More on the Tribal Sovereignty Curriculum: Since Time Immemorial

Since we posted an outline of Washington State’s new Tribal Sovereignty Curriculum on this blog, we have received many e-mails for more information. Shana Brown gives us a first-hand account below of her involvement with the curriculum both as a teacher and lead contributor to its development. Shana also provided us with a nine-page report that gives more details. We have added a link to the report and the webite where readers can find the curriculum following her post along with a short bio to introduce this committed teacher to our readers.

Shana's personal story comes at an opportune time for me. Just the other day, students in our teacher education program brought up some searching questions about the profession they are about to enter. They are young, idealistic and committed, but also somewhat anxious about the reality of the world they are about to experience. They want to make a difference in this world and are searching for answers to their existential questions. Shana's story of life as a teacher, sometimes lonely, sometimes exhilarating, is a deeply honest and insightful account on ways teachers can make a difference in community with others. Her story will not only speak to our students' search for the meaning of the profession they are about to enter, but hopefully also to the politicians, media and think tanks that have exploited real problems and real social and human conditions by resorting to a simple campaign of "teacher bashing." Thank you for your story Shana.



Since Time Immemorial: Tribal Sovereignty in Washington State Curriculum

By Shana Brown

It’s been awhile since I reflected in writing about STI: Since Time Immemorial. I’ll post the articles I’ve written and co-written for a lot of the background information, but as far as what I’m feeling now regarding the curriculum, how I feel as a teacher, tribal person, parent…well, that deserves a bit of writing.

When I started this project, I felt very alone in it. I was trying to get my teacher colleagues to include tribal perspectives in history and literature, trying to get myself to do the same, and it never quite matched my vision of what it ought to be.

And that gets us in trouble, we teachers. Always thinking about the way our classrooms, lesson, students, and the world ought to be.

But it is what keeps us honest, too.

And when we’re honest about what we can and cannot do, we become one among those rare, incredibly lucky teachers whose visions becomes actualized. And the thing I have concluded through this immense exercise that I began almost twenty years ago is that if we depend just upon ourselves to realize whatever our educational vision happens to be, we will fail. Big.

Kafka says that “…the book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” If for Kafka the book is the remedy for our inner being, our inner truth, then it is the act of communing that is the remedy for the isolation that stems from being an army of one. As it turns out there were dozens of teachers plugging away at making their little corner of the universe a little better, a little more inclusive of tribal history, a little more truthful. As it turns out, there were dozens of tribes plugging away at making their histories known. As it turns out, the teaching of tribal history and tribal sovereignty was an idea whose time had finally come.

For a very large reason, a kind of harmonic convergence occurred over Washington State beginning in 2005 with the passage of House Bill 1495. John McCoy’s sponsored bill was the “giddyup” that we needed to bring all of us together. The “Us” became OSPI (Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction), Federal Title programs, state legislature, teachers, school districts, the state AG’s office, tribal attorneys, state library associations, the state’s Secretary of State’s office, tribes, tribal schools, tribal libraries, and the list just continues. We’ve received funding from federal, state, and tribal agencies, and most recently we added the Gates Foundation. And then we joined other states in their varying degrees of tribal history inclusion, namely Montana (Regional Learning Project) and Wisconsin (Indian Land Tenure Foundation). I tell you, the more who were interested, and who in turn invested their time and money into our efforts, became overwhelming. I’d find myself giggling while en route to whatever training, presentation, or function, I’d happen to be attending, giddy with the fact that what I’d envisioned so long ago was coming true. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Yes, Virginia, there are other like-minded individuals, who can nod and make it so. I’m smiling and giggling right now, in fact.

My words of wisdom: it may take awhile, but don’t give up. Really. It happens. It can and it will. And sometimes it happens all discombobulated and backasswords, but really—have faith. If Ray Kinsela taught me anything it is that sometimes when faith is all you got, it’s all you need. We started with a flickering of an idea when it came to our curriculum initiative, and we had no funding. Now we’re staring at a regional, multiyear effort that has a generous budget.

Now, the curriculum itself. In the articles I explain the rationale and the mechanics of it, but I’m still fearful that it’s not good enough. Hell, I know it’s not good enough purely because many of the lessons haven’t been tried. Remember how I said some things happen bassackwards? Well, the writing was one of them. I wrote, then my curriculum partners wrote, but without pilot schools to try them out. Then, we got pilot schools, but no real budget to support them the way we wanted. That meant only a few of the lessons were vetted properly. Then, we got the budget to support them, but after the pilot ended. So now, we have the budget to pilot and evaluate, get the lessons out to the tribes for them to see, too. But there’s still a big chunk of it that needs to be scrutinized, edited, and reworked. For example: I have a GREAT idea for how we can take the history of Celilo Falls on the Columbia river and transform it into a storypath, a la Margit McGuire from Seattle University (look her up. She’s great.) But, time for a teacher is short, and so I had to resort to recording my suggestions on what to do with the unit in order to develop it further. So, perhaps one day I’ll be able to continue it, but it’s going to take awhile. Another: some of the units just feel so “first-drafty” to me, but that, too will change as more people look ‘em over and say, “Hey! You really ought to change it to X,” or, “There’s a problem with Y.” I’m just lucky my ego ain’t locked up inside of my work. Okay, not locked up inside my work that much.

The cornerstone of our curriculum, though, is our saving grace: we don’t pretend to be the definitive voice on any one tribe’s history and definition of tribal sovereignty. Our curriculum compels its users to create and develop partnerships between school districts and tribes so that tribes can tell their own stories and begin trusting an educational system that was hurtful at best and genocidal at worst. Tribes are damned tired of having schools teach about them rather than with them. Our curriculum’s success depends on it. And how will you as teachers accomplish this? Hopefully, not bassackwards, but have faith that if it does happen that way it will probably be okay.

There’s a lot more to say, and my class will begin in 20 minutes and I have yet to make the photocopies I need (that part of teaching does not change. Ever.). I hope I’ll be able to chat with some of you as time allows. I’m very eager to find out what people think, how the work is used, not used, augmented, revised, and ultimately used.

There’s a whole other topic about the generosity of folks in this project. I think part of why it works is that no one wants to make any money on it. When you’re not worried about profit, the rest seems to flow easier. Kind of like growing up poor and not realizing it until your adulthood. You’re incredibly oblivious to just how difficult being poor actually is because you’re just so incredibly happy. It doesn’t matter that it’s your fifth meal mainly comprised of commodity cheese; you’re just happy you get grilled cheese sandwiches again!


Link to Report: Washington State’s Tribal Sovereignty Curriculum Initiative: Since Time Immemorial by Shana Brown and CHiXapkaid

Also see: Since Time Immemorial: Developing Tribal Sovereignty Curriculum in Washington's Schools by Barbara Leigh Smith, Shana Brown, and Magda Costantino

Link to the website: Tribal Sovereignty Curriculum Website


Shana Brown is a descendant of the Yakama, Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Squaxin, Puyallup, Muckleshoot, Tulalip, and Snoqualmie tribes. She was born and raised on the Yakama reservation, and despite her surroundings, was never introduced to any tribal history in the public schools. It has been her vision as a veteran English, Language Arts, history, and technology teacher of 22 years to develop curriculum that becomes part of the everyday experiences of all students, not just an ancillary tip of the multicultural hat. She has developed curriculum for the Washington State Historical Society, the University of Montana’s Regional Learning Project, and is the lead curriculum developer and writer for OSPI’s Since Time Immemorial: Tribal Sovereignty in Washington State, or STI. She currently teachers ancient cultures, language arts, and technology at Broadview-Thomson K – 8; her husband and two young children keep her busy, happy, and healthy.

A Groundbreaking Curriculum on Tribal Sovereignty in Washington State

Since Time Immemorial: Tribal Sovereignty in Washington State


Denny Hurtado

Director, Indian Education
Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction
Washington State


In 2005, the Washington State Legislature passed House Bill 1495, which officially recommended inclusion of tribal history in all common schools.


The resulting curriculum is called Since Time Immemorial: Tribal Sovereignty in Washington State. The final product will be web-based and will be available in August 2010.

This curriculum uses three approaches:


An inquiry based approach with five essential questions:

How does physical geography affect the distribution, culture, and economic life of local tribes?

What is the legal status of tribes who negotiated or who did not negotiate settlement for compensation for the loss of their sovereign homelands?

What were the political, economic, and cultural forces consequential to the treaties that led to the movement of tribes from long established homelands to reservations?

What are the ways in which tribes responded to the threats to extinguish their cultures and independence, such as missionaries, boarding schools, assimilation policies, and the reservation system?

What have tribes done to meet the challenges of reservation life? What have these tribes, as sovereign nations, done to meet the economic and cultural needs of their tribal communities?

A place-based approach. Our approach encourages teachers and students to address the essential questions in the context of tribes in their own communities.

An integrated approach. Teachers choose how much time to spend on tribal sovereignty content to complete their units throughout the year. The integrated approach provides three levels of curriculum for each of the OSPI recommended social studies units, each level building on the last. Where appropriate, units build toward successful completion of Content Based Assessments (CBA).


Selected goals of tribal-sovereignty curriculum

Elementary School:

• Understand that there are more than 500 independent tribal nations and that they deal with the United States and one another on a government-to-government basis.
• Define tribal sovereignty as "a way that tribes govern themselves in order to keep and support their cultural ways of life."
• Identify the names and locations of tribes in their area.

Middle school:

• Understand that under the U.S. Constitution, treaties are "the supreme law of the land."
• Understand that tribes are subject to federal law and taxes, as well as some state regulations.
• Understand that levels of sovereignty vary from tribe to tribe and that there are continued threats to tribal sovereignty.

High school:

• Recognize landmark court decisions and legislation bearing on tribal sovereignty.
• Understand that tribal sovereignty works toward protecting tribes' ways of life and toward the development of their nations.
• Explain the governmental structure of at least one tribe in their community.

New Journal on Native Literatures Launched

JEC Editorial board member, John Purdy, has launched a new journal called Native Literatures: Generation. The mission of this new journal is described as follows:

NLG is dedicated to providing a global forum for original works of literature by writers from the indigenous nations of North America and Hawai’i. Our goal is to support writers in their endeavors by offering a venue linking them with new audiences and potential publishers. Moreover, our magazine is designed to generate funds to provide financial support for writers through scholarships for their studies or grants for specific writing projects.

NLG is a quarterly, with content accessible online for three months with rights reverting to authors thereafter.

Submissions:

NLG is seeking original, unpublished works by writers from the indigenous nations of North America and Hawai’i. We publish in all genres: poetry, fiction (short stories but also novel excerpts if self-contained), creative nonfiction, drama and mixed-genre/media. We are seeking works that extend this body of literature by avoiding cliché and trite conventions through risk-taking and experimentation, but also through distinctive and engaging voices, exciting and innovative approaches. For full submission guidelines, please visit our website. For information, contact info@nativeliteratures.com or submissions@nativeliteratures.com

Congratulations John on the launching of your new magazine. Readers can check it out at: http://www.nativeliteratures.com/

"American Indians in Children's Literature" Comments on a Recent Article in our Journal

This morning, I came across what looks like an interesting and informative blog called: "American Indians in Children's Literature." On the April 5th posting on the blog, Debbie Reese, a member of the Nambe Pueblo in northern New Mexico and a former school teacher who currently teaches in UIUC's American Indian Studies program, talks about an article that the Journal of Educational Controversy just published in its current issue. Our article was entitled, "Examining Images of Family in Commercial Reading Programs," and it was written by Judith Dunkerly and Frank Serafini. While generally favorable to the article, Debbie Reese raises some interesting questions about the author's account of Native American students in their study. We reproduce the post from her website below, so our readers can consider the concerns expressed and respond with their own thoughts.

Update: Our authors have notified us of an error in their article. The figure for Native American representation should be .9% and not 9%. We will make the correction in the article.

From the American Indians in Children's Literature Website:

Basal Readers
by Debbie Reese

Earlier today I read an article about a research study of basal readers (textbooks used to teach children how to read).

The researchers wanted to see how families are presented in the readers. Here's the citation. Click on the title to go right to the complete article.

Examining Images of Family in Commercial Reading Programs
Judith Dunkerly, M.Ed., Doctoral Student, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Dr. Frank Serafini, Ph.D., Arizona State University
Journal of Education Controversy, Volume 4, Number 1, Winter 2009

The study is definitely worth reading. Texts they studied are:

• Harcourt Trophies
• MacMillan-MacGraw Hill Readers
• Scott Foresman Reading

What stands out for me is the content related to American Indians. In the Findings section of the article, this is under "Ethnicity."

"Ethnic diversity within the basal anthologies more closely mirrored the face of American society statistically. Nineteen (40 percent) of the basal anthology selections depicted Caucasians. Characters of Hispanic and African American descent were portrayed in eleven selections (24 percent) and nine selections (20 percent), respectively. There were seven stories featuring Asian or Pacific Islanders, which made up the other 16 percent. Comparatively, the student population of the school district under study is 9 percent American Indian, 6.6 percent Asian, 28.8 percent Hispanic, 13.8 percent African American, and 49.9 percent Caucasian, figures that are closely aligned with state and national statistics (Population Reference Bureau, 2000).

"While the percentages of race representations in the basal anthologies do favor Caucasians, they are at least comparable to the statistical composition of both national and local populations. However, it is worth noting that while overall portrayals of different ethnicities are fairly representative, 45 percent of children under the age of five are minorities. Coupled with data showing that Hispanics continue to be the largest and fastest growing minority group at 42.7 million people followed closely by African Americans at 39.7 million (U.S. Population, 2006), the comparatively representative portrayal of minorities in basal anthologies will not be so in the near future, if both publishing and population trends continue along the current pattern."


I read that first paragraph several times. None of the stories portray American Indians.

The researchers say the diversity in the readers "more closely mirrored" national statistics. And, they say, the local school district (unnamed) is "9 percent American Indian."

Again, none of the selections in the readers reflect American Indian families.

American Indians are absent from the readers, but, American Indians are absent, too, from the researcher's discussion. They give us that statistic (9 percent) but don't comment on it. To be fair, Dunkerly and Serafini were not looking at Native representation. Perhaps they've written about that elsewhere, and for the purpose of this particular article, it seemed to them unnecessary to note the lack of Native people. I hope, in fact, that they've written about it somewhere, because Serafini teaches in Arizona.

Many stories in readers like the ones Dunkerly and Serafini used for their study are drawn from children's literature. In their discussion of socio-economic status, for example, the researchers refer to Cynthia Rylant's story, The Relatives Came. There's a lot of books like The Relatives Came that publishers can use to portray Native families. One terrific example is Cynthia Leitich Smith's Jingle Dancer. I should head over to UIUC's school collection to see what the basal readers we've got available look like.