History shouldn’t be boring. Or leave out stuff. Resources for your Indigenous Peoples’ Day

A year or so ago, I sat with a group of upper elementary teachers and asked them to read an article titled How Do We Teach With Primary Sources When So Many Voices Are Missing? Published by Education Week, the article highlights the difficulty in telling a complete story when Native American voices are hard to find.

Bottom line? We need to train both ourselves and our students to look beyond what the easy to find sources are telling us. It’s what Sam Wineburg once called “reading the silences.” We need to be more intentional about finding and using sources that fill in those silences, that let kids listen to the stories that are often untold and left out. 

Finding these missing voices is important for a lot of reasons. But one particular quote in the EdWeek article stood out for me:

The nice little progressive American story is boring. Once students realize it’s complicated, it’s interesting.

We want our kids to go beyond just hearing and memorizing the story. When students get the chance to hear the nuance and connections and people and interactions and relationships and context and motivations and emotion and similarities to contemporary issues, you don’t have to work very hard to keep them engaged.

No one likes a boring story. No one sits through a crappy movie on Netflix. No one finishes a book with poorly written and unimaginative characters.

So why should a student have to sit through a tedious and dull history class that tells a story without subtlety or interesting individuals?

Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day provide a canvas for a nuanced and complex story that can be incredibly engaging to kids. Indigenous Peoples’ Day doesn’t erase the stories of Columbus and others from Europe who encountered Indigenous North and South Americans. What it does do is give us the chance to think through the complexities of those encounters. Kids get the opportunity to the nuance of both initial and later interactions, the establishment of slavery, and the concept of “discovery” while examining how these sorts of stories are constructed and how they change over time.

I also understand that October 12 is right there, knocking on the door. But this is the kind of story that I know you can weave into a lot of the learning going on between now and next May.

So . . . take some time to explore a few resources that can help:

Begin with a powerful article from the Teaching Channel by Ali Michael. Lots of specific tips and tools. Some examples:

• Teach truth about both Columbus and Native Americans. They were not friends.
• Don’t teach that Columbus discovered America. “De-center” Columbus and allow the story of Native Americans to become visible and share the stage.
• Be intentional about identifying Native American stereotypes in your instructional materials.
• Don’t teach myths that will need to be unlearned later.

I love Teaching Tolerance stuff – they’ve got some super useful resources:

• Ned Blackhawk Q&A: Understanding Indigenous Enslavement
• With and About: Inviting Contemporary American Indian Peoples Into the Classroom
• Reconsider Columbus Day
• Indigenous Peoples’ Day Resources

The Atlantic has a nice post with background and context in their Rethinking History Class on Columbus Day article. And I don’t usually get too attached to textbook company stuff but I gotta admit Houghton Mifflin’s Q & A about how to teach Indigenous Peoples’ Day is pretty spot on.

Need some teaching resources? 

• The National Museum of the American Indian describes five ways for celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
• Decolonizing the Classroom: Teaching with Indigenous Comics from Teaching Tolerance.
• The Mitchell Museum of the American Indian has put together an extensive resource list.
• The University of New Mexico’s Latin American and Iberian Institute created an 80 page Rethinking Columbus: An Educators Guide available on Issuu. The Guide focuses on “discussing matters relevant to teaching about Columbus, rethinking how we present Columbus to our students, and providing teaching resources and lesson plans.” It’s based on the book Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years.
• The Maine Department of Education has some great general indigenous peoples resources.
• Find lessons, resources, and books on Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Columbus Day at the Zinn Education Project
• The Anti-Defamation League has a nice HS lesson focused on why states and cities are moving away from Columbus Day.
• Have some conversations around the controversial role of indigenous-inspired mascots in American sports.

Why? Because we need to go beyond boring, one-sided storytelling. Our kids are smarter than that.

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Glenn is a curriculum and tech integration specialist, speaker, and blogger with a passion for technology and social studies. He delivers engaging professional learning across the country with a focus on consulting, presentations, and keynotes. Find out more about Glenn and how you might learn together by going to his Speaking and Consulting page.