A reader who I infer is part-Indian wrote:                                                                                                       Your book Lies My Teacher Told Me, and especially the chapter"Red Eyes," has had an uprecedented effect on how

I view the world.  I have never felt inclined to write a letter of approval for anything I've read before.  Your

description of the Indian experience in the United States and, more importantly, the concept of a syncretic

American Society has subtly, but powerfully, changed my understanding of my country, and, in fact, my own

ancestry.  If, as Lies My Teacher Told Me shows, history is the least-liked subject in American high schools, it is positively abhorred in Indian Country.  There it is the record of five centuries of defeat.  Yet, properly understood, American history is not a record of Native incompetence but of survival and perseverance. 

-Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen      pg.xiii 

Syncretism is how cultures typically change and survive, and all Americans need to understand that Native American cultures, too, must change to survive.  Natives as well as non-Natives often labor under the misapprehension that

"real" Indian culture was those practices that existed before white contact.  Actually, real Indian culture is still being produced-by sculptors like Nalenik Temela (page 133), musicians like Keith Secola, and American Indian parents everywhere.     

-Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen      pg.xiii-xiv