We live in a place where the heritage of various Native American tribes survives — the Indian Ladder Trail traverses the Helderberg limestone cliffs that define our horizon. The Vale of Tawasentha is in our midst, marked with a blue-and-yellow state plaque. Our middle-school children go to houses with Indian-inspired names: Hiawatha, Tawasentha, Mohawk, and Seneca.

We have written on our pages of Guilderland’s famous son Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was born and raised in an 18th-Century house that still stands on Willow Street. Here is what I wrote a few years ago for a story in our Home & Garden section about the young family that restored Schoolcraft’s house:

“Henry Rowe Schoolcraft devoted much of his life to recording the rapidly disappearing way of life of American Indian tribes and their languages. Most Americans today are familiar with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, ‘Song of Hiawatha,’ which, written in 1855, serves as a eulogy for a dying culture. The northeastern Indians by then had mostly been placed on reservations, assimilated, or killed. Longfellow’s tale is set in the vale of Tawasentha, the Iroquois word for burial ground.

“In his notes on ‘Song of Hiawatha,’ Longfellow credits Henry Rowe Schoolcraft as providing the material for his poem, citing Schoolcraft’s ‘Algic Researches, and his History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States.’

“‘Into this old tradition,’ wrote Longfellow, ‘I have woven other curious Indian legends drawn chiefly from the various and valuable writings of Mr. Schoolcraft to whom the literary world is greatly indebted for his indefatigable zeal in rescuing from oblivion so much of the legendary lore of the Indians.’”

Here is what is wrong with what I wrote: I had taken a white man’s view of the “legendary lore of the Indians” that had to be “rescued from oblivion” when no doubt there are still Native people who know and live by those traditions.

Worse, although Longfellow’s poem can indeed be read as a eulogy for a fading way of life, I wrote that, by the middle of the 19th Century, “northeastern Indians by then had mostly been placed on reservations, assimilated, or killed.”

I realized how outrageous and damaging this description is when I pored through 74 pages of copious and thoughtful research released earlier this summer in a document titled “Reclaiming Native Truth: A Project to Dispel America’s Myths and Misconceptions.”

This is not to denigrate Schoolcraft’s work, documenting Native American culture as he found it in the 1800s. He served as a United States Indian agent and married the granddaughter of an Ojibwa chief, Jane Johnson, learning the Ojibwe language and culture through her.

The dismissive description was my error. I should have known better. Journalists are in the business of telling stories. We need to make sure the stories we tell include the viewpoints of those we are writing about.

When I was a young reporter in the 1970s covering the Mohawk warriors who had built an encampment on state land at Moss Lake in Herkimer County, I talked to the Mohawks who had left their reservation to establish a traditional way of life for their children on land they claimed as part of their historic territory. Talking to them made sense because it was their story.

I visited the encampment where Art Montour, a Mohawk, spoke to me, sitting comfortably on a tree stump. He used the name Kakwirakeron. He had been a high steel worker before he was injured and said it made him realize how most Indians lived; then he became an activist.

Tensions were running high as two white people were injured by shots coming from the encampment. “People were shooting at us, our women and children,” Montour told me. “We were getting no help whatsoever. When hunting season came, every few hours, someone would shoot. On October 28, our people started shooting back. Two were hurt.”

State Police got involved and wanted any two warriors turned over as responsible. “The warriors didn’t know what to do,” said Montour. “The women said, no. We came in here for the future of our children and grandchildren. We’re not turning back now. If they want some of us, they’ll have to take us all … .”

“There are worse ways to die than by a bullet,” said Montour, without flinching. “If we go back to the cities and reservations, our children will die from alcohol, drugs, depression, and suicide.”

How easy it is when you are distant from Native Americans to slip into a white person’s mindset. “Reclaiming Native Truth” quotes brain scientists who say that people “interpret information and make decisions first through their values lens and then through cognitive processing of facts and evidence. In most cases, they accept facts that align with their values and reject facts that don’t. In some cases, receiving facts that conflict with their values may actually make people grasp their existing narrative more tightly.”

Among the values that may shape how non-Natives view Native people is, the report says, Americans’ almost instinctive inclusiveness. “They tend to seek sameness and work to find commonalities across cultures,” the report says.

The researchers found that these biases keep contemporary Native Americans either invisible or affixed to the past, which keeps modern Native Americans from achieving political, economic, and social equality.

Native Americans are viewed as a homogenous group. Most non-Natives don’t realize there are close to 600 different tribes in the United States with different languages, customs, traditions, and laws.

“Complicating and reinforcing this view is the fact that among non-Natives, ‘assimilation’ is not a bad word and the mythology of the American ‘melting pot’ is strong,” the report notes. “Among other communities of color, assimilation does not carry the same threat of cultural extinction and so is not perceived to be negative.”

“Reclaiming Native Truth” gives the example that, if all Koreans in this country were fully assimilated, there would still be a Korea in Southeast Asia that would maintain  their culture.

The New York State Learning Standards reflect this view with the very first standard, of four, for each of three levels — elementary, intermediate, and commencement — in teaching social study courses: “The study of New York State and United States history requires an analysis of the development of American culture, its diversity and multicultural context, and the ways people are unified by many values, practices, and traditions.”

The “Reclaiming Native Truth” researchers found that a 72-percent majority believed it is necessary to make significant changes to school curricula on Native history and culture.

This year, the states of California and Oregon passed bills to revamp school curricula to more accurately depict Native American culture and history, and both states also codified the participation of Native Americans in writing their own stories.

We urge New York teachers, within the framework of the given state standards, to do the same.

The research for “Reclaiming Native Truth” was underway when the Sioux, in 2016, were leading a fight against Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. A grassroots movement, ultimately attracting hundreds of tribal nations and thousands of individuals, the story was first reported by citizen journalists, leveraged by social media, and later by mainstream media.

One of the movement’s organizers, Judith LeBlanc of Caddo Nation, said, “We interrupted the narrative of who and what Indian People are in the 21st Century.” No longer invisible to non-Native Americans, the Native people showed they have a special relationship to land and water and must be respected.

Most Americans, the report says, lack personal contact with Native Americans and “fall back on media tropes of the savage/noble warrior, reports of negative outcomes such as poverty and alcoholism rather than seeing Indians in everyday roles.”

The report goes on, “The most persistent and toxic negative narrative is the myth that many Native Americans receive government benefits and are getting rich off casinos.”

The researchers, further, reference “policy elites” saying that a lack of awareness and empathy for Native Americans may stem from guilt. “Americans want to send money to help those in poverty in Africa, and they want to learn about Anne Frank and the Holocaust, but it is harder to own the reality of what happened right here with the First People,” the report says.

Some Protestant denominations have recently passed resolutions repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, originating in 15th-Century papal edicts and later part of royal charters and court rulings, that justified the discovery and domination by European Christians of lands inhabited by indigenous peoples.

“Reclaiming Native Truth,” finds, “When people are exposed to accurate facts about Native American history and contemporary life, they believe the information, feel cheated that they didn’t learn it in school, and quickly become open to a new narrative.”

“Until we shift the broad public narrative,” says the report, “we cannot move hearts and minds on the issues that shape current reality for Native Americans.”

The narrative the researchers tested was brief and straightforward. A huge majority of those surveyed found it credible and those who read it showed significantly higher support for Native issues compared with those who did not read the narrative.

We’re printing the narrative here, in its entirety, in hopes in will change the hearts and minds of our readers, replacing the false stereotypes that may be lodged there:

“The history of Native Americans is one of great strength and revitalization. It is a story built around values that have shaped Native cultures and American society: respect for family and elders, shared responsibility to care for the land, and an obligation to do right by the next generation. It is a story of resilience through great pain and injustice, from broken treaties and loss of land and language in the past, to derogatory sports mascots and biased history taught in schools today. Across more than 1,000 tribal nations and in every profession and segment of society, Native American peoples carry the cultural knowledge and wisdom that sustains Native nations and helps build a stronger future for all. Let’s move forward together.”

Narratives on these four issues were also shared by the researchers, summarized here:

— The Indian Child Welfare Act: In Native cultures, family is defined very broadly. Everyone plays an active role in raising a child and is ready to help in times of crisis. But when the U.S. child welfare system was created, it was biased against raising a child in this way, as a community. As a result, the U.S. government removed Native children from their families — not because of abuse or neglect but because of this way of being;

— Sovereignty and Treaties: When a country makes an agreement or signs a treaty, you expect them to live up to it. And yet, our own country has broken more than 500 treaties with Native nations that were here long before the United States was founded;

— Native-themed Mascots: For hundreds of years, Native Americans have been mocked and dehumanized by slurs and images in team mascots at every level from elementary schools to professional sports. And while some people mistakenly believe that these mascots are harmless or even respectful, they represent a continued dehumanization of Native peoples and do real psychological harm to Native children; and

— Representations of Native People in Entertainment: From books and television to Disney films, representations are often based on negative stereotypes. Even portrayals that seem positive at first can be harmful when they romanticize Native culture and imply that all Native American peoples are the same. Native storytellers have always been here; their voices connect with values that are core to American culture and that are needed today more than ever.

Those of us who are non-Natives must bore through our guilt, examine our prejudices, and learn both the history and present-day reality of the Native peoples who have endured and contributed despite the many injustices they’ve suffered.

The pictures in “Reclaiming Native Truth” all by themselves — from the smiling face of young Anna Warren with a beaded butterfly on her braid to the proud demeanor of an elderly Pawnee, Marlena Riding In, hands, with artful rings, crossed over her chest — tell the story of a diverse set of individuals.

As the new narrative concludes: Let’s move forward together.
— Melissa Hale-Spencer