Before I hit the main body of this newsletter, I want to toss out a quick request. If you have a few bucks to spare, Chickadee Community Services is serving as fiscal agent for the Métis Heritage Festival in Choteau. It’s an adorable, small festival showcasing Métis culture, and while the budget is small, the account is also mostly empty. Could you be one of the first to throw a few pennies into the jug so you can hear them rattle around in there? Here’s the link. Please select Métis Heritage Festival from the drop-down menu. And now…on with it!
I’m just wrapping up Native American Studies for Everyone, a course 492 people signed up for, and which deluged my inbox for weeks until people either dropped out or remembered how to access the course consistently. I taught this course last summer in a NAS for Teachers iteration to over 100 teachers primarily in Montana, and both large-scale classes revealed something profound: the course does not work well unless people are ready to hear facts they didn’t know, would rather not know, are uncomfortable knowing.
The vast majority of registrants were ready to hear all of it! I received many messages from people retelling facts they’d never known about and sharing ways their thinking has changed. One woman conveyed a goosebump-inducing story of repatriation of some baskets her grandmother had acquired from a tribe in BC in the 19th century, which she will accomplish this summer. Another told me she’d never learned much about her own Indigenous background due to assimilation and boarding schools, but that this course had helped her feel more connected. For all this sharing, I am so grateful.
Yet others…I don’t know what they expected. Every single speaker in the course is Indigenous, except me, and I mostly just facilitated webinars. So it’s their expressions, their experiences. The text, videos, and other materials are also Native-authored or highlight Indigenous experiences. Obviously I curated the materials and that is fraught with bias, because what I include and choose not to include lead to different learning opportunities, but nowhere did I claim to present an “unbiased” account of Native American Studies. If you look at the syllabus you can tell how it’s going to go.
So imagine my confusion when I received the following pair of comments on the evaluation, from two different participants.
“I think it would be nice to hear counter perspectives, just to add to people's critical thinking skills. At times the material seemed more like propaganda.”
and
“Very one sided. I have taken multiple Indigenous courses from multiple instructors across multiple states, and this is the only one that did not present any kind of alternative viewpoints. Maybe that was the intent of this course, but it does a disservice to learners who may not be familiar with the issues presented.”
I would like to know what “other side” they think there is for some of these topics. We studied MMIW, LandBack, language revitalization, tribal sovereignty, and more. Is there another side to those? I need to know who’s in favor of kidnapping children and shipping them to boarding schools at the age of 5. Was I supposed to unearth some “it wasn’t all bad” stories about these schools? Who wants to promote further health disparities in Native populations? What’s the “other” side to teaching Indigenous languages in schools? Basically, if someone wants to hear “another side,” it’s not hard: go back to standard history textbooks, mainstream news outlets, early Hollywood movies. Maybe don’t sign up for a course whose primary - whose ONLY - speakers are actual Indians. You’re probably not going to hear what you want to hear.
And, the idea that presenting only Indigenous perspectives “does a disservice to those who aren’t familiar with these topics” is insulting not only to the Indigenous people who gave of themselves to this class, but also to the participants themselves. They’ve already learned the non-Indian version of all of this. They see it in disrespectful Indian mascots, they see it in the “government gave the Indians land” trope, they see it in every English-speaking Native person. It is not my responsibility to share a whitewashed version to “balance” the material in my course. That whitewashed version is what most people, non-Indian and Indian too, have received, all their lives.
The suggestion that Natives presenting their experiences through their own mouths or government statistics regarding Natives could be considered “propaganda” blows my mind…and also it doesn’t. Because isn’t this where we are? In a time where some people only stamp as “truth” ideas that don’t hurt their feelings, that confirm what they want to believe about the world? It’s what’s behind the presidential backlash against DEI, certainly, and a longer-term and top-down insistence on rejecting facts that clash with what some people already think.
You might say I’m doing the same. It’s possible, I guess. But I challenge anyone to find anything presented as facts1 in this class such as treaties, the Dawes Act, the termination/relocation period, the existence and operation of boarding schools, health disparities across Indian Country, the staggering rates of violence against Native women…and demonstrate how those facts are incorrect. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t make it untrue.
And that’s actually what develops critical thinking: careful evaluation of previously held beliefs, paired with new information, to try to determine the closest thing to the truth. I know, because I have been teaching this skill for 26 years.
Want to take this course and decide for yourself? It’s happening again this summer from June 2-August 10 and it’s all online, no live components to schedule around. Disclaimer: It’s very one-sided. You won’t find standard historical information in it, nor do I provide multiple perspectives, nor will you read or hear anything by a white person unless it’s like Robert Redford narrating a documentary. Okay? Just want to be clear for you.
I have to say it like this because some course materials are opinion-based. Like an editorial I provided once, and some of the experiences and beliefs interviewees described.
Both sides this! (*makes obscene gesture*)
Such white bullshit.
Anna, I took the class, and loved it. So appreciated that I was able to hear the speakers stories, see their expressions, etc as you said.
I'm constantly amazed at how we (white folks) carry so much fragility, rage & disbelief around tragedies they're involved in.
Thank you for NASfE