Monthly Highlights – November 2023
For the month of November, the California History-Social Science Project is highlighting Native American Heritage by featuring recent scholarship in Native American history and Native American Studies, existing teaching resources to support your lessons on Native American history, and with this new edition of Kate’s Book Club.
If you’re interested in learning more about Native American Heritage Month and methods for responsible teaching of Indigenous history, take a look at our November 2022 Educator Feature with Brianna Tafolla Riviére: Agency, Resistance, Persistence: Teaching Indigenous History with Culturally Sustaining Practices.
Featured Teaching Resources:
The collection below includes selections of teaching resources centered around Native American heritage and history from the entire CHSSP state-wide network. Reach out to a site near you or browse their websites for additional teaching resources, as well as information on professional development opportunities, events, and more!
This second-grade primary source set asks students to consider the actions and characteristics of people who have made notable contributions in history and their community. The investigative questions have students determining who was/is a hero and the difference he/she made. Student’s analysis of Sitting Bull’s biography will reveal his heroism in protecting his people, the Lakota, and trying to preserve their culture in the face of attacks by U.S. troops during the Indian wars of the Reconstruction era.
Native Californian Communities
This third-grade inquiry set shows students the ways that Native people lived, and continue to live, in various regions of California. It demonstrates the ways that Indigenous peoples in California interacted with their environments (natural resources, geographic location, climate) and illustrates the ways that the various environments in California influenced the development and cultures of California Indian communities
California Indians (Pre-Columbian to Mexican Rancho Period)
This fourth-grade 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.
Check out this lesson’s additional literacy activity, also!
Native American Systems of Government
This set of primary sources for fifth graders 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. Students will respond to the question: How were different groups of North American Indians organized into systems of governments and confederacies?
Interactions Between Native Americans and Euro Explorers
This fifth-grade inquiry set is designed to provide students with an introduction to and a geographic overview of how different European explorers and settlers interacted with American Indians. The investigative question How did European explorers interact with American Indians? provides the opportunity for teachers to introduce three key concepts to students — conflict, diplomacy, and religion — and to consider the role that each concept plays in the development of the United States.
This CHSSP Inquiry Set for 12th graders offers legal and historical definitions of citizenship. Students learn about the ways in which the meaning of citizenship has been contested and reshaped over time by court challenges, political decisions, and shifts in immigration. The set includes the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and a prompt to ask students to connect the government’s interpretation of Native American citizenship rights to the larger question of how the definition of citizenship has evolved.
This K-2 lesson plan from the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project asks students to respond to the inquiry question: How do people celebrate the harvest, in the United States and around the world? Students learn about the history of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. and the centrality of the Wampanoag people to this history, as well as how this day can mean different things to different groups of Americans.
Library of Congress: Primary Source Set on Thanksgiving
This primary source set from the Library of Congress includes documents on Thanksgiving celebrations throughout the history of the United States. Students learn how the U.S., over hundreds of years, has come to observe a national holiday for giving thanks, one that has taken many forms and has been observed in different ways since the 16th century.
Recent Scholarship:
Charlotte Coté, A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (January 2022)
From University of Washington Press:
“In A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other, Charlotte Coté shares contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth practices of traditional food revitalization in the context of broader efforts to re-Indigenize contemporary diets on the Northwest Coast. As Indigenous peoples continue to face food insecurity due to ongoing inequality, environmental degradation, and the Westernization of traditional diets, Coté foregrounds healing and cultural sustenance via everyday enactments of food sovereignty: berry picking, salmon fishing, and building a community garden on reclaimed residential school grounds.”
Jessica L. Taylor, Plain Paths and Dividing Lines: Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake, (August 2023)
From University of Virginia Press:
“In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined by connection, Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and into the continent for centuries. As Taylor finds, their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland’s planters erected fences and forts, policed unfree laborers, and dispatched land surveyors.”
Dana Lloyd, Land Is Kin:Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (October 2023)
From University Press of Kansas:
“Responding to Vine Deloria, Jr.’s call for all people to “become involved” in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites, Dana Lloyd’s Land Is Kin proposes a rethinking of sacred sites and a rethinking of even land itself. Deloria suggested using the principle of religious freedom, but this principle has failed Indigenous peoples for decades. Lloyd argues that religious freedom fails Indigenous claimants because settler law creates a tension between two competing rights—one party’s religious freedom and another party’s property rights. In this contest, the right of property will always win.”
Farina King, Diné dóó Gáamalii : Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century (October 2023)
From University Press of Kansas:
“Diné dóó Gáamalii is a history of twentieth-century Navajos, including author Farina King and her family, who have converted and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), becoming Diné dóó Gáamalii—both Diné and LDS. Drawing on Diné stories from the LDS Native American Oral History Project, King illuminates the mutual entanglement of Indigenous identity and religious affiliation, showing how their Diné identity made them outsiders to the LDS Church and, conversely, how belonging to the LDS community made them outsiders to their Native community.”
Stefan Aune, Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and Shadow Doctrines of Empire (September 2023)
From UC Press:
“References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation “Geronimo” used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere, Stefan Aune shows how these resonances signal a deeper history, one in which the Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence.”
Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer Jr., We Are the Land: A History of Native California (March 2022)
From UC Press:
“Before there was such a thing as “California,” there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it.”
Gregory D. Smithers, Reclaiming Two Spirits: Sexuality, Spirituality & Sovereignty in Native America (April 2022)
From Penguin Random House:
“A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them.”
Picture Books (#KatesBookClub):
Rock Your Mocs by Laurel Goodluck, illustrated by Madelyn Goodnight. A happy tribute to Rock Your Mocs Day, observed yearly on November 15, this new book celebrates the joy and power of wearing moccasins—and the Native pride that comes with them. A perfect book for Native American Heritage Month and all year round. Don't miss the author’s note with additional information about moccasins and Rock Your Mocs day, which will be celebrated in 2023 the week of November 12 - 18. Indigenous author and illustrator.
Berry Song written and illustrated by Michaela Goade. Simply beautiful book that celebrates the land and the wisdom of one's elders. On an island at the edge of the sea, a girl and her grandmother gather gifts from the earth. Caldecott Honor Book. Indigenous author and illustrator.
What Your Ribbon Skirt Means to Me: Deb Haaland's Historic Inauguration by Alexis Bunten, illustrated by Nicole Neidhardt. This is such a find...an informative picture book that provides an homage to Secretary Deb Haaland's achievements, and a celebration of urban Indigenous community through the eyes of a little girl. In the book, Auntie Autumn gathers all the children around their television on March 18, 2021, to witness Secretary Deb Haaland in her ribbon skirt at the White House as she becomes the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary. With their parents and Elders, the children explore the values that are woven into their own ribbon skirts, making memories that will last for years. Indigenous author and illustrator.
Finding My Dance by Ria Thundercloud, illustrated by Kalila J Fuller. This book tells the true story of professional Indigenous dancer Ria Thundercloud's path to dance and how it helped her take pride in her Native American heritage. At four years old, Ria Thundercloud was brought into the powwow circle, ready to dance in the special jingle dress her mother made for her. As she grew up, she danced with her brothers all over Indian country. Then Ria learned more styles--tap, jazz, ballet--but still loved the expressiveness of Indigenous dance. And despite feeling different as one of the only Native American kids in her school, she always knew she could turn to dance to cheer herself up. Would be great to pair with Tallchief: America's Prima Ballerina about Maria Tallchief. Indigenous author.