Post by blackcrowheart on Nov 25, 2005 13:39:16 GMT -5
Shaping the talk on American Indians
Teachers update impressions of Natives
By CAROLYN LORI
Valley News
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 24. 2005 8:17AM
Lynn Murphy remembers the day her 4-year-old daughter, Melissa, came home from a Florida preschool a few days before Thanksgiving, singing a song about Indians. Instead of criticizing the song she found offensive, Murphy, who is Abenaki, said to her daughter, "Did you know that you're an Indian?"
With a look of disgust, Melissa replied, "I am not."
"I cried," remembers Murphy.
That was more than a dozen years ago, but for Murphy, who now lives in Thetford, Vt., it marked the beginning of an ongoing struggle over what Melissa learned in school about Native Americans.
It's a struggle that Judy Dow and Rick Pouliot want to end, and they are trying to do so one school at a time. The two, who are also Abenaki, visit classrooms to talk about Native American history and present-day culture with students, and, more importantly, to give teachers the information they need to create a culturally and historically accurate curriculum.
"Teachers want to do what's right," says Dow, of Essex Junction, Vt.
For Murphy, doing what's right means sparing her daughter, and other children, the educational experience she had growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. In the suburban Boston schools she attended, Murphy said, she was handed a version of history that didn't mesh with what she learned from her mother and grandparents.
There were the textbook depictions of the savages Columbus encountered, the lumping together of vastly different nations and tribes and the annual trotting out of the First Thanksgiving story, with its feel-good spin on the complicated and tenuous pact forged between the Native Americans and Europeans, she said.
"I'd be sitting in class and they'd be talking about Indians and I'd be screaming in my head, 'No, you've got it all wrong,'" says Murphy.
One of the things that has been all wrong, says Dow, is the idea that Native Americans of the past were simple-minded people who spent their time making crafts. Native American technology is one of the topics Dow specializes in teaching, and it is what she focuses on during a recent presentation to fourth-graders at the Marion Cross Elementary School in Norwich.
Dow tells the children about Abenaki baskets, shelters and canoes, and the importance birch bark played in their production.
"The Abenaki homeland includes regions of New England. Birch contains an anti-bacterial (component). It prevents food from spoiling, so food was often kept in (birch) baskets," she tells them.
It is also waterproof, when used correctly, which is why it was used to make canoes and shelters. In other words, Dow explains to the students and teachers, the use of birch bark was not a reflection of some sort of earthy aesthetic but the application of technology.
"(Native people) of the past were not simplistic craftspeople as the books portray them. They were scientists and mathematicians. Indigenous knowledge is so amazing," says Dow.
But as Pouliot, who attends the talk, explains during a break, it is easer to oppress people who are seen as simple-minded. To acknowledge that Native Americans were technologically sophisticated would have made their oppression more morally complicated in the past, both for oppressors of their time and those looking back.
In addition to technology, Dow also offers classes on topics such as ethnobotany (the study of indigenous peoples use of plants) and the history of eugenics, as the pseudo-science was used to support actions including the sterilization of Native Americans to improve the human race.
At her nonprofit school, Saba, in Essex Junction, Vt., she teaches children how to read the land as well as use and protect it. Saba is an Abenaki word that means tomorrow.
The talk at Norwich is on technology at the request of fourth-grade teacher Beth Haney, who invited Dow. Pouliot helped arrange Dow's visit through the New Hampshire-based cultural resource center, Gedakina, which he helped found about five years ago. The organization was based in Norwich, but is moving to New Hampshire.
Such classroom visits, says Pouliot, serve multiple purposes. First, the very presence of indigenous persons dismantles a myth many children hold: that Native Americans lived hundreds of years ago but no more. It also challenges the idea that Native Americans are identifiable by how they look.
Pouliot is fair-skinned and blond, as he has ancestors that are both Abenaki and Eastern European. This was one of the challenges Murphy faced with her daughter, Melissa, who looks more like her Irish father than her Abenaki mother.
Nobody would look at that child and know she was raised Native, says Murphy. But many children of mixed ancestry consider themselves Native American, having been raised steeped in the culture. At the other extreme are children who may look Native American or whose cultural identity is well known. There can be pressure on Native children to know about all Native people, not just their own, says Dow.
When talking with the students in Norwich, Dow makes it a point to admit there are things she doesn't know, such as when a child asks her what Mohawk means. While working with the children is important for Dow and Pouliot, it is the teachers they are most concerned about reaching.
Dow worked as an elementary teacher in Vermont for about 15 years before opening Saba, and in that time she saw her co-workers plan classroom activities that made her uncomfortable, sad or angry.
"But many times I realized that they were doing it because the resources weren't out there,"she says. So she decided to become a resource herself, and to find others, that would help teachers.
------ End of article
By CAROLYN LORI
Valley News
Teachers update impressions of Natives
By CAROLYN LORI
Valley News
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 24. 2005 8:17AM
Lynn Murphy remembers the day her 4-year-old daughter, Melissa, came home from a Florida preschool a few days before Thanksgiving, singing a song about Indians. Instead of criticizing the song she found offensive, Murphy, who is Abenaki, said to her daughter, "Did you know that you're an Indian?"
With a look of disgust, Melissa replied, "I am not."
"I cried," remembers Murphy.
That was more than a dozen years ago, but for Murphy, who now lives in Thetford, Vt., it marked the beginning of an ongoing struggle over what Melissa learned in school about Native Americans.
It's a struggle that Judy Dow and Rick Pouliot want to end, and they are trying to do so one school at a time. The two, who are also Abenaki, visit classrooms to talk about Native American history and present-day culture with students, and, more importantly, to give teachers the information they need to create a culturally and historically accurate curriculum.
"Teachers want to do what's right," says Dow, of Essex Junction, Vt.
For Murphy, doing what's right means sparing her daughter, and other children, the educational experience she had growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. In the suburban Boston schools she attended, Murphy said, she was handed a version of history that didn't mesh with what she learned from her mother and grandparents.
There were the textbook depictions of the savages Columbus encountered, the lumping together of vastly different nations and tribes and the annual trotting out of the First Thanksgiving story, with its feel-good spin on the complicated and tenuous pact forged between the Native Americans and Europeans, she said.
"I'd be sitting in class and they'd be talking about Indians and I'd be screaming in my head, 'No, you've got it all wrong,'" says Murphy.
One of the things that has been all wrong, says Dow, is the idea that Native Americans of the past were simple-minded people who spent their time making crafts. Native American technology is one of the topics Dow specializes in teaching, and it is what she focuses on during a recent presentation to fourth-graders at the Marion Cross Elementary School in Norwich.
Dow tells the children about Abenaki baskets, shelters and canoes, and the importance birch bark played in their production.
"The Abenaki homeland includes regions of New England. Birch contains an anti-bacterial (component). It prevents food from spoiling, so food was often kept in (birch) baskets," she tells them.
It is also waterproof, when used correctly, which is why it was used to make canoes and shelters. In other words, Dow explains to the students and teachers, the use of birch bark was not a reflection of some sort of earthy aesthetic but the application of technology.
"(Native people) of the past were not simplistic craftspeople as the books portray them. They were scientists and mathematicians. Indigenous knowledge is so amazing," says Dow.
But as Pouliot, who attends the talk, explains during a break, it is easer to oppress people who are seen as simple-minded. To acknowledge that Native Americans were technologically sophisticated would have made their oppression more morally complicated in the past, both for oppressors of their time and those looking back.
In addition to technology, Dow also offers classes on topics such as ethnobotany (the study of indigenous peoples use of plants) and the history of eugenics, as the pseudo-science was used to support actions including the sterilization of Native Americans to improve the human race.
At her nonprofit school, Saba, in Essex Junction, Vt., she teaches children how to read the land as well as use and protect it. Saba is an Abenaki word that means tomorrow.
The talk at Norwich is on technology at the request of fourth-grade teacher Beth Haney, who invited Dow. Pouliot helped arrange Dow's visit through the New Hampshire-based cultural resource center, Gedakina, which he helped found about five years ago. The organization was based in Norwich, but is moving to New Hampshire.
Such classroom visits, says Pouliot, serve multiple purposes. First, the very presence of indigenous persons dismantles a myth many children hold: that Native Americans lived hundreds of years ago but no more. It also challenges the idea that Native Americans are identifiable by how they look.
Pouliot is fair-skinned and blond, as he has ancestors that are both Abenaki and Eastern European. This was one of the challenges Murphy faced with her daughter, Melissa, who looks more like her Irish father than her Abenaki mother.
Nobody would look at that child and know she was raised Native, says Murphy. But many children of mixed ancestry consider themselves Native American, having been raised steeped in the culture. At the other extreme are children who may look Native American or whose cultural identity is well known. There can be pressure on Native children to know about all Native people, not just their own, says Dow.
When talking with the students in Norwich, Dow makes it a point to admit there are things she doesn't know, such as when a child asks her what Mohawk means. While working with the children is important for Dow and Pouliot, it is the teachers they are most concerned about reaching.
Dow worked as an elementary teacher in Vermont for about 15 years before opening Saba, and in that time she saw her co-workers plan classroom activities that made her uncomfortable, sad or angry.
"But many times I realized that they were doing it because the resources weren't out there,"she says. So she decided to become a resource herself, and to find others, that would help teachers.
------ End of article
By CAROLYN LORI
Valley News