Reckoning with Modernity’s Shadows: How Social Studies Textbooks Neglect Indigenous Knowledge Systems Vital to Sustaining Communities of Life

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Although some textbooks discuss how Indigenous communities have been marginalized, many nevertheless still valorize modern industrial development as the desired path for all, neglecting to address modernity’s role in ongoing environmental degradation. Examining 47 English-language textbooks published from the 1880s to the present, I analyze how textbooks extol modernity without recognizing its detrimental environmental costs, and whether they discuss Indigenous ways of knowing and living as providing requisite guidance for living more sustainably. This analysis applies the philosophy of Indigenous scholars Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and Tyson Yunkaporta, who both maintain that modern industrial economies can never be sustainable and discuss how the “disease” of modernity blinds us from recognizing this. Although some regional textbooks are more inclined to shed light on modernity’s shadows, this study finds that most textbooks fail to acknowledge the vital role of environmental stewardship, and concomitant custodial practices, that Indigenous communities have long embraced.