First of three parts
The following interesting article makes me agree that we do need to rewrite history.
The United States is often referred to as the melting pot of the world, but not for our black culture. Because of the result of unfair treatment. We have protests all over the world stating: Black Lives Matter and they do!
Let’s not forget the American Indian, or, Native American, culture and the land we as a Nation dwell on, the Native Americans originally cared for and honored as God’s land. Then the European immigrants, the white power structure, and greed, took over. We need to bring back our land.
In the magazine “Teaching Tolerance” Dave Constantin submitted an article entitled: Rewriting history–for the better. His article follows:
“It was pure coincidence that, during a recent trip to northern California’s wine country, Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., stumbled upon a perfect illustration of what’s wrong with history instruction in the United States.
“He and his wife were visiting an original Spanish mission at the same time as a group of fourth-graders. Gover watched as teachers and chaperones dressed as Franciscan friars led the children, who were dressed as American Indians, through a series of quaint activities.
“They were making candles. They were spinning wool, weaving baskets. The message of the day that a kid would come away with is, ‘Wow, it was fun to be an Indian at the Mission.’
“The reality was that the mission system was astonishingly brutal. Obviously we don’t want to teach fourth-graders about murder and slavery, but, they shouldn’t come away believing the mission system was good for the Indians.
“This kind of Eurocentric approach to American history will come as no surprise to many educators who work from scripted U.S. history curricula. Aside from some obligatory lessons about Pilgrims and Indians at Thanksgiving and maybe a retelling of Pocahontas and Sacagawea’s contributions to Anglo exploration of the New World, generations of American school children grow up effectively ignorant of the tragic and complicated story of this Nation’s original inhabitants.
“ It’s no wonder that many educators lack the foundation necessary to change the conversation. It’s a vicious cycle governed by inertia, and it’s been like this for as long as anyone can remember. “We aren’t seeing any important progress in student performance among Native Americans, and the non-Indian students aren’t learning about Indian things any more effectively than they have in the past.
“We know teachers are teaching about Indians as required elements of their curriculum, but we know that the textbooks haven’t changed in decades and that the information that is being put forward simply is not very good. It’s, at best, incomplete, and at times, absolutely inaccurate.”
“To address this situation, Gover and his team are gearing up to unveil a program called Native Knowledge 360, a nationwide curriculum initiative to make comprehensive Indian education a priority. In pockets of the country, culturally-responsive educators, many of whom have been hard at work on various facets of this issue for decades, are waiting with bated breath.
“We’re a textbook-oriented society and the textbooks, when they deal with Indians, don’t have a lot to say, or it’s all Manifest Destiny, so you’re really on your own to develop curriculum,” said Jon Reyhner, professor of education at Northern Arizona University and the co-author of American Indian Education: A History. Reyhner, who taught Native students for four years at reservation schools and spent another 10 years as a school administrator, understands how difficult it is for even the most well-meaning teachers to tackle this challenge on their own.
“‘When you’ve got the class sizes that teachers have, asking them to do much curriculum development is a recipe for burnout,’ Reyhner said.
“And that’s assuming the issue is on educators’ radars at all,” Constantin wrote.
Continued at https://thevoice.us/teaching-native-american-history-various-drastically