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1) Resources: 2021 Indigenous Peoples’ Day Curriculum Teach-In, Teaching for Change (Zinn Project)
"Thank you for attending the 2021 Indigenous Peoples’ Day Curriculum Teach-In. Below find resources from each session. For additional teaching resources, see the NMAI’s Native Knowledge 360° website and the Zinn Education Project’s Teach Climate Justice campaign.
- Keynote
- Making Land Acknowledgement Meaningful
- Native Voices in Children’s Literature
- Virtual Field Trip Demonstration: American Indian Removal
- Inka Road, Bridge, and Landscapes
- Pipeline Protests: Putting Climate Civil Disobedience into the Curriculum (Necessity Film)
- “Nothing Was Discovered, Everything Was Already Loved”: Critical Conceptions of Land in K-12 Curriculum
Dr. Kelsey Leonard
- TED Talk: Why Lakes and Rivers Should Have the Same Rights as Humans
- Junior Water Walkers
- Earth Law Center
Renée Gokey
- Land Acknowledgement Guidance Points and Examples
- Territory Acknowledgement – Native Land
- Indigenous Land Acknowledgment | Native Governance Center
- So you Want to Acknowledge the Land | High Country News
- Are you Planning to do a Land Acknowledgment? | American Indians in Children’s Literature
- Beyond Territorial Acknowledgments | âpihtawikosisân
- Guide to Indigenous Land and Territorial Acknowledgements for Cultural Institutions | Land Acknowledgements
- Land Acknowledgement | Greater Cincinnati Native American Coalition
- Native American & Indigenous Peoples Initiative | Texas Christian University
- We Have a Story to Tell: Native Peoples of the Chesapeake Region | NMAI
Dr. Debbie Reese
- American Indians in Children’s Literature (AICL)
- Critical Indigenous Literacies Article
- NMAI Native American Literature in your Classroom Introductory Page
- NMAI Native American Literature in your Classroom Worksheet
- Heartdrum Educator Guide
- AICL Best Books Page
- AICL Tips for Teachers Page
- Books Recommended
- Books NOT Recommended
Michaela Pavlat and Gabrielle Lee
Availability for NMAI Virtual Field Trips are released monthly. Teachers will be able to register for November programs on October 1.
- Native Knowledge 360° Online Lesson: American Indian Removal
- More NK360° Educational Resources
- Treaty of New Echota (1835)
- Cherokee Nation Protest Petition
- American Indian Removal Facts
- American Indian Removal Resources
- More stories of Removal
- Discussion Guide on the Story of Cherokee Removal
- Dialogue Toolkit – Americans
Dr. Isabel Hawkins
- NK360° Lesson The Great Inka Road: How Can a Road System Be an Example of Innovation? | En Español
- A Road in the Andes
- The Bridge of Q’eswachaka
- NK360° Lesson The Inka Empire: What Innovations Can Provide Food and Water for Millions? | En Español
Ursula Wolfe Rocca
- Zinn Education Project Lesson | Teaching Climate Disobedience: Using the Film Necessity in the Classroom
- Film | Necessity: Oil, Water, and Climate Resistance
Dr. Leilani Sabzalian
Center for Humans and Nature: Questions for a Resilient Future
- How can we live respectfully with the land and one another?
- What stories does the land hold?
- What kind of ancestor do you want to be?
Juxtaposing Perspectives to Support Student’s Critical Thinking Activity
- American Territorial Expansion Mapped by The Daily Conversation (video)
- Invasion of America by Claudio Saunt (video)
Other Resources described in the session
- The Tribal Legacy Project
- Homeland, full poem by Karenne Wood, a poet from the Monacan Indian nation (from the book “Enough Good People”)
- Homeland image and graphic
- Honoring Tribal Legacies Website and Curriculum
- Land as Teacher: Understanding Indigenous Land-Based Education featuring Dr. Alex Wilson on queering land-based education
- “Settler Colonialism an Overview” Prezi by Eve Tuck
Recommended Books to Foster Anticolonial and Critical Indigenous Literacy
- Teaching Critically about Lewis and Clark by Alison Schmitke, Leilani Sabzalian, and Jeff Edmundson (use code LEWISANDCLARKFALL2021 for 15% discount and free shipping; expires 11/30/2021)
- Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought by Sandy Grande
- Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools by Leilani Sabzalian (use code ADC21 for a 30% discount)
- An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese
- Huckleberries and Coyotes: Lessons From our More Than Human Relations by Michelle Jacob
- Fox Doesn’t Wear a Watch: Lessons from Mother Nature’s Classroom by Michelle Jacob
- For more books, including Native-authored books to use in your classroom, see this booklist from Social Justice Books featuring Indigenous peoples and nations
From the Slides: Plains Cree scholar Emma LaRocque in her book When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990 shares how this civ/sav dichotomy also surfaces in a “double standard” in how Indigenous and Western societies are discussed:
“In this war of words, Whites explore, Indians wander; Whites have battles or victories, Indians massacre and murder; Whites scout, Indians lurk; …Whites defend themselves, Indians “wreak revenge”; ….Whites have “faiths” and so they pray; Indians have superstitions and so they conjure; (LaRocque, 2010, p. 50)"
"WAKEFIELD — The candidates argued over how to pay for a new school and the best ways to address the prolonged street closure on Broadway. As far as Town Council debates go, the virtual event here could have played out in hundreds of towns across Massachusetts.
Until, that is, it turned to the “logo issue.”
There’s been harassment and cyberbullying, one candidate said. Dueling lawn signs have sprouted across the town. The discourse in one virtual forum — where a resident drew a comparison between Indigenous people and animals — was “embarrassing,” another candidate charged.
Indigenous people and others have for years criticized Native American imagery in sport and school logos, but it was last summer’s demonstrations for social justice that catalyzed a newfound reckoning with their use, from small towns to professional franchises.
The Cleveland Indians in December said they would change their name, months after the owner of the Washington NFL franchise begrudgingly dropped its “Redskins” moniker following years of saying he would never change the name. In Massachusetts, state officials launched a commission to study and recommend changes to its state motto and seal, which depicts a disembodied arm holding a sword above the image of a Native American.
Since last summer, local officials in Pittsfield, Quincy, Barnstable, and a wave of other communities already have voted to eliminate Native American mascots, logos, or nicknames. (Twenty-five Massachusetts schools still use some form of them, according to a group called the New England Anti-Mascot Coalition.)
“It’s very important that we do not lose momentum, not just as communities of color and Indigenous people but as a society as a whole,” said Jean-Luc Pierite, president of the board of directors of the North American Indian Center of Boston, which is backing state legislation to prohibit the imagery in all public school team names or logos. “These images aren’t grounded in reality and are obviously racist.”
In Wakefield, the School Committee’s decision to hold its vote after a pair of public forums but before the referendum fanned frustration among the logo’s supporters. Signs adorned with an older version of the school logo — a side-profile image of a Native American in a headdress — quickly cropped up, urging residents to “Save the Warrior” or “Preserve Wakefield Pride.” An opposihe referendum fanned frustration among the logo’s supporters. Signs adorned with an older version of the school logo — a side-profile image of a Native American in a headdresng ballot question committee formed, and signs declaring “Keep The Pride! Retire The Logo” followed.
A Facebook group set up in support of the question was later disabled amid what some logo supporters described as cyberbullying. One School Committee candidate wrote on Facebook that she didn’t want to publicly detail her personal stance, fearing she would be judged by voters on that issue alone.
“The ballot question has not enhanced the quality of the public discourse, it has degraded it. It’s politicized it, and it made it a partisan issue when it really should be a school and a civil rights issue,” said Greg Liakos, a School Committee member who voted to eliminate the logo and is running for another term.
“What’s happening in Wakefield is a microcosm of what’s happening in other parts of the state and across the country,” Liakos said. “It’s a reckoning with a history that is complex.”
To those who support keeping the logo, there are other concerns, including submitting to the nebulous idea of “cancel culture,” said Richard Tisei, a former state Senate minority leader and lobbyist who has lived in Wakefield for 40 years.
“I think there are people who are going to specifically vote to send a message, that they should be the one to decide . . . regardless of how they feel about the issue,” said Tisei, who supports keeping the logo.
The logo’s own history has been threaded through the debate. It was first designed in the 1940s by John Galvin, a revered late Army general whose name adorns the town’s middle school. Many in Wakefield also attribute the creation of the “Warrior” name to Galvin’s classmate, Richard Bayrd, a member of the Narragansett tribe — evidence, supporters say, that its intent wasn’t to stereotype or disrespect Native Americans.
The first known use of “Wakefield Warriors” was decades earlier in an 1890 Globe article, according to a School Committee presentation.
“I don’t want to erase it. I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen: that we’re going to lose that history or tradition for our town,” said Ami Ruehrwein Wall, who filed the ballot question petition and is also running for School Committee. “If the voters are saying this is what we want to do, I feel as an elected official you have to listen.”
Tribal leaders, who often are met with arguments that the imagery represents town pride, roundly disagree.
“Of course you see pride no matter what your mascot is,” said Faries Gray, the sagamore, or chief, of the Massachusetts Tribe at Ponkapoag. “But when you’re made aware that it’s offensive to the people it’s referring to, it’s time to make an educated decision.”
That the town’s voters will now have a say on the logo worries those who want it gone. A “yes” vote in support of keeping the logo, albeit nonbinding, could spur a newly constructed School Committee — four of its seven seats are on the April 27 ballot — to reconsider the March decision, opponents fear.
The logo’s opponents also question whether keeping it should be decided by referendum in a town where 93 percent of the people are white and 0.1 percent, or about two dozen residents, are Native American.
“There are a lot of people who have lived in the town their whole lives who feel like they’re losing control and feel like outsiders are coming in and trying to change the town to something they don’t like,” said Nicole Calabrese, an investment manager and Wakefield native who’s leading a ballot committee urging residents to vote “no” on the question of keeping the existing logo.
“As someone who has lived here my whole life, I think that’s kind of foolish,” she said, adding she views the vote as a statement about Wakefield’s future. “I hate what a ‘yes’ vote would say about the town.”
"We Shall Remain is a mini-series and provocative multi-media project. Five 90-minute documentaries spanning three hundred years tell the story of pivotal moments in U.S. history from the Native American perspective.
At the heart of the project is a five-part television series that shows how Native peoples valiantly resisted expulsion from their lands and fought the extinction of their culture — from the Wampanoags of New England in the 1600s who used their alliance with the English to weaken rival tribes, to the bold new leaders of the 1970s who harnessed the momentum of the civil rights movement to forge a pan-Indian identity. We Shall Remain represents an unprecedented collaboration between Native and non-Native filmmakers and involves Native advisers and scholars at all levels of the project. [Producer’s description.]
1. After the Mayflower – In 1621, Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoags of New England negotiated a treaty with Pilgrim settlers. A half-century later, as a brutal war flared between the English and a confederation of Indians, this diplomatic gamble seemed to have been a grave miscalculation. Directed by Chris Eyre.
2. Tecumseh’s Vision – In the course of his brief and meteoric career, Tecumseh would become one of the greatest Native American leaders of all time, orchestrating the most ambitious pan-Indian resistance movement ever mounted on the North American continent. After his death he would live on as a potent symbol of Native pride and pan Indian identity. Directed by Ric Burns and Chris Eyre.
3. Trail of Tears – Though the Cherokee embraced “civilization” and won recognition of tribal sovereignty in the U.S. Supreme Court, their resistance to removal from their homeland failed. Thousands were forced on a perilous march to Oklahoma. Directed by Chris Eyre.
4. Geronimo – As the leader of the last Native American fighting force to capitulate to the U.S. government, Geronimo was seen by some as the perpetrator of unspeakable savage cruelties, while to others he was the embodiment of proud resistance. Directed by Dustinn Craig and Sarah Colt.
5. Wounded Knee – In 1973, American Indian Movement activists and residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation occupied the town of Wounded Knee, demanding redress for grievances. As a result of the siege, Indians across the country forged a new path into the future. Directed by Stanley Nelson.
“One of the greatest victories for the people of America since Andrew Jackson,” Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, said of Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 election. We agree that Trump and Jackson have a lot in common, but neither election can be accurately described as a victory for anyone other than the wealthy elite.
Textbooks often portray Jackson as a “man of the people.” However, as Howard Zinn describes in this excerpt from A People’s History of the United States,
Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader, and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history.
The reading below is followed by links to lessons and other resources on the Zinn Education Project website that can be used to introduce students to Andrew Jackson, including “The Cherokee/Seminole Removal Role Play” and “Andrew Jackson and the ‘Children of the Forest’.”
By Howard Zinn"[Andrew Jackson] became a hero of the War of 1812, which was not (as usually depicted in American textbooks) just a war against England for survival, but a war for the expansion of the new nation, into Florida, into Canada, into Indian territory.Not all of Jackson’s enlisted men were enthusiastic for the fighting. There were mutinies; the men were hungry, their enlistment terms were up, they were tired of fighting and wanted to go home. Jackson wrote to his wife about “the once brave and patriotic volunteers. . . sunk. . . to mere whining, complaining, seditioners, and mutineers. . . .” When a 17-year-old soldier who had refused to clean up his food, and threatened his officer with a gun, was sentenced to death by a court-martial, Jackson turned down a plea for commutation of sentence and ordered the execution to proceed. He then walked out of earshot of the firing squad.
Battle of Horseshoe Bend (Tohopeka), Creek War. Image: New York Public Library.
Jackson became a national hero when in 1814 he fought the Battle of Horseshoe Bend against a thousand Creeks and killed 800 of them, with few casualties on his side. His white troops had failed in a frontal attack on the Creeks, but the Cherokees with him, promised governmental friendship if they joined the war, swam the river, came up behind the Creeks, and won the battle for Jackson.
When the war ended, Jackson and friends of his began buying up the seized Creek lands. He got himself appointed treaty commissioner and dictated a treaty which took away half the land of the Creek nation. Rogin says it was “the largest single Indian cession of southern American land.” It took land from Creeks who had fought with Jackson as well as those who had fought against him, and when Big Warrior, a chief of the friendly Creeks, protested, Jackson said:
Listen . . . The United States would have been justified by the Great Spirit, had they taken all the land of the nation . . . . Listen, the truth is, the great body of the Creek chiefs and warriors did not respect the power of the United States. They thought we were an insignificant nation, that we would be overpowered by the British . . . they were fat with eating beef, they wanted flogging . . . We bleed our enemies in such cases to give them their sense.
As Michael Rogin puts it: “Jackson had conquered ‘the cream of the Creek country,’ and it would guarantee southwestern prosperity. He had supplied the expanding cotton kingdom with a vast and valuable acreage.”
From 1814 to 1824, in a series of treaties with the southern Indians, whites took over three-fourths of Alabama and Florida, one-third of Tennessee, one-fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina. Jackson played a key role in those treaties, and according to Rogin, “His friends and relatives received many of the patronage appointments—as Indian agents, traders, treaty commissioners, surveyors and land agents. . . . “
Jackson himself described how the treaties were obtained: “ . . . we addressed ourselves feelingly to the predominant and governing passion of all Indian tribes, i.e., their avarice or fear.” He encouraged white squatters to move into Indian lands, then told the Indians the government could not remove the whites and so they had better cede the lands or be wiped out. He also, Rogin says, “practiced extensive bribery.”
These treaties, these land grabs, laid the basis for the cotton kingdom, the slave plantations. Every time a treaty was signed, pushing the Creeks from one area to the next, promising them security there, whites would move into the new area and the Creeks would feel compelled to sign another treaty, giving up more land in return for security elsewhere.
Jackson’s work had brought the white settlements to the border of Florida, owned by Spain. Here were the villages of the Seminole agents in their resistance to the Americans. Settlers moved into Indian lands. Indians attacked. Atrocities took place on both sides. When certain village refused to surrender people accused of murdering whites, Jackson ordered the villages destroyed.
Another Seminole provocation: escaped black slaves took refuge in Seminole villages. Some Seminoles bought or captured black slaves, but their form of slavery was more like African slavery than cotton plantation slavery. The slaves often lived in their own villages, their children often became free, there was much intermarriage between Indians and blacks, and soon there were mixed Indian-black villages—all of which aroused Southern slaveowners who saw this as a lure to their own slaves seeking freedom.
Jackson began raids into Florida, arguing it was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and for marauding Indians. Florida, he said, was essential to the defense of the United States. It was that classic modern preface to a war of conquest. Thus began the Seminole War of 1818, leading to the American acquisition of Florida. It appears on classroom maps politely as “Florida Purchase, 1819”—but it came from Andrew Jackson’s military campaign across the Florida border, burning Seminole villages, seizing Spanish forts, until Spain was “persuaded” to sell. He acted, he said, by the “immutable laws of self-defense.”
Jackson then became governor of the Florida Territory. He was able now to give good business advice to friends and relatives. To a nephew, he suggested holding on to property in Pensacola. To a friend, a surgeon-general in the army, he suggested buying as many slaves as possible, because the price would soon rise.
Leaving his military post, he also gave advice to officers on how to deal with the high rate of desertion. (Poor whites—even if willing to give their lives at first—may have discovered the rewards of battle going to the rich.) Jackson suggested whipping for the first two attempts, and the third time, execution.
The leading books on the Jacksonian period, written by respected historians (The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger; The Jacksonian Persuasion by Marvin Meyers), do not mention Jackson’s Indian policy, but there is much talk in them of tariffs, banking, political parties, political rhetoric. If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history you will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people—not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, execution of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.
This is not simply hindsight (the word used for thinking back differently on the past). After Jackson was elected President in 1828 (following John Quincy Adams, who had followed Monroe, who had followed Madison, who had followed Jefferson), the Indian Removal bill came before Congress and was called, at the time, “the leading measure” of the Jackson administration and “the greatest question that ever came before Congress” except for matters of peace and war. By this time the two political parties were the Democrats and Whigs, who disagreed on banks and tariffs, but not on issues crucial for the white poor, the blacks, the Indians—although some white working people saw Jackson as their hero, because he opposed the rich man’s bank.
Under Jackson, and the man he chose to succeed him, Martin Van Buren, 70,000 Indians east of the Mississippi were forced westward. In the North, there weren’t that many, and the Iroquois confederation in New York stayed. But the Sac and Fox Indians of Illinois were removed, after the Black Hawk War (in which Abraham Lincoln was an officer, though he was not in combat).
. . .
As soon as Jackson was elected President, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi began to pass laws to extend the states’ rule over the Indians in their territory. These laws did away with the tribe as a legal unit, outlawed tribal meetings, took away the chiefs’ powers, made the Indians subject to militia duty and state taxes, but denied them the right to vote, to bring suits, or to testify in court. Indian territory was divided up, to be distributed by state lottery. Whites were encouraged to settle on Indian land.
However, federal treaties and federal laws gave Congress, not the states, authority over the tribes. The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, passed by Congress in 1802, said there could be no land cessions except by treaty with a tribe, and said federal law would operate in Indian territory. Jackson ignored this, and supported state action.
It was a neat illustration of the uses of the federal system: depending on the situation, blame could be put on the states, or on something even more elusive, the mysterious Law before which all men, sympathetic as they were to the Indian, must bow. As Secretary of War John Eaton explained to the Creeks of Alabama (Alabama itself was an Indian name, meaning “Here we may rest”): “It is not your Great Father who does this; but the laws of the Country, which he and every one of his people is bound to regard.”
The proper tactic had now been found. The Indians would not be “forced” to go West. But if they chose to stay they would have to abide by state laws, which destroyed their tribal and personal rights and made them subject to endless harassment and invasion by white settlers coveting their land. If they left, however, the federal government would give them financial support and promise them lands beyond the Mississippi.
. . .
As Jackson took office in 1829, gold was discovered in Cherokee territory in Georgia. Thousands of whites invaded, destroyed Indian property, staked out claims. Jackson ordered federal troops to remove them, but also ordered Indians as well as whites to stop mining. Then he removed the troops, the whites returned, and Jackson said he could not interfere with Georgia’s authority.
The white invaders seized land and stock, forced Indians to sign leases, beat up Indians who protested, sold alcohol to weaken resistance, killed game which Indians needed for food. But to put all the blame on white mobs, Rogin says, would be to ignore “the essential roles played by planter interests and government policy decisions.” Food shortages, whiskey, and military attacks began a process of tribal disintegration. Violence by Indians upon other Indians increased.
Treaties made under pressure and by deception broke up Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribal lands into individual holdings, making each person a prey to contractors, speculators, and politicians. The Chickasaws sold their land individually at good prices and went west without much suffering. The Creeks and Choctaws remained on their individual plots, but great numbers of them were defrauded by land companies. According to one Georgia bank president, a stockholder in a land company, “Stealing is the order of the day.”
. . . .
According to Van Every, just before Jackson became president, in the 1820s, after the tumult of the War of 1812 and the Creek War, the Southern Indians and the whites had settled down, often very close to one another, and were living in peace in a natural environment which seemed to have enough for all of them. They began to see common problems. Friendships developed. White men were allowed to visit the Indian communities and Indians often were guests in white homes.
The forces that led to removal did not come, Van Every insists, from the poor white frontiersmen who were neighbors of the Indians. They came from industrialization and commerce, the growth of populations, of railroads and cities, the rise in value of land, and the greed of businessmen. “Party managers and land speculators manipulated the growing excitement. . . . Press and pulpit whipped up the frenzy.” Out of that frenzy the Indians were to end up dead or exiled, the land speculators richer, the politicians more powerful. As for the poor white frontiersman, he played the part of a pawn, pushed into the first violent encounters, but soon dispensable."
Read more in A People’s History of the United States.
"(CNN) When news of the Covid-19 pandemic first broke, Brian Mask, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, immediately saw the danger it posed to his tribe.
"November is Native American Heritage Month in the United States.
I don’t have a specific “Best” list for the month.
However, I have many related resources at:
The Best Sites For International Day Of The World’s Indigenous People
The Best Online Resources About Christopher Columbus (& ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’)
The Best Resources For Teaching & Learning About The Standing Rock Protests
A Beginning List Of The Best Folklore & Myth Sites
The Best Resources For Learning About The Code Talkers
Many resources sharing the perspectives of Native Americans are included in The Best Sites To Teach and Learn About Thanksgiving.
A BEGINNING LIST OF RESOURCES FOR TEACHING ABOUT RACIST MASCOTS
