For courses on World History, Western Civilizations, and United
States History I would use selected poems, stories, songs and
other sources to provide the students with a sense of Native
American culture over time and space, and to illuminate the
"collision of culture" theme. First, I would divide the class into
small groups and assign each group a specific document. Each
group would be responsible for "telling a story" about their
document. They could analyze their document as a cultural artifact,
or they might act it out. I would want the groups to be as creative
as possible.
The second approach I might use to engage the students would be to
involve a brief discussion of The Sacred Ways of Thinking (six
concepts; see Beck, Walters and Francisco)
and contrast that with the European cultural belief system. I would
then hand out a series of documents to each student and ask them to
analyze them using the basic six concepts. The goal of this
approach would be for the students to obtain a sense of what the
Native American belief systems entail and how they compare to
European systems.
