Every Month Should Be Native American Heritage Month

 For Native American Heritage Month the National Council for History Education created a curated list of websites for teaching Indigenous history and heritage. But since every month should be Native American Heritage Month, I thought I'd share two items on their list that particularly caught my eye: 

National Archives Citizen Archivist Mission

The National Archives has a special Citizen Archivist Mission to make the records it holds on various Indigenous communities more accessible to researchers. This is a crowd-sourced project (using search strategies they outline) to find relevant documents and then tagging them with terms that will make them easier for future resources to find. Could this be a class project? (If you've ever had your class work on a citizen archivist mission of any kind, I'd love to hear from you!)

Native Knowledge 360°

The material created by OPI's IEFA unit is so good, it's easy to stick to their offerings, but if you haven't explored the National Museum of the American Indian's Native Knowledge 360° site recently, I highly recommend you make a little time. Among the material I just found was a really interesting 9-12 unit called How Do Native Americans Experience Belonging? It asks students to explore four case studies: Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and the Three Affiliated Tribes (Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara) to answer title question as well as three supporting questions:

• What gives Native Nations a sense of belonging to the land?
• How do kinship systems work to create a feeling of belonging? 
• What are the rights and responsibilities of belonging to a Native Nation? 

This is just one of many units, including a dynamite one on treaties, to be found at NK360°, which also has videos, exhibits, FAQs, teacher workshops, and more. They have materials relating to all subject matters, including STEM, social studies, art, and ELA. Did I mention that their resources are all sortable by grade level, subject, nation, region, format, and topic? Do yourself a favor and check them out.