Webinar on Indigenous
Women
Attend the
OPI IEFA webinar on March
3rd at 4:00 p.m. where we will be sharing IEFA
resources to support instruction about Indigenous women. Educators can receive
one renewal unit for attending the webinar.
Zoom link: https://mt-gov.zoom.us/j/88561388687?pwd=pyP4AX3RQlPiY1y1v3257utTIkbLS2.1
Resources from MTHS
MTHS has
several lesson plans and other resources on focused on women's
history.
Here are a
few of my favorites:
- Montana Women at Work: Clothesline Timeline Lesson
Plan (Designed for grades 4-12) This primary-source
based lesson asks students to analyze historic photographs to draw
conclusions about women and work from the 1870s through the 2010s.
Students will discover that Montana women have always worked, but that discrimination,
cultural expectations, and changing technology have influenced the types
of work women undertook.
- Women and Sports: Tracking Change Over Time (Designed for grades 4-8) In this lesson aligned to
both Common Core ELA and Math standards, students learn about how Title IX
(a federal civil rights law enacted in 1972 that prohibits sex
discrimination in education) changed girls’ opportunities to participate
in school sports by collecting and analyzing the data to look at change in
women’s sports participation over time.
- Ordinary People Do Extraordinary Things! Connecting
Biography to Larger Social Themes Lesson Plan (Designed for grades 8-12) This lesson uses essays
published on the Montana Women’s History website to help students explore
how ordinary people’s lives intersect with larger historical events and
trends and to investigate how people’s choices impact their communities.
After analyzing two essays on American Indian women from the Montana
Women’s History website, students are asked to conduct interviews with
people in their own community to learn about how that person has chosen to
shape the world around him or her.
- Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan Study
Guide (Designed
for students 6-10). This study guide includes everything you need to teach
Girl from the Gulches:
The Story of Mary Ronan. Set in the second half of the
nineteenth century, this highly readable 222-page memoir details Mary
Sheehan Ronan’s journey across the Great Plains, her childhood on the
Colorado and Montana mining frontiers, her ascent to young womanhood in
Southern California, her return to Montana as a young bride, and her life
on the Flathead Indian Reservation as the wife of an Indian agent. Book
One, which provides a child’s-eye view of the mining frontier, is
available to download as a PDF (Lexile
Level 1180L). Classroom sets of Girl
from the Gulches can be purchased from the Montana
Historical Society Store by calling (406)-444-2890.
And of
course, check out Montana Women's History Website for short
essays, PDFs of journal articles and other materials.
Glacier National Park’s fifty-mile-long Going-to-the-Sun Road is known for its breathtaking views. Congress appropriated the first funds to build the “Transmountain Highway” in 1921. Constructing a road over such mountainous terrain presented a variety of unique challenges including sheer cliffs, a short construction season, and sixty-foot snow drifts. More than ten years later the first automobile crossed the park’s new Transmountain Highway in October 1932.
In 1876–1877, the US military targeted the Lakota (Sioux), Tsetsėhesėstȧhase naa Suhtaio (Northern Cheyenne), and Hinono'ei (Arapaho), who remained on unceded hunting grounds rather than moving to reservations. The tribes fought back, most famously winning a battle at Little Bighorn against Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his troops on June 25–26, 1876. Custer’s name became a rallying cry for those seeking to avenge the rout.
Hopeful miners flocked to Grasshopper Creek in 1862, and Bannack, Montana’s first boom town, sprang to life. Briefly named Montana’s territorial capital, Bannack became a near ghost town after gold was discovered at Virginia City. Quartz mining rebounded in the 1870s, and Bannack served as the Beaverhead County seat until 1881. In 1954, the State of Montana acquired most of the town and it became a state park.
Charlie Russell, Montana’s most beloved artist, and his wife Nancy built their modest frame house in Great Falls in 1900. Three years later, they constructed Charlie’s log studio. Nancy noted that Charlie “loved that . . . building more than any other place on earth and never finished a painting anywhere else.”
Pictograph, Middle, and Ghost Caves are exceptional for the rare preservation of perishable items and for their stunning art. Early inhabitants painted more than one hundred images on the walls, including one more than two-thousand years old. Artifacts offer evidence of the extensive Indigenous trade network. They include the fragment of a 1,370-year-old coiled basket, which resembles those made in the Great Basin, and a thong necklace strung with Pacific shell beads.
Lewis and Clark Caverns, one of the largest and most remarkable caves in the Northern Rockies, became Montana’s first state park in 1937. Members of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)—a Depression era jobs program—developed into the site we know today. The CCC cleaned and surveyed the caves, blasted a 538-foot exit tunnel, installed electric lighting, and built an access road, a Rustic-style headquarters building, a visitors’ center, and a stone latrine.
When the first train arrived in Scobey, the two-story, Western False Front–style Commercial Hotel—today the south half of the courthouse—was the new townsite’s largest building. After 1915, gambling, dog fighting, drinking, and prostitution became central to the hotel’s business model. In 1920, county officials purchased the hotel for use as a courthouse. It is Montana’s last functioning false-front courthouse and perhaps the only bordello converted to government use.
