IEFA Resources Roundup

It's past time for another post on IEFA (Indian Education for All) topics and resources that have caught my eye--or more likely, been brought to my attention by readers and colleagues.

This video does a great job surveying major eras in American Indian policy and explaining sovereignty all in 2 minutes and 41 seconds!

The Smithsonian Magazine published an interesting article on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty: "In 1868, Two Nations Made a Treaty, the U.S. Broke It and Plains Indian Tribes are Still Seeking Justice."

That treaty is available online (with a transcription) from the National Archives. How do I know? Billings High School teacher Cheyenne Aldrich wrote to let me know about a session she attended, given by the National Archives at the National Council for Social Studies annual conference on resources in the archives relating to native communities. As a take home, the archives created a dandy handout of links, which Cheyenne shared. In poking through the handout, I not only found out how to search for treaties, but also about the National Archives' research guides, which suggests search terms to find relevant information on Montana tribes in the National Archives catalog.

Speaking of the National Archives, several years ago, University of Montana sent several students to Washington, D.C., to scan documents--"65,000 pages from 126 boxes of Bureau of Indian Affairs records (Record Group 75) held at the National Archives in Washington, D.C." These documents, which include letters, reports, photographs, petitions, leases, bonds, wills, and other legal documents, are available on the Montana Memory Project in a collection called the Natives of Montana Archival Project (NOMAP). They are an underused treasure trove, which includes a 1931 letter describing the problem of malnutrition among Blackfeet children in 1931, a 1913 letter complaining about the July 4 celebrations in Browning (a "Fully two-thirds of these people are still addicted to medicine practices and pagan superstitions"), letters from Salish hero Sam Resurrection, protesting the opening of the Flathead Reservation to homesteaders (Select "download all as a PDF" and see particularly pages 10-13 of the document), and more. NOMAP will be one of the collections Director Jennifer Birnel will explore at the March 2-3, Best Practices in Indian Education for All conference, for which you can register here.

And speaking of upcoming professional development, 2014 Montana Teacher of the Year Anna Baldwin is presenting "Unpacking Bias in a Reservation School" as part of this Teaching Tolerance online course, which runs February to June. (Registration closes today--sorry for such late notice).

Finally, my colleague Stan Wilmoth shared an article published in Quaternary Science Reviews with this unwieldy title: "Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492." The article is too hard for all but the most advanced high school students (I think) but I found its conclusions fascinating enough to include a link to it in this round-up. Basically, the paper argues that the disease, slavery, and warfare brought by European conquerors (beginning in 1492) killed approximately 55 million indigenous people, 90 percent of the inhabitants of the Americas. "The Great Dying," as the authors call it, led to billions of acres of farmland being abandoned (56 million hectares). That farmland became forest, and those new forests sequestered enough CO2 to make global surface air temperatures decline. In other words, human behavior created climate change (in this case global cooling) before the industrial revolution.

Got a great resource you think other teachers would like to know about? Let me know and I'll share!