Response to Oct. workshop

1) A brief summary of the seminar. Include any highlights for you – new information, a particularly useful exercise, a favorite moment. Be sure to identify the main historical themes and the core documents presented in the seminar.

I once again found the information presented by both Tom Doughton and Alice Nash to be very helpful in finding new ways and perspectives to look at the enormous amount of material we've gotten and will continue to get on this topic. Particulalry useful was the "occular"/"specular" session and trying to decide when we talk from a certain perspective are we talking about Native history or or we talking about our history. To cite an example from the workshop the Jesuit writings that were really more about the Jesuits themselves than the Natives they were encountering. So are we looking at our own history or Native history through many of these sources? That to me was a very interesting part of the workshop. Also of note was the theme of the identity and how it was changed with enfrachisement and detribalization, which is certainly applicable to the classroom. Also, the piece on Thanksgiving and Manifest destiny were something that can be brought right into the classroom for discussion.

2. What questions did the seminar raise for you and how will you follow-up on those questions? Will you need to do further research – and if so, how will you approach that research and what sources are available to you?

After almost all of these seminars my question is the same. How am I going to use this in the classroom and how do I make a high school kid interested in this topic? Always second place in my order of questions is How do I fit this in with the frameworks? I think since our focus is shifting further into the 19th century, much more will be applicable to the standards. It's always very difficult to examine much of what we covered last year and through the summer unless it is used as a comparison to something else, because there simply isn't enough time to start and cover with any depth anything before the French and Indian War. I think I've gotten a little better at drawing in some of what we've learned and certainly have made use of the multitude of primary sources we've been given.


3. How would you use this material in the classroom? If you do not currently teach this material, pretend that you do (you may be teaching it at some point in your career!).
Teaching U.S. I I think that getting kids to see the difference between an occular and specular learning. To get students to try and see things from an occular point of view and get them to understand history from a certain cultures own point of view and experiences is a critical skill. Also, the idea of manifest destiny becomes a huge theme in U.S. History I and is something that can really be explored by the students who search for justification and understanding of how it happened.

4. How does the material presented in the seminar deepen your understanding of the relationship between representation and reality in the history of New England natives?

The representation is certainly of the vanishing Indian. However, the reality may be that this was done over time and that Inidans were looked at as the remains of a once noble people and so weren't really looked at as Indians in the first place. The enfranchisement and detribalization is a big part of the identity and how many Indians became citizens and therefore no longer part of their tribes. Also, many were just looked at as vagrants and therefore weren't real Indians either. This power play by Europeans to steal Indian identity contributes to the myth of the vanishing Indian when we know they were here and continued to be even after most of their land was taken.