Last Updated on December 17, 2025
As of 2025, 27 out of 50 US states still lack curriculum requirements for teaching Native American genocide. New Hampshire is among the 23 states that have no education requirements and continues to provide a neglectful view of U.S. history. That is not an educational oversight; it’s the very intent of settler colonial education.
NH may have no federally recognized tribes, but it is home to the Abenaki and Penobscot, and houses the smaller bands of the Kennebec, Norridgewock, and Cowasuck. Native American history is often taught through a whitewashed lens that silences ongoing forms of Indigenous dispossession while celebrating settlers as pioneers.
Until students are around nine years old, Native American history is required in NH, but after third grade, the study of Indigenous history simply disappears from the social studies curriculum.
This is partly why NH Representative Ellen Read introduced a bill requiring the teaching of genocide in January 2025. NH House Bill 555-FN called for “holocaust and genocide study requirements for an adequate public education.”
NH State Representative Ellen Read -District 10
It included a requirement for students to receive “at least 5 hours of study … at a minimum, instruction on the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the United States.” Not that five centuries of genocide can be taught in five hours, but it was a first step towards redress.
This was the first time a set number of hours was assigned to studying Native American history in NH. But the bill didn’t pass.
In fact, it was killed almost unanimously, strangled between those members opposing UN frameworks and others denying genocide in Gaza. Rep. Read plans to reintroduce the bill. But history was censored, and, with it, our ability to recognize ongoing forms of genocide.
Ironically, what triggered the bill was another genocide far away. In September of 2025, Rep Read became the first elected US official to join a flotilla to break Israel’s blockade in the Gaza Strip. The idea for a genocide bill came from witnessing the genocide of the Palestinian people.
By introducing this bill, she observed how genocide education is primarily taught in the context of the Holocaust. This framing, she felt, created a critical misunderstanding by locating genocide in the past in ways that impede us from recognizing its present manifestations.
Native scholars have condemned the Israeli genocide in Gaza as settler colonial elimination targeting Palestinians. A 2024 statement by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) pointed that “Indigenous peoples best understand what it means to be subjects of settler states that deny, conceal, or attempt to erase their own complicity in genocide.” Settler elimination is ongoing, from Gaza to New Hampshire.
Historians have examined the history of Native genocide in New England from different perspectives. In Our Beloved Kin, Lisa Brooks uses archival primary evidence to show genocidal tactics during King Philip’s War. “The Narragansetts…told these Indians that the English had a fight with them, & killed about forty fighting men & one Sachem, & about 300 old men, women & children were killed & burnt in the wig-wams, most of which were destroyed.”
In Beyond Conquest, Amy E. Den Ouden explores how colonial conquest in Connecticut depended not only on physical violence but also on the deliberate erasure of Indigenous identity. “The treaty thus made it quite explicit that the official, ‘legal’ erasure of Pequot identity was as important to the process of imposing and securing colonial territory, as was the attempt at ridding the landscape of Pequot bodies.” Adding to this conversation, Jean M. O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting shows that colonial erasure of Indigenous histories removed Native voices from the historical record. Together, these works use historical narratives to reveal the multidimensionality of settler genocide against Native peoples in New England.
In NH, like in Gaza, skeptics will deny genocide. Alex Alvare wrote a book dismissing genocide on the basis of lack of intent, one of the key criteria for genocide in Raphael Lemkin’s definition. But in NH, like in Gaza, the goal of eliminating the population is very much public record. A historical figure such as Thomas Jefferson said that the US would not stop “till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi,” showing presidential intention of extermination.
It is estimated that European invasion killed over 56 million people living in the Americas. Native Americans were slaughtered, forcibly removed from their homes, and their cultures destroyed. This massive elimination even impacted global climate.
HB 555 is a crucial step in rewriting the past. The push to formally recognize settler colonial genocide in U.S. education is not unique to NH.
In Maine, a bill named “An Act to Require Education about African-American History and the History of Genocide” was passed in 2021. Similar to the NH bill, it requires the teaching of genocide in American, Maine, African American, and Wabanaki history. This bill enables students to develop the skills to connect the history of their state to the broader conversation of colonialism.
Education about colonialism tends to be overlooked because it’s both controversial and uncomfortable. That is exactly why it needs to be taught; to understand how the past continues to shape the present.
A statement released by the Maine House Democrats echoes many of the same reasons behind the NH bill: “The requirements are necessary to make sure Maine students understand the past and the historical context of current events.”
The primary goal is to help students understand their own settler colonial history, free from the traditional mythic lens. The mythologies of good settler relations with Indigenous Peoples perpetuated in the US Thanksgiving holiday are widespread in history books.
James W. Loewen’s seminal work Lies My Teacher Told Me dives into US history textbooks’ inaccuracies, analyzing how Christopher Columbus’s heroic portrayal presents him as an origin myth: “He was good and so are we.”
Similarly, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s classic book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States debunks historical myths that glorifies settler interactions with Native Americans. The book was turned into a graphic novel that could easily be assigned to high school students.
Maine House Democrats state that education was called the “necessary barrier between the mistakes of the past and similar mistakes in the future.” The report notes that this law will allow teachers the “means to share a more thorough, honest view of our heritage in order to better inform our shared future.”
If some states have attempted to adopt the teaching of Native American history in the classroom, a significant gap remains in most states. This gap leaves millions of students either disillusioned or with no understanding of the importance of their own history. And not knowing one’s history is not knowing oneself.
The reason HB 555-FN failed shows exactly why it is needed. With an average age of a NH state rep being 66, those representatives are evidence of the need for a more comprehensive education on genocide. Resisting acknowledging genocide reflects, at best, their lack of education and, at worst, their complicity.
US Congress members have failed to call genocide by its name. In 2021, former US Senator Rick Santorum said, “there was nothing here” that Europeans “birthed a nation from nothing upon arriving in what would become the United States.” This failure to acknowledge the past speaks to the lack of ability to acknowledge the future.
The future mirrors the past. Genocide should be taught not as a single chapter of history, but as a contemporary and interconnected structure that continues to shape the present.
First steps to change our curriculum may include incorporating Native authors, inviting Native speakers and artists, or simply acknowledging the history of genocide. These additions do not make up for the genocide, but they are the first step in acknowledging it. Unless we confront our own history, we leave the next generation unprepared to stop perpetuating it.
From Gaza to Sudan to the Uyghurs, settler-colonial violence is ongoing. Learning about the past shows students that genocide is neither historic nor isolated, that Gaza and New Hampshire have more in common than we would like to acknowledge.
This article is a part of Hotspots, a journalistic collaboration between IC, Professor Manuela Picq and her students at Amherst College.
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