"Native Americans" category on Jeopardy

In 2011, one of the clues on Jeopardy was "The National Museum of the American Indian." None of the contestants selected a clue in that category until they had no choice:

NMAI (the National Museum of the American Indian) made a video of that episode. The image (above) is from their video.

On April 12, 2016, "Native Americans" was the category. Just like in 2011, contestants avoided it. Martie Simmons, snapped a photograph of it and put the photograph on Twitter and on Facebook. It is circulating widely in Native social media (a shout out to Martie for letting me use her photo):

One of the contestants responded to her:

What does this avoidance point to?  Fear of saying the wrong thing? Or, fear of their ignorance being on national TV? Or, fear of answering the question wrong and hurting their chance of winning?

The same thing happened in February of 2014, too. The category then was African American History:

This avoidance is, to say the least, disappointing. Frank Waln, a hip hop artist from the Rosebud Reservation responded to it, too, on Twitter. He said:

"This [is] what 100s [of] years of erasure and colonial propaganda masquerading as history does."

If you missed his interview on NPR's here & now on April 6, 2016, listen to it and his music, too.

Teachers and librarians: this points to a huge gap. Our job is clear. Start with getting books written by Native writers.

Update

Thanks to Todd, a librarian on YALSA, for pointing me to an archive of the clues for the Jeopardy episodes. Here's screen caps from yesterday's show:

If you roll over the dollar figure, the answer appears:
$200 - Cherokee
$400 - steamboat
$600 - lacrosse
$800 - Little Big Horn
$1000 - Navajo

Though some of the comments below are defensive or critical of my post, what I've seen on YALSA's listserv has been positive and helpful (like the link for the archive). It'd be interesting, next, to analyze the clues, but I'll leave that be, maybe, for another day.

American Indians and "Double Jeopardy!" (yeah, the game show)

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) publishes a blog that is loaded with terrific information. In January, they uploaded a series of images and a video of an episode of Jeopardy. The reason? One of the categories was "National Museum of the American Indian."

The surprise (or maybe not a surprise) was that the contestants chose EVERY OTHER ITEM IN EVERY OTHER CATEGORY. Finally, they had no choice. They had to select an item in the "National Museum of the American Indian" category. Does that blow you away? Jeopardy contestants know a lot of stuff... But they avoided that category. Watch the video NMAI put together.



As you saw, the contestants did ok with the clues in the NMAI category. But they were definitely afraid to go there... 

Want to see more? Read "Double Jeopardy" at the NMAI site, and click around while there! You'll learn a lot.