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Mankiller

Book co-authored by WilmaMankiller

 

Wilma Mankiller was an interesting woman, some of her accolades include being a leader among the San Francisco Bay area Indians, she served tenure as a principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, as well as devoting herself to supporting youth.  Wilma had 18 honorary doctorate degrees, earned a fellowship from Dartmouth gave upwards of 100 lectures as well as receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  She also co-authored the book Mankiller with Michael Wallis about her life and time as a Cherokee Chief.

 

Wilma Mankiller with other protestors on Alccatraz Island.

  The attached video is a lecture that Wilma gave discussing the significance of tribal governments and how they work as well as that each tribe has their own history, culture and language.  For instance, she believed that context is everything when studying history and in particular Native American issues.  In order to learn about a topic you need to be exposed to the subject matter, from the history to the thought process and feelings of a group of people.
                                            
 While listening to her talk it reminded me of our first written assignment and how many times we all heard “why don’t they teach this in schools in the United States?” or “why didn’t we learn this in school?”  There is definitely an area of US History that is lacking in our primary education and we as a people cannot make unbiased informed decisions about topics that we know nothing about.

Interestingly, Wilma teaches of the misunderstanding in our culture of the role Native American women take in their culture and through all of the education that we have received in this course, I still wouldn’t have thought a woman could be Chief.  I guess I was wrong!

Boaording Schools

The first time I learned about Indian boarding schools it made me sad.  Sad for the children, the parents and the tribes as a group.  Imagine being a parent of a small child and having that child leave you to go to a school that you can’t even imagine and is different from anything you have ever known.

While sources reveal that there were bad experiences by the children who attended these schools, according to the University of Washington Digital Collections at http://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/marr.html there were some positive experiences also.

The main goal for Indian education from the 1880’s through the 1920’s was to assimilate Indian people into the melting pot of America by placing them in institutions where traditional ways could be replaced by those sanctioned by government.  Federal policy called for removal of children from their families and in many cases enrollment in a government run boarding school. The first attempt at a boarding school was the Carlisle Indian School, founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt in 1819 at that time they believed that Indian ways were inferior to white and Pratt subscribed to the policy of “kill the Indian and save the man.” (Marr)

Later many other schools followed the model of the Carlisle school but in an effort to decrease costs the government established two other types of schools, the reservation boarding schools and day schools. There is a brief history of the evolution of Indian schools from boarding schools to day schools on the site. (Marr)

In particular the site gives some insight into the beliefs of those who created Indian schools and what their goals were for the children and the schools. An example of these beliefs was that young people would be immersed in the values of American Society while also being kept away from familial and tribal influences. Due to the cost involved in keeping these schools operating there was an evolution from boarding schools to reservation based boarding schools and then eventually day schools.  There were also some Mission Schools opened by Missionaries that were funded by the government in some cases. (Marr)

I changed my mind just a little after reviewing the information available at http://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/marr.html on University Libraries, university of Washington Digital Collections. The author included some quotes and memories from people who attended some of the schools and I was interested to learn that there were good memories from some.  The boys played baseball, broad jumping and ran foot races and other young boy activities, while the girls learned traditionally female tasks such as sewing, cooking and gardening. (Marr)

Marr, Carolyn J. University Libraries. n.d. <http://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/marr.html >.

There is a lot of interesting information out there on Native American culture, for instance a site about the Haudenosaunee Indians (or Iroquois) in Victor, New York just southeast of Rochester, http://www.gagondagon.org/. 

The Haudenosaunee are currently working on the Iroquois White Corn Project, which is an effort to restore the farming, consumption and distribution of a traditional, nutritious, low glycemic index Iroquois white corn, used widely by the Haudenosaunee for at least 2,000 years.  It was grown in abundance by the 17^th Century Ganondagan until thousands of bushels of it, the food that sustained the 4,500 people living there, was burnt by the French in 1687. (Haudenosaunee Indian Fact Sheet, 1998-2014) 

Frenchman Marquis de Denonville, in the course of military expeditions against the Haudenoshaunee in 1687 reported that his forces destroyed more than 400,000 minots of corn.  A French minot, according to Lewis Henry Morgan, equals roughly three bushels, so the 400,000 minots of corn that Denonville’s forces destroyed in 1687 equaled roughly 1.2 million bushels.  While Denonville’s estimate may have been inflated to please his superior’s, even half that amount would be a very large cache and devastating to the Haudenoshaunee. (Johnson & Mann, 2000)

The Haudenoshaunee ability to produce a surplus of corn played a role in the political influence of the confederacy (or alliance of 6 Native American Nations) which reached, through a chain of alliances, from their homelands in present day upstate New York across much of New England and the Middle Atlantic Regions. (Johnson & Mann, 2000)

The original vision of the White Corn Project was to bring the corn back to a prominent place at the center of Haudenosaunee culture, diet and community.  They will plant, process and sell white corn in an effort to rebuild on their legacy. (Ganondagan, n.d.)

For those interested in learning more about this the link between traditional white corn and the Haudenoshaunee (Iroquois) Creation Story will be the focus of the “Corn and Haudenoshaunee Creation” workshops on Tuesday, March 18 from 6:30-8 PM  at the friends of Gagondagans Iroquois White Corn Project at 7191 Country Road 41 at School Street in Victor, NY.

Tell me and I’ll forget

Show me and I may not remember

Involve me and I’ll understand

(Native American Proverb)

This week I reviewed the website http://www.42explore2.com/native3.htm.   According to information found on the site, developers Annette Lamb and Larry Johnson created the site in 1999 in an effort to give teachers and students a site they can go to and find multiple sources of information regarding many different topics all in one place.  The idea is that there are at least four links to each topic and sometimes more in case one or more of them are not working.

The top five sites that    4 2 explore offers links to are yahoo.com, ancestry.com, meetup.com, vista.ir and squidoo.com.  (Johnson, 1999)

The site itself is geared toward teachers and students for K-12 and could definitely be used to either teach an informative class, or from the student’s perspective, write a good quality research paper.  

I took a closer look at the biography links provided regarding Chief Joseph of the Nez Pierce.  I have done a small amount of research in the past on Chief Joseph and the information I received from the link on

4 2 explore is some that I didn’t know before.  I learned that Chief Joseph actually converted to Christianity and was an active supporter of the long standing peace with whites before gold was discovered and the government took back almost 6 million acres of land and restricted the Nez Pierce to the reservation in Idaho.  (New Perspectives on The West, 2001)  Chief Joseph actually denounced the US and destroyed the US Flag and his bible and refused to move his band and sign the treaty with the US Government that would make the new boundaries of the reservation official.  I knew that Chief Joseph and his people were relocated to a reservation in Washington where he died of, according to the physician on the reservation, a broken heart. (Powerful People, n.d.)

There is quite a bit more to learn about Chief Joseph via 4 2 explore and I’d definitely recommend at least reviewing the site and seeing what is available on topics such as Native Americans.

Hello

Hello classmates, this is my test to see if I actually figured out how to do this.  I hope it worked and here goes nothing.  I look forward to learning alongside of all of you this semester, best wishes to all!!