I don't know what you are talking about. To the point where it sound like you are part of the kooks who believe kids these days are being taught to hate their country.
> you fully believe the myths you've been told
Which myths are you referring to?
> is somewhere between completely false and deeply misleading
I'm totally on board with that. The history I learned in school appear to have whitewashed the history.
> We teach history as if the natives were peaceful victims and the settlers were violent attackers
This is completely untrue. I even pulled out my high school American history book, and it doesn't say that. And my high school teacher is still teaching American history.
> where refugees from European wars settled as peaceful farmers only to have a Comanche war party find and attack them years later.
Is this a specific incident you have in mind? The Comanche surrendered in 1875 so you're talking about settlements in 1870 or earlier, and in modern-day Texas or Oklahoma. I'm hard pressed to think of which European refugees you refer to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_history gives an example of that place and time:
] In May 1847, Texas allowed the German settlers near Fredericksburg and New Braunfels to make their own treaty with the Texas Comanches. In exchange for land, the Germans promised a trading post and gifts. Unfortunately, the Germans not only encroached beyond the agreed boundary, but were slow to pay, and in response the Comanches made raids.
This is some time after the Council House Fight, "in which Republic of Texas officials attempted to capture and take prisoner 33 Comanche chiefs who had come to negotiate a peace treaty, killing them together with two dozen of their family and followers" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raid_of_1840
Or, quoting https://archive.org/details/americanindianho00thor_0/page/48... :
] In Texas, “the facts of history arc plain: Most Texas Indians were exterminated or brought to the brink of oblivion by Spaniards, Mexicans, Texans, and Americans who often had no more regard for the life of an Indian than they had for that of a dog, sometimes less” (Newcomb, 1961: 334; see also chapters on individual Texas tribes in Ortiz, 1983)
I'm curious - how much regard did this European refugee farmer have for the Comanche? And how did the refugee come to be settled in contested land? Who did he think would protect him, and why?
I ask, because we can directly compare the roughly century of peace between the Comanche and New Mexico, after NM killed Cuerno Verde and made - and upheld - a peace agreement with the Comanche, to know that long-term peace was possible. ... by a non-expansionist power.
> basic factual truths like
There really weren't that many European war refugees settling the plains, so even given that it's a basic factual truth, I don't understand how one small example is at all meaningful over the entire history of English-speaking American expansionism.
> they deflect the criticism by refocusing on the (imagined) treatment of various tribes by American policies in the 1800s
Again, the California Genocide was not imagined. Or do you think it was?
What imagined example are being given? Why make up examples when the real ones are so plentiful?
I mean, Soviet propaganda used real examples of Black oppression in the US to counter American "Free World" propaganda.
And it wasn't until the 1940s that it became illegal to hold someone as a slave - to counter possible Japanese propaganda. Quoting https://www.onlyonesolution.org/blog/blog/2016/01/31/Neo-Sla... .
] The change came as a result of Roosevelt’s fear that racial inequalities would be used as anti-United States propaganda by the Japanese during World War II. After Pearl Harbor Roosevelt asked the cabinet what were the U.S soft spots, propaganda wise. The reply he received was that the Japanese may claim America is stating that it fights for freedom while oppressing its own citizens. This led him to finally order some enforcement actions against slavery by the federal government.
Own up to our negative history, explain why it was wrong, and use that to prevent further genocides.