Professor Niman needs to update his reading list (Getting a Grip, Artvoice 2/5/09). Lies My Teacher Told Me was published in 1996 and things have changed in the text books being used in our schools. Both of the American history text books currently being read by all City of Buffalo middle school students make clear that there is no scholarly consensus on the size of the native population of North America at the time Europeans arrived. Further, at page 45 of the eighth grade text, America, Pathways to the Present (Prentice Hall 2003), there is a set-out of the following lovely quotation from the diary of a Jamestown settler: “So great was our famine, that a Savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort tooke him up againe and eat him…” If Dr. Niman’s column had been submitted for evaluation in middle school I am afraid it would have failed the minimum requirements of the grading rubric, which call for multiple, up-to-date sources, including at least one primary source. Resubmissions with corrections are permitted, but remember, Wikipedia is not an acceptable source.

David Cohen

Buffalo