Native American Heritage Month, simply concluded, represents an attention-grabbing pressure for educators. There’s a drive to have fun tradition—and why not, when Native tradition is so ceaselessly missed or erased in public college curriculum? On the identical time, lecturers can really feel pissed off—and overwhelmed—that there’s just one month out of the yr to show their focus to the tons of of tribes inside the USA. It’s straightforward to really feel like a handful of classes in November about Native American artwork or storytelling isn’t sufficient. It isn’t.
However even asking the query of how a lot time to spend on Native cultures in your historical past class is to imagine that Native historical past is an add-on to the common curriculum. If Native historical past is an add-on, that signifies that common curriculum is by, for, and about non-Native folks. Irrespective of how participating and revolutionary your Native American Heritage Month lesson was, if it handled Native historical past as an add-on, it is going to solely proceed to heart mainstream curriculum as regular and Native training as supplemental.
For thousands and thousands of Native folks, Native American training is foundational, not supplemental. Native data, tradition, and methods of being are stewarded and handed rigorously throughout generations as they’ve been since time immemorial. And but that is virtually invisible to most non-Native folks.
At River Ridge Excessive Faculty in Lacey, Wash., we created a novel three-course Native-studies program that earns college students (each Native and non-Native) highschool and college credit score and is built-in with Native-language instruction. The philosophies and theories of our work are complicated and related to peoples and to their lands. We get requested ceaselessly to share our curriculum, which is a request we regularly can’t fulfill. Our curriculum is a dwelling entity that grows and adjustments with our school and college students. We don’t do particular tasks for Native American Heritage Month and we don’t have particular course texts to seek advice from. This system is grounded in Native instructing frameworks that aren’t simply defined over an e-mail.
This type of response can really feel defeating to non-Native educators who need a starting point. However there isn’t a neat shortcut to discovering the historical past and tradition that replicate a Native perspective relatively than the colonizing mentality of Euro-American settlers. Non-Native lecturers should study to see and perceive issues in another way. Phrases like “decolonizing” come up rather a lot in training, however they’re hardly ever tied to significant academic change.
This may increasingly seem to be rather a lot to unpack. However probably the most primary factor is quickly accessible: Make Native voices and views central to your classes.
Any educator can play a task in ending public training’s lengthy historical past of miseducation and erasure of Native peoples.
You don’t have to “indigenize” every part . Generally, it’s tempting to begin with a monumental gesture, like modifying state coverage or beginning a large-scale environmental mission with a neighborhood tribe. However you will need to perceive the place you might be positioned—are you, as an example, a white instructor in a college system that has lengthy catered to white college students?—if you start. Beginning with small, intentional, and knowledgeable actions will construct a basis that may develop over time.
As an educator, begin by studying on whose conventional lands you reside, work, and play. What treaties, if any, cowl the world you reside in? If no tribes at the moment exist in your space, study why. Carry those self same units of questions into your college, assess what kind of Native training helps could exist in your district, and construct a relationship with Native folks or with a Native group. You probably have Native college students, ask: Who’re they, and what tribal citizenships do they maintain? Ask: What have or haven’t you and different educators discovered about Native peoples and why?
By no means earlier than have there been extra sources to assist educators of their work towards desettling, however sources want to come back from Native peoples. In case your state has a tribal historical past and sovereignty curriculum, start with that. Examine what the Nationwide Indian Schooling Affiliation and the Nationwide Museum of the American Indian have to supply.
Generally, educators confess that they’re afraid they’ll do one thing fallacious. Doing nothing is doing hurt. We encourage educators to show with Native peoples and never nearly them. Mannequin neighborhood constructing. Problem your self to discover a tribal chief, scientist, lawyer, instructor, or entrepreneur. Our program has welcomed dozens of Native audio system from over 20 tribes together with their allies. Our invitees have included Native legislators, authors, roboticists, and college students.
Whether or not you might have a big Native-student inhabitants or one way or the other have none, higher instructing about and with Native peoples improves training, builds more healthy communities, will increase Native visibility, and creates broad alternatives for all college students. Any educator can play a task in ending public training’s lengthy historical past of miseducation and erasure of Native peoples.
This work isn’t snug, and it shouldn’t be. If educators who occupy Indigenous lands wish to do higher than educate the identical over-stereotyped classes in November, they have to come to phrases with their positionality in public training. Intentional research and neighborhood constructing with Native folks will problem educators to see the very actual, fashionable presence and contribution of Native peoples. Educators will uncover long-standing biases that erase or reduce Native presence and studying in public training.
Actual change requires that educators acknowledge their function in perpetuating and privileging the narratives and instructing approaches of Euro-American settlers. Actual motion towards desettling and decolonizing training begins with small selections—selections which might be grounded in the place you might be, rooted in your neighborhood, and related to the area you occupy as a part of the tutorial system.
Editor’s Notice: That is considered one of a brief sequence of opinion essays reflecting on Native American Heritage Month.
