A little rant

I'm reading James W. Loewen's fabulous book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, a book about how awful high school history text books are (they actually make students more stupid than they are before they read them!). So far we've covered Columbus, the first Thanksgiving, the fact that Helen Keller was a socialist and Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist and both fact have been covered by their "hero" status, and now the textbook treatment of Native American culture, society and impact on Europeans. Specifically, textbooks treat Native people like ignorant savages, when in fact Europeans derived or possibly derived zillions of words, foods (from chili to soul food), names, medicines, and even a large part of their original concepts of democracy from Native people! American democracy can be believed to be a syncretic (coming together to form something new) of Native American and European ideas, which is always totally totally ignored by modern textbooks.
I had a truly excellent US history teacher; she was probably the best teacher I had in high school, and taught me a crapload about social justice and did a fair job of presenting different sides of history. We certainly did not revere Columbus in my history class. But still, we worked from a textbook like these. We learned all about Andrew Jackson, president, and I did not discover until I did a report about him that he was a total inhuman monster that killed so many Native American people (especially during the Cherokee's "Trail of Tears", when he forced then entire tribe to walk from their lands in Georgia to a reservation in Okalahoma, and 25% died along the way) that I can't even comprehend, and that he still has hate websites up against him today. That's pretty hardcore, considering how long he's been dead, but I think that his Native American policy probably got a paragraph or one of those special little "insight" boxes and then wasn't mentioned again.
All of this is just pissing me off. Why aren't high school students reading Loewen's book, or Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, for god's sake? Both of those books have ripped my heart apart countless times, and yet we are still allowing kids to work from textbooks called things like The American Way and Triumph of the American Nation, letting them believe that "Americans" or anybody substantially connected to the formation of the way things are now never did bad things? It's absurd.
I guess I'm done. For more information on Jackson, go to http://www.americanindian.ucr.edu/discussions/jackson/deeds.html
Also, my interesting website for yesterday was guerrillanews.com, if you're interested in what seems to be an at least decent alternative news source.
One last thing: John Marshall, a Supreme Court Chief Justice who I always kind of admired in high school, basically allowed Jackson to move the Cherokees by saying that, while the Native Americans had rights to the land in Georgia by dint of "occupancy," white enroachers had superior rights by dint of "discovery." Can you live somewhere without first "discovering" it? Another "hero" down the drain.