The video is a lecture given by Edwin Schupman, one of the authors of the book. It is 48 minutes long. Schupman starts by engaging his audience in a "Name that tune" game (he doesn't call it that). The meat of his presentation starts about 20 minutes into the video. He asks pointed and provocative questions about "perpetual ignorance" of Americans when the subject is American Indians.
Click over to Do All Indians Live in Tipis. Watch. Listen. Think. Do what you can to interrupt the cycle of perpetual ignorance.
Buy several copies of the book, and host a showing of the video at your library.
Schupman is Muscogee and works at the National Museum of the American Indian.
4 comments:
I can't thank you enough for sharing this link. I share this book with my students on the evening devoted to teaching respect for native peoples.
I looked up the Montana Seven Essential Understandings that Schupman shared.
http://www.montanatribes.org/files/7EssUnd-Summary.pdf
I am going to share these with my students (preservice teachers). If we remove the references to Montana and broaden to the entire United States, they still work quite well and are so important for us to recognize and accept.
Yes, Tricia, the Essential Understandings are applicable to other places.
Some time back, I wrote about Montana's Indian Ed for All project, and I was elated when Denise Juneau was elected to their Montana's "State Superintendent of Public Instruction." Here's the link:
http://www.juneauforkids.com/meetdenise
And the Indian Ed for All is here: http://opi.mt.gov/Programs/IndianEd/
This is off the topic of the post, and I apologize for that. I know that this question goes broader than the focus of your blog, but - what did you think of the Canadian representation of the First Nations Peoples in the Olympic Opening Ceremonies? Is that something you wish the USA would reflect the next time we host?
Anonymous:
I know you weren't asking me, but as a Canadian of FN descent (not originally from BC but living there now) I thought I would give my two cents.
The Vancouver Olympics's representation of FN culture was lip service, nothing more. They chose an inukshuk as a symbol (despite it having absolutely no connection to the FN people of BC - it's Inuit) and then had two non-FN artists 'modify' it. They're holding the events on unceded land. They tried to get the Cowichan sweaters made in China. They put laws in place to make sure that Vancouver's enormous homeless population (32% of whom are FN compared to 2% FN among the wider population) would not be around to bother the nice tourists by outlawing panhandling and sleeping in parks. They took six billion dollars away from a city that has the highest cost of living and the lowest minimum wage in Canada, a city in which 60% of the women who go missing are FN (a city in which a white man got away with torturing and murdering women for twenty years because the police don't care about missing Native women), and they threw themselves a big self-congratulatory party about how Canada is so progressive and so multi-cultural, despite the fact that it continually fails every international standard for its treatment of its aboriginal citizens.
A full 50% of Vancouver's population is of Asian descent, compared to 2% FN. If they really cared about representing the city as it is, that would have been the focus. This was pure pageantry.
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