Exceptional Colonial Violence: Eurocentric Portrayals of Indigenous Taínos in Social Studies and History Textbooks in Puerto Rico

• In Event: New Histories of Indigenous Education

Abstract

This paper presents one of the themes that surfaced while researching the portrayal of Indigenous Taíno cosmology in secondary and university-level Social Studies and History textbooks used in Puerto Rico. I focus on how textbooks consistently critique the violence of European conquest and colonization of the Americas but fail to question its inherent racial violence. The discourse of exceptional cases of abuse and flaws within the system, renders the modern colonial project as a potentially positive endeavor that was hindered by isolated instances of misbehavior and frames genocide as an unintended consequence of civilization.

Author

• Rafael V Capó García, University of British Columbia