In America, Native Americans are typically presented as various groups of hunter gatherers. Why are the feats of Native American tribes such as the Mississippians, such as Poverty Point and Cahokia Mounds, and their large trade networks stretching thousands of miles ignored?
I understand that due to their extreme isolation at the time these fears had little impact on later civilizations. But to me, the fact that such great feats occurred in isolation is all the more reason for them to be taught.
Edit: typo
There really is no way for us to know why you may it may not have learned something. Asking former teachers or faculty is really the only way— or investigating the politics of different text books labels.
After all, I find the question a bit befuddling as we spend roughly 3 lectures (out of 27ish) covering societies in the Americas in our World History pre-1500 seminars. Granted that can change a bit depending on the faculty doing the teaching, some squeeze it in to a bit less time or others expand even a bit more. At least at the university level, different faculty have different specializations and when they teach large survey courses they do tend to put more emphasis on the areas or topics they know best. For instance, my knowledge of pre-1500 Southeast Asia is pretty limited or light, so I don’t usually do a lecture on it aside from pointing out its connections to South Asia and East Asia. Some semesters I include a lecture, other times it’s an easy one to cut. However, I know other professors who specialize in the region and therefor carve out several days to cover the spread of philosophical ideas, religious beliefs, cultural practices, and trade goods in the region. Their knowledge of the area is so great, they would never dream of skipping over it.
The same could be true of teachers/professors you have had it the past. People tend to focus on the topics and stories that they are most familiar with and in the case of a social studies teacher they probably are not subject to a lot of continuing history education unless they seek it out themselves. If a teacher were less confident in pre-1500 history of the Americas, they might very well skip over it, especially if they were using a textbook that included very little. Now, there is no way for us to know for sure what the case was as we aren’t that/those teachers and we were not there.
I would say of course these topics are important to cover, the integration, the contact, and the exchanges between different social or cultural groups is very important. It is important that students understand the dynamic nature of human existence and not walk away with a view of societies or cultures as static and unchanging.
I would love to think the students I’ve had, who want to go on to teach history in high school or middle school, carry with them a fuller appreciation of the dynamism of societies in the past.