious work. And that can take lots of different forms, including my personal favorite: myth-blasting baseball.

[1:44] [baseball organ plays]

[1:45] [glass breaking]

[1:48] Che Jim: Now then, where were we? Oh yeah, the first Thanksgiving. So, what actually happened that day? In 1620, the Pilgrims landed in an untamed wilderness.

[1:58] [record scratch]

[1:59] Che Jim: Except, wait—

 (02:00) to (04:00)


Che Jim: this place wasn’t untamed at all. It already had a name: Patuxet. Which was also the name of a band of the Wampanoag Confederation, who had been farming and living there for generations. But it was a terrible time for the Wampanoags.

An epidemic from a disease brought over by other Europeans had wiped out up to 90% of their population, leaving them weak and vulnerable. Meanwhile, the English considered all of this God’s will. And a great time to take some land!

When the Pilgrims arrived in winter, they robbed the homes and graves of Wampanoags who’d died, promising to repay what they’d taken. They didn’t. All the while, the Wampanoag leader Ousamequin was weighing his options, as tensions with other tribes were brewing.

He strategically decided the Pilgrims might be good allies if a war broke out. The Wampanoags helped the Pilgrims make it through the winter. And the Pilgrims did throw a harvest feast.

But they didn’t invite their neighbors! The Wampanoags heard guns going off and sent 90 men over to help. Only then were the Pilgrims like, “Oh, want some food?” And there wasn’t enough to eat, so the Wampanoags went out to hunt some deer.

And if there was friendship that day, it didn’t last. Within a generation, the tension between Native Americans and English settlers erupted into King Philip's War— one of the deadliest conflicts in U.S. history.

So while the Thanksgiving myth  might seem like no big deal, it hides a grim reality—that this strategic, temporary alliance kicked off a centuries-long  disaster for the Wampanoags—who, by the way, are still here, living in New England. But where did this myth come from—and why? Historians point to a few different moments, like the mid-1700s when New Englanders sought to establish themselves as the “fathers of America.” Or the mid-1800s when the U.S. was pushing further West into Indian territory and Abraham Lincoln was trying to unify the country. And the Reconstruction period, when whites tried to distance the nation’s history from enslavement. Essentially, the story was passed on for political reasons, not historically accurate ones.

 (04:00) to (06:00)


Che Jim: According to historian David Silverman, the false narrative of Thanksgiving creates an emotional burden for Native Americans, and promotes a lighthearted view of historical trauma. It contributes to the spread of false ideas, like “Natives and colonizers got along” and “Native Americans are a part of the past.”

[4:17] [Mysterious music plays]

[4:19] Che Jim: The myth that Native Americans no longer exist Westerns & Native Invisibility – often called the myth of the “Vanishing Indian”—couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, I’m here, aren’t I? In fact, I’m one of about six million Natives living in the U.S. today.

Part of the reason we can seem “invisible” is because the media has done a pretty poor job of showing who we really are. For instance, I remember as a kid feeling like there just wasn’t room for people like me in movies. Many of the most popular early films were Westerns, which, for a long time, were the only ways Native Americans were represented to the wider world.

These movies made Natives seem synonymous with the Wild West, not the here and now, something we also covered in Crash Course Art History. And this omission of Native people from the present can have serious consequences: one survey of more than six thousand Native folks found 87% of those surveyed believed the average American didn’t care about Native Peoples. That invisibility can cause mental health issues and minimize the effects of anti-Native racism.

Not to mention the stereotypes that still hang around today, in Thanksgiving plays, Halloween costumes, and sports. Like have you ever seen Kansas City Chiefs or Atlanta Braves fans doing this? Yeah, that’s called the “Tomahawk chop.” And it’s meant to remind us of savage Indian warriors wielding their tomahawks at cowboys, just like in those Western films.

The tomahawk chop is part of  this culture we have in the U.S. of using Native people as mascots for sports teams. The myth goes like this: Using a Native American as a mascot honors them and the nation’s history and traditions.

But, just like the Thanksgiving myth, that’s far from the truth.

 (06:00) to (08:00)


Che Jim: You know what we need to do.

[6:02] [marching drum plays]

[6:04] [glass breaking]

[6:12] Che: Oo! Like I said earlier, Native Americans aren’t just figures from the past. But mascots like these make us seem like we are. In fact, many of the team names that “honor” Native Americans came about during a time when the U.S. government was trying to assimilate Natives out of existence, through forcing them onto reservations  and into boarding schools. White America was like, “Boom, colonization done. Here’s a mascot to remember the good times.” Native mascots don’t bring  the average non-Native person any closer to actually understanding Native people.

And disrespect aside, there are real, negative effects to that. Studies have shown that  exposure to Native stereotypes decreases young Native people’s sense of their own worth and the worth of their communities, and can increase depression. And, sometimes, sports teams use really offensive language that further harms Native people, like the Washington football team’s old name.

Native leaders protested the name for decades, but little changed. When controversy bubbled up in 2014, a Washington football alumni site made this statement: “We believe the [...] name deserves to stay. It epitomizes all the noble qualities we admire about Native Americans—the same intangibles we expect from Washington’s gridiron heroes on game day. Honor. Loyalty. Unity. Respect. Courage. And more."

And listen, I get it. I’m a huge football fan.

But when it comes to the “r word,” I can’t help but think about how it’s been used in the past. Back in the mid-1800s, the Minnesota state government offered two hundred dollars per Native killed—and used the “r” word to describe, well, what they wanted to exchange. So there was a lot of controversy about this word.

Some Natives saw no problem with it, while others were offended by it. My take is this: if you wouldn’t say it to an actual Native person,

 (08:00) to (10:00)


Che Jim: you probably shouldn’t say it at all. Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee activist who spent decades advocating for a name change, has said, “When I was a girl, you barely could make it through your young life without getting attacked by  a bunch of white people [...] And they would always go to that word.” To many Natives, there’s a fundamental mismatch between this idea of Indian and the actual lived experience of being one. And this applies to the financial lives of Native people, too. Like, lots of non-Natives think we are either “rich casino Indians” or that we’re poor and lazy and get everything handed to us.

I’ll take ironic contradictions for 400. Let’s be real: Not all tribes own casinos. For those that do, under a federal law called the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, tribes can only use casino profits for certain things, like health care, public safety, education, and infrastructure projects, and per capita payments to tribal members.

And the vast majority of casinos don’t actually produce much revenue for tribes.

[9:05] [Mysterious music plays]

[9:05] Che: The whole “rich casino Indian” thing is a stereotype that grew out of ‘90s TV, in popular shows like “South Park” and “The Sopranos” and a growing fear of Natives becoming an economic threat. Because the thing is, to be really Indian you need to rely on government handouts, right? You know the drill.

[9:26] [marching drum beat]

[9:28] [glass shatters]

[9:30] Che: As of 2023, Natives have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in the U. S. But media critic Celeste LaCroix has pointed out that the “casino Indian” myth in particular presents Natives as immoral, scheming, and undeserving of power and wealth. If people think you’re part of a get-rich-quick scheme, they’re not very likely to help you.

So let’s rapid-fire myth-bust real quick. Checks from the government? Some Natives do get them—but  it’s payment that they’re owed for use of natural resources on their land.

 (10:00) to (12:00)


Che Jim: Taxes? Tribes don’t pay federal taxes, because the U. S. constitution recognizes them as sovereign nations. But virtually all individual Natives pay federal income taxes.

College tuition? Most Native students pay for college through loans, need-based grants, and merit-based scholarships—same as everybody else. Only sometimes they can get access Native-specific scholarships and state-based tuition waivers if they meet certain criteria.

And those tuition waivers are slowly increasing the number of Native Americans who can go to college and graduate. Besides Indian Health Services, or IHS—a federal agency that delivers healthcare to nearly 2.6 million American Indians—if a Native is receiving government assistance, it’s not because they’re Native. It’s because they qualify for the same support open to any U.

S. citizen. IHS itself is a result of treaty agreements and federal trust obligations to Native people, where the government was like, “We’ll take your land, and then we’ll take care of you—Sort of.” ‘Cause turns out, IHS is chronically underfunded. On average, IHS users get less than half of the money that users of other types of federal healthcare receive each year.

So Natives aren’t even getting everything that they were promised. So… what do we do with all this? We know that these myths ignore the violent, traumatic history of colonization and promote stereotypes about Native people, all of which harms them and their communities and limits a broader understanding of Native people by non-natives.

But sometimes, things do change. During the racial reckonings of 2020, the threat of major sponsors pulling out ultimately made the Washington football team’s owner change his tune, and the team was renamed to the Washington Commanders in 2022. But it was advocacy by Indigenous folks like Suzan Shown Harjo and Chief Billy Redwing Tayac that brought that issue forward in the first place and continued to fight for decades.

There’s time and space to start swapping out these myths for real stories of real Natives.

 (12:00) to (12:35)


Che Jim: To ditch the Native stereotypes, in whatever way you know how.

[12:03] [ding]

[12:04] Che: Next time, we’ll learn about American Indian identity—and just how complicated it can be. I will see you then. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Native American History which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash  Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
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