POLSON
- On the first day of classes, Myla Vicenti Carpio, an assistant
professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University,
shakes hands with all her new students and welcomes them to class.
Then
she tells them to imagine that she is a frontier-era missionary
priest and they are members of an Indian tribe the priest has just
met for the first time.
"I
have immunity to diseases that you don't have," she says. "I
just shook every hand and infected all of you. In some cases 90
percent of your tribe will be wiped out."
At
a vacation rental east of Polson, Carpio is one of seven scholars
from across the nation who have gathered this week, not so much
to rewrite history as to, at long last, tell it from their perspective.
They
are all Indians.
And
they are in on the ground floor of an ambitious project spearheaded
by Julie Cajune to produce a history textbook for high school and
college classrooms within the next 2 1/2 years that will move Native
peoples out from the backdrop they often occupy in traditional U.S.
history textbooks.
"The
idea is to bring these scholars together to create a framework of
what absolutely has to be in such a book," Cajune says. "We
want it to be interesting, tribally significant, and to humanize
it so people don't get lost in a sea of dates."
It
will be designed, she says, to be a companion to traditional U.S.
history textbooks, not replace them.
Here
in Montana, Cajune says, it will help teachers and schools comply
with the Indian Education for All Act, which requires public schools
to include curricula about the history, culture and contemporary
status of the state's Indian population.
Too
often, Cajune has said, that has meant studying about Indian dwellings
and crafts, or reading about Sitting Bull and Geronimo.
"This
will be a final response," Cajune says, "to teachers who
say, I don't have the materials to teach this.' "
***
Teach
what?
"One
example would be the fur trade," Steven Crum of the University
of California-Davis said during Wednesday's session. "It affected
a huge geographical area and it affected Native people in a lot
of different ways - it introduced diseases into the tribes, introduced
alcohol to them, and it changed the tribal economy."
It
also, said Donald Grinde of the University of Buffalo-SUNY, introduced
dependency. The fur traders gave Indians guns and knives, pots and
pans - and if they wanted more, they needed to produce more beaver
skins for the traders.
"They
knew what they were doing," Grinde said of the fur traders.
"It allowed them to manipulate the society."
"It
also started moving the spiritual relationship Native people had
with everything," said George Price of the University of Montana,
"to a notion that This is worth ....' It commodified
tribes."
Carpio,
Crum, Grinde and Price are joined this week by Robert Miller of
Lewis & Clark College Law School in Portland, Ore., Kate Shanley
of UM and Annette Reed of Sacramento State University.
(Grinde,
an expert on the Iroquois Confederacy and the Great Law of Peace,
is being shadowed for a couple of days while he's in Polson by documentary
filmmaker Jamie Redford, son of actor and director Robert Redford.
The younger Redford is working on a film about how the Iroquois'
democratic ideals inspired the framers of the U.S. Constitution.)
All
the scholars will be contributors to the textbook, along with up
to a dozen more, including ones from Alaska and Hawaii.
"Their
stories are different, and need to be represented," Cajune
says, and part of this week's process is to identify who those people
should be.
"These
guys have to stretch from their usual audience of other academics"
and write for high school students, Cajune says, "but they're
willing to do that because they see the value in what we're doing."
***
What
they're doing
is part of a three-year, $1.4 million grant awarded to Cajune by
the foundation of cereal magnate W.K. Kellogg.
A
foundation staff member sought out Cajune and encouraged her to
apply for a grant.
Then,
ironically, the board shot down her first proposal. Too small in
scope, they told her. Dream big, they said.
That
was fine with Cajune. In the time since her reworked and beefed-up
proposal was unanimously approved, Cajune has established the American
Indian Center for Policy and Applied Research at Salish-Kootenai
College in Pablo. There, she and HeartLines program director Hal
Schmid and program coordinator Sarah Bennett have set out to produce
authentic tribal histories in a variety of media, including film.
The
textbook, called the Parallel History Project, is just one part
of that, although certainly one of the most ambitious.
There
are, Cajune notes, thousands of years of Native American history
to cover before U.S. history texts generally get around to how the
last 300 years have played out.
"The
challenge will be which of all the information we gather will be
the most essential," Cajune says. "We want it to contain
meaningful, rich individual tribal histories."
Miller,
a law professor who has written two books on the Doctrine of Discovery,
says too much of history has been sanitized for students.
"They
want the sweetness, the stories of George Washington throwing a
silver dollar across the Potomac and cutting down the cherry tree,"
says Miller, a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.
But,
he goes on, much of history is "an ugly, violent story,"
portions of which are swept under the rug in many textbooks.
In
Polson this week, seven scholars are lifting up the rug and deciding
what needs to be pulled out from under it so that students have
a better understanding of Indian people.
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