Diné youth Kaylee is urging our community to sign this petition to bring awareness and urge leaders to improve history textbooks that support a curriculum that is a honest and unbiased history for Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) students. We encourage meaningful actions to support challenging the use of inappropriate and offensive language across APS and NM schools. This includes the latest high school history textbooks that reinforces a revisionist history. This is a history that does not inform students of the REAL history of the United States and “Native Americans” also known as Indigenous people across this continent. Revisionist history is a form settler colonialism meant to rewrite history through the elimination of Native people in history. This is to assimilate and indoctrinate people into a false narrative. We have seen this through Boarding schools for Native People and in the slogan “Kill the Native and save the man” by only teaching colonial narratives of erasure. Racism knows no boundaries, the history within textbooks perpetuate stigmatized & stereotypical views of many marginalized communities. 

Kaylee shared “As an Indigenous student taking a World History class, I feel frustrated with our state-mandated textbooks that perpetuate eurocentric views through Indigenous erasure, the use of racist language, and by misinterpreting historical events”. 

Several issues have been brought up in  multiple meetings with APS board as a result of an incident in 2018 where a Diné student at Cibola High school was assaulted by her teacher who had cut her hair and sprinkled it around her in class. Community stormed APS Board meetings and made demands for a safer education environment. None of the demands have been met.

Another example of this is in the lawsuit case of Yazzie and Martinez vs. state of New Mexico, which argues that the education system is failing to provide a sufficient and uniform education system for students across so called New Mexico as guaranteed by the education clause in the New Mexico State Constitution. A Judge ruled that all students in New Mexico have a right to be college & career ready and that the state is failing to meet this obligation. 

Let’s support Diné youth Kaylee in their petition against revisionist history that promotes Indigenous erasure, racist language, misinterpretation of historical events, and pro-imperialist propaganda in state issued history texthooks and learning curriculum!

No Pride In Genocide 
#NoRevisionistHistory