But ... what about Native Americans?

In Jill Lepore's narrative, I am now into the 20th century, more than 400 years after Columbus "discovering" India.

After some of the detailed descriptions early on about the asymmetrical interactions between European settlers and Native Americans, and then later about the Trail of Tears, Lepore's narrative does not say much about the original inhabitants.

Now, Lepore herself writes about readers who would question her on why she had skipped something or the other.  As she writes, no single-volume history of the United States can cover it all.  I think that including it all will be like trying to draw a true-to-scale map of the world.  (Was this in Alice in Wonderland?)  But, still ...

I figured I would not be the first person to think of this.  As a truly curious person would do in this internet age, I googled for it.

Sure enough, this essay from The Los Angeles Review of Books pops up, in which the author writes:

Indigenous absences are not a minor fault with These Truths. They lie at its core and they bear weighty consequences for the story that emerges. In a book that confidently bills itself as “an account of the origins, course, and consequences of the American experiment over more than four centuries,” the marginalization of indigenous people is a fundamental problem.

Any historical account will be contested, yes.  But, still ...

Methodology may have been a problem from the start. Lepore has a reliance on written literacy and record-keeping as powerful determinants of history and memory. The “history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail,” she asserts, adding, “most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts.” She makes this claim partly through a contention about the “literall advantage” supposedly maintained by Euro-American colonizers over peoples of indigenous and African descent, who oftentimes used non-written forms of expression and communication.

I don't understand why academics use "methodology" when they mean the research method.  Anyway, that is beside the main point, which is that when Lepore's method is to let the people speak for themselves, and for which she relies on the written word, well, what happens to the stories, the truths, that were not written down but were passed down through the spoken word or through images?

Lepore is a sharp intellect, and a phenomenal communicator.  I am sure there were reasons about which she is confident.  But, still ...

[Scholars] of early America and Native America have produced marvelously fine-grained reassessments of literacies, communication, and meaning production. You can now browse entire library shelves that illuminate the dynamic, enduring processes through which distinctive Native communities have transmitted information: knotted quipu strings, woven baskets, petroglyphs, standing stones, oral traditions, songs, dances, gestures, cornfields, clothing, sand and bone maps, and so much more.

Understanding the non-written is not an easy task.  And, like in the case of the Indus civilization, not being able to decode their inscriptions is another challenge altogether.

Such complexities ought to make us even more interested in understanding the past--what we may have been taught and told might not be anywhere close to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  What a shame that instead of a collective investment in such pursuit of truth, we are even closing down history departments, as if the truth is the one that Henry Ford declared: History Is Bunk.