Jesse E

How is Native American history taught in public elementary schools in the United States? What determines how it is taught? And what efforts have been done and are being done to improve the content?

QUOTES:

"The essentialized cultural differences constructed in class discussions represent the conflict between whites and Native Americans in US history as a clash of two opposing and incompatible structures (because culture is represented as fixed and static, not a process but an object that groups possess). That is, the conflict between whites and Native Americans is represented as a cultural conflict, rather than differences in the power of whites and Native Americans to realize their interests during the colonial period and beyond." ("Missing in Interaction..." 53-54)

"Re-storying places through orientations that disrupt settler colonial imaginaries suggests a move toward looking beyond innocent perspectives of children’s place experiences and instead orienting toward explicitly politicized enactments of and dialogues with place." ("Decolonizing place in..." 103)

Notes Document

Bibliographic Information:

Author: Ward, Micheal Kent

Title of article or book: Teaching Indigenous American Culture and History: Perpetuating Knowledge or Furthering Intellectual Colonization?

Title of publication (if article in magazine, newspaper, or journal): Journal of Social Sciences

Page numbers (if article in magazine, newspaper, or journal): 104-112

Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Date published: 2011

URL (if applicable):

Paraphrased Notes: Include Page #s

  • Kids are usually excited to learn about the different cultures of Indigenous people so most elementary schools spend a good amount of time learning about them

    • Often it is romanticized and exotified

    • This can be harmful to Native people, and that is not often acknowledged

    • Attempts to fix this often just replace one harmful curriculum with another

  • The interest in Native culture makes non-Indigenous people want to learn more and more about it, and use it for themselves 

    • Indigenous people say that this can be inappropriate

  • The ways that Indigenous culture is taught is almost always prejudiced, but not usually meaning to be harmful (105)

  • There have started to be a lot of programs and courses to learn about Indigenous culture, but there has also been a lot of criticism of these courses 

    • "cultural tourism" (106)

  • These workshops change the way they teach Indigenous culture and history to fit the narrative of the colonists

  • Courses are usually designed by non-indigenous people 

  • Stereotyping and romanticizing Indigenous culture is widely accepted and justified 

  • Certain things like songs in a culture are often used in inappropriate contexts and by people who have no connection to the people to whom the song means something when it shouldn't be (108)

  • Education has a huge effect on worldviews which is why the misconceptions about Indigenous people conveyed in American education are such an important problem

  • Often Indigenous spiritual ceremonies are used in presentations without context or respect to the meaning

  • "New Age" spiritual movement is harmful (109)

  • Lessons about Indigenous culture for non-Indigenous people talk solely about archaic Indigenous culture whereas those taught to Indigenous children focus more on how the culture is seen today (111)

Direct quotes: Include Page #s

  • " ...it became apparent to the author that a wide range of cultural biases with regard to Native peoples are deeply ingrained in the American mind and remain perpetuated through many institutional programs of instruction. Such prejudicial expressions usually appear innocent and sympathetic to indigenous Americans, but often they are subtly disrespectful." (105)

  • "In the centuries-old effort to justify the theft of indigenous owned lands, resources and the subjugation and subordination of conquered and colonized peoples, colonizing nations have long imagined themselves as triumphant and superior, re-imagining the definitions of indigenous peoples at the same time. Meanwhile, subordinate peoples are required to conform to new definitions and roles according to an overall global (and capitalist) scheme, as historian J. M. Blaut has illustrated (Blaut, 1993).  In a similar vein, historian Eric Wolf has described the 'economic and political side to the formation of idea systems,' and the fact that upon their formation, they can “become weapons in the clash of social interests (Wolf, 1997).” For indigenous Americans such collisions of cultural interests and interpretations often arise from new definitions of Native culture that are synonymous with non-Indian projections. " (106-107)

  • "Of course, this media description was meant for a regional non-Native audience; its obvious biases were never challenged nor were they recognized by the readers, as evidenced by the lack of any negative or challenging public comments in the editions that followed. On the surface such expressions of non-Indian ethnocentrism and romantic sentimentality might seem fairly innocent. Underlying them however, is an old colonial exploitative imperialism that objectifies the other and preys upon indigenous peoples and cultures." (108)

  • "...this common notion feeds the historic pattern of non-indigenous claims to ownership of things Native American and the presumption that modern Indians betray an ancestral past as defined by non-indigenous authorities." (110)

Summary of Source (2-4 sentences)

 In curriculums taught to mainly non-Indigenous people, Indigenous culture is misrepresented, exoticized, and romanticized in a way that is harmful. The perpetuation of stereotypes through this romanticization has an effect on the view of Indigenous people today. 

 Does this help me answer my question? Why or why not?

 To some extent, yes, but it doesn't talk too much about early education. It is focused more on courses for college students and/or adults. 

Lingering Questions

How would a paper about a similar thing be different if it was written by an Indigenous person?

What would fixing this problem have to look like?

Connections to other sources

In Missing in Interaction, it talks about how the emphasis was too much on the culture and not enough on the more difficult topics around the actual colonization which is emphasized in this source




JRPS, Division 4Betsy Goldman