This course will offer glimpses of the daunting diversity of Native America—thousands of distinctive peoples, cultures, languages, and lifeways stretching over millennia.
Lead Scholar: K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Arizona State University
Master Teacher: Rebecca Luebker
Image: Cover of Alcatraz: Indians of All Tribes 1, no. 2 (February 1970). (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC09792)
Up To 24 PD Hours
This course will offer glimpses of the daunting diversity of Native America—thousands of distinctive peoples, cultures, languages, and lifeways stretching over millennia—through three perspectives:
We will focus on the inherent sovereignty of Native nations in relationship with the US government and settlers through moments that illustrate the role of Native nations in the development of federalism, including the US Revolution and Indian removals in the early 1800s.
We will discuss schools as a key battleground between settler forces of dispossession and deculturation and Indigenous movements for local control and self-determination, with a particular focus on the off-reservation boarding schools and Native experiences within them.
Finally, we will focus on the persistence, survival, revitalization, and resurgence of Indigenous peoples, cultures, languages, and lifeways through notable contemporary examples rooted in key historic moments.
Optional Book Talk: If you are interested in Professor Lomawaima’s scholarship but want to take a different course at the Teacher Symposium, you may attend her book talk on “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Symposium participants who come to these optional book talks can earn additional PD credit.
Compilation of sixteen engravings from Nouveaux Voyages de Mr. Le Baron de Lahontan, dans l’Amerique Septentrionale, 1703. (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC09517)
K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Mvskoke / Creek Nation and German Mennonite descent), scholar of Indigenous studies, is retired from the professoriate (University of Washington, 1988–1994; University of Arizona, 1994–2014; Arizona State University, 2014–2020). Her research interests include the status of Native people as US citizens and Native nations as inherent sovereigns, the role of Native nations in shaping US federalism, and the history of American Indian schooling. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Education. Her scholarship on the federal off-reservation boarding school system is rooted in the experiences of her father, Curtis Thorpe Carr, a survivor of Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma. Publications include the 2018 special issue of the Journal of American Indian Education 57, no. 1, “Native American Boarding School Stories”; “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons for Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (2006; with Teresa McCarty); Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law (2001, with David E. Wilkins); Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences (2000; with Margaret Archuleta and Brenda Child); and They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (1994).
Rebecca Luebker is the chair of social sciences at Haas Hall Academy, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She has been honored as the 2017 Arkansas History Teacher of the Year, and she was an inaugural Computer Science Teacher Association’s Equity Fellow. Her work is focused on increasing Native American representation in education. Rebecca created the first Arkansas Department of Education–approved Native American History and Culture course for high school students in Arkansas. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, an eighth-generation educator, and a proud fourth-generation graduate of the University of Arkansas.