The Secret Lives of Teachers by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous [Anonymous, ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226313764
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

Native Intelligence

There are some topics in the survey that I regard as chronic problems in my teaching. I don’t devote enough time to the Constitution. Latinos are stinted — they fall out of the picture once the focus shifts from Spanish colonization, to surface again only briefly during the Mexican War — and my handling of women’s suffrage is weak. From time to time I resolve to fix these problems, but the press of other commitments often leads me to defer them. Sometimes, though, I do plug holes. This is the year I finally do something about Native Americans.

To some extent, I was spurred by an exceptionally talented former student who had spent a summer on a Lakota Sioux reservation and did a senior project, supervised by a colleague, to develop a curriculum for teachers of US history at the school to incorporate into their classes. So now that we’ve reached the late nineteenth century, and I’ve reached the point where I do my standard routine about the trans-Mississippi west, I add a session using her material on the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. I also toss in some material on the second Wounded Knee, the standoff at the Pine Ridge Reservation that took place in 1972. The latter event was marked by internecine conflict between tribal leader Dickie Wilson and his militant challenger Russell Means of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

After providing some overview information, I begin our class discussion by explaining how it is that they came to be assigned this material, and I recapitulate some of the history we’ve already studied. I also take what I consider a fairly standard gambit in asking them to compare the situation of Native Americans with that of African Americans. They’re pretty quick to make the point that African Americans were pulled into the United States and absorbed, albeit unequally, into American society, whereas Native Americans, already here, were pushed out. They don’t have the background to talk about the sense of militancy that the two groups shared after the integrationist spirit of the early civil rights movement; that will be a conversation for another day. For now, I ask: Do they think AIM was right to create that standoff? Was it the best strategy to get the US government to rethink its treaty obligations?

A long silence — a very long silence. Even when I paraphrase the question, I still get no takers. Did they do the reading? Did I make a big mistake by inserting this material into the course this way? In any case, we’ve fallen into a real ditch. I’m really not sure what to do.

Sam Stevens tentatively raises a hand, out of what I sense to be courtesy more than anything else. “I’m not sure taking over property and handing out guns is ever really a good idea,” he says. A sensible answer from a sensible kid.

“But how else were they going to get the government’s attention?” I ask.

“Well, civil disobedience,” he says. “I mean, Martin Luther King used nonviolence, didn’t he?”

Kim Anders steps in.

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