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The original was posted on /r/askhistorians by /u/Moist_Street_7073 on 2023-10-31 04:02:25+00:00.

I’m a high school algebra teacher and I always try to talk about the origins of a math concept before teaching it, especially if it has an interesting story (Pythagoras being a cult leader, John Napier summoning the devil, etc). Students always love these stories and my research on these things has taken me to some wild places.

Most of my students are native American and so I always feel bad that I talk about math in almost every country in the world over the course of 5000 years, but I don’t have anything for pre colonial America.

I’ve tried to do research into this but it’s so hard to find anything useful. Almost all information I can find is just “they didn’t have math because they didn’t need it” or things suggesting that their most complex math was simply in the making of geometrical patterns in blankets, but this must be bullshit because many large civilizations like the Aztec and Maya had very complex calendars and very precise understandings of the movement of celestial objects, so they must have had some form of trigonometry at the very least, but I can find absolutely zero resources on this.

I’ve been researching for a long time now, and even local natives that I’ve talked to about it echo the idea of “we never really needed math”, which again cannot be true. I’m sure the reason for this is because of the fact that the colonizers wanted to make natives seem primitive, so they destroyed evidence of math and science and shoved all the kids in boarding schools and told them only the whites had complex math, but there must be some scrap of evidence to contradict this.

Also the endless articles on the teacher who tried to teach soh cah toa by being racist make this job especially hard.

Does anyone at least know of a direction I can look in to learn more?