Monthly Highlights – November 2022
Throughout November, we will highlight resources that educate students about Indigenous history and heritage. This month's theme is "survivance," which is a conjunction of the words "survival" and resistance." Resources we feature will help educators teach beyond the comparative context (where Native peoples are taught in relation to colonial encounters rather than framed as Nations with their own history and agency). Instead, this month's resources amplify how Native peoples leveraged their political, social, and economic power to resist assimilation or incorporation into the United States, to preserve and adapt cultural practices, and to assert their own autonomy. We hope the diversity of teaching resources will help integrate Indigenous history into the classroom throughout the year.
Blog Post
"Agency, Resistance, Persistence" - Brianna Tafolla Riviere, UC Davis PhD Candidate
Featured Teaching Resources
Native American Systems of Government - Grade 5
This set of sources explores the many different ways that Native American groups organized themselves into social and political kinship structures that include clans, bands, tribes, nations, and confederacies.
Federalism (Native Boarding Schools) - Grade 12
This inquiry set offers students an opportunity to consider Native American education, guided by federal Indian policy, which created a system of coerced education in the form of boarding schools. The sources in this set allow students to consider the goals of the federal government, the consequences of these policies on children, and how Native Americans navigated their relationships between the levels of authority (federal, state, local, and tribal) that they encountered.
This lesson introduces students to some of the lifeways of Native Californian communities before the arrival of newcomers (Europeans and Americans). It addresses the ways that foreign contact changed Native people’s lives during the Spanish mission period, including changes to their cultures and the impacts of disease and European plants and animals on Native populations.
Impact of Colonialism on Native People - Grade 10
This is a case study of the colonial enterprises of Spain and the United States in California. It forces on the continuous resistance of Native peoples from the eighteenth century to the present.
Working with maps of natural regions and Indian tribes, students can describe ways in which physical geography, including climate, affected the natural resources on which California Indian nations depended. Investigating the plants and animals used by local Indians, students explain how Indians adapted to their natural environment so that they could harvest, transport, and consume resources.
Featured Picture Books (#KatesBookClub)
Kapaemahu by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson, and Daniel Sousa
An Indigenous legend about how four extraordinary individuals of dual male and female spirit, or Mahu, brought healing arts from Tahiti to Hawaii. This book also provides a FAIR Act opportunity as it is difficult to find titles for elementary students that focus on the Two Spirits.
Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun's Thanksgiving Story by Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry, Alexis Bunten, and Gary Meeches
Yes! Finally a Thanksgiving story from the native perspective. An important picture book honoring both the history and tradition that surrounds the story of the first Thanksgiving. Also introduces students to the "Three Sisters" - corn, beans, and squash. Changes the narrative of how we teach Thanksgiving.
The Water Walker by Joanne Robertson
This is a true story about Josephine Mandamin who was concerned about water quality and conservation. Josephine, called by her Ojibwe name Nokomis, organized a group of other Ojibwe women to walk around all the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, blessing and singing to the water. Nokomis went through 11 pairs of sneakers on her walks, making her story particularly appealing to children. This is a great book to use with students to introduce climate activism and environmental justice. Robertson and Mandamin worked together to write this book.
We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga by Traci Sorell
The word otsaliheliga (oh-jah-LEE-hay-lee-gah) is used by members of the Cherokee Nation to express gratitude. Beginning in the fall with the new year and ending in summer, students follow a full Cherokee year of celebrations and experiences. The Cherokee community is grateful for blessings and challenges that each season brings. This is modern Native American life as told by a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. This book was the winner of multiple awards, notably the American Indian Youth Literature Award Honor Book. Sorrel’s book provides another opportunity to change the narrative on teaching Thanksgiving - “What are you grateful for?”
Recent Scholarship
Christine Bold (2022) - "Vaudeville Indians" on Global Circuits, 1880s-1930s
Drawing from little-known archives, Christine Bold brings to light forgotten histories of Indigenous performers in vaudeville and, by extension, popular culture and modernity. Vaudeville was both a forerunner of modern mass entertainment and a rich site of popular Indigenous performance and notions of Indianness at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the stories of artists Native to Turtle Island (North America) performing across the continent and around the world, Bold illustrates a network of more than 300 Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying entertainers…These fascinating stories cumulatively reveal vaudeville as a space in which the making of western modernity both denied and relied on living Indigenous presence, and in which Indigenous artists negotiated agency and stereotypes through vaudeville performance. (text from publisher)
William J. Bauer, Jr. & Damon B. Akins (2022) - We Are the Land: A History of Native California
A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience. (text from publisher)
Kent Blansett (2020) - A Journey to Freedom Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement
Historian Kent Blansett offers a transformative and new perspective on the Red Power movement of the turbulent 1960s and the dynamic figure who helped to organize and champion it, telling the full story of Oakes’s life, his fight for Native American self-determination, and his tragic, untimely death. This invaluable history chronicles the mid-twentieth-century rise of Intertribalism, Indian Cities, and a national political awakening that continues to shape Indigenous politics and activism to this day. (text from publisher)
Douglas K. Miller (2019) - Indians on the Move Native: American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century
The dynamic histories of everyday people at the heart of this book shed new light on the adaptability of mobile Native American communities. In the end, this is a story of shared experience across tribal lines, through which Indigenous people incorporated urban life into their ideas for Indigenous futures. (text from publisher)
Thomas Grillot (2018) - First Americans: U.S. Patriotism in Indian Country after World War I
Drawing from archival sources and oral histories, Thomas Grillot demonstrates how the relationship between Native American tribes and the United States was reinvented in the years following World War I. During that conflict, twelve thousand Native American soldiers served in the U.S. Army. They returned home to their reservations with newfound patriotism, leveraging their veteran cachet for political power and claiming all the benefits of citizenship—even supporting the termination policy that ended the U.S. government’s recognition of tribal sovereignty. (text from publisher)