"What About This One with the Mice?"

How are societies from the distant past rendered palatable for modern US classrooms? A few months ago I worked with a fellow educator to create a lesson for high-schoolers about Moche, an ancient Andean society. We were attempting to correct an almost total erasure of Indigenous peoples in his social studies curriculum, but we found ourselves engaged in a very classroom-specific form of redaction. Moche artifacts that graphically depict both sex and violence brought that society into direct juxtaposition with our own and forced us to confront US norms about "appropriateness" in school. This piece is both a recounting of and reflection on that ethically confounding process. It renders transparent an aspect of education that usually happens in the privacy of home offices and teacher workrooms.