Rationale
The majority of students in my school, a career path (formerly vocational-technical) high school, are African American, who until recently, with the addition of a required African American history course, might easily have traversed their K-12 years with only spotty exposure to a rich artistic and literary heritage. They can easily, I surmise, identify with the experience of American Indians whose voice, experiences and creations have in large part been rendered marginal and, in many cases, been obliterated.
Assuming, then, a sense of spiritual camaraderie, our task in investigating and ultimately appreciating the unique and myriad gifts of American's first nations will comprise a triple challenge: research obstacles, authentic understandings, and accurate writing. The challenges, however, can be transformed into thrilling adventures of exploration, reflection, new insights and skills.
Research obstacles have many manifestations. A paucity of extensive written records where oral traditions prevailed, the vast numbers of different languages spoken (600 is the most recent estimate), and adventurers who were seeking land and loot rather than literary light limited the collection and recording of verbal creations. Assumptions regarding the developmental stage of Indian civilization, in Helen Carr's words, the ". . .idea of the primitive shaped the understanding of Native American literary traditions from the first days of the United States until the modernist period. . ." (Carr, 3). Even in cases where Europeans sought to understand and gather poetic expressions of the first nations, multiple stages of translation, restating, editing, interpreting almost guaranteed a distorted result.
The hidden shoals of search engines like our beloved Google lead Edward Tenner to note that "Google displays irrelevant or mediocre sites on a par with truly expert ones." (2006) Admirably though disturbingly adept at cut-and-paste, students are often reluctant to pause-and-reflect. Nor do many young (and, we must admit, quite a few older) people today possess an extensive reading background that would arm them to discern wheat from chaff on the web or in other mass media. Found objects, whether utilitarian or artistic "things", are open to their own misinterpretation or simple lack of information. While we can appreciate their craft and beauty, we cannot be sure that we understand their place and purpose.
A plethora of standardized tests, as well as classroom experience, reveal that our students often combine below grade-level reading skills with general lack of interest in traditional academic content. Although I am occasionally tempted to blame that mass media world out there for this sorry state of affairs, my responsibility, nevertheless, is to seek to spark a connection and to help it grow to a warmth- and light-giving flame.
By way of encouragement in the consideration of meaningful questions, students will arrive at a place where, their interest having been piqued, their research skills sharpened, their comprehension honed, they will be eager to create a written record of their findings to share with others of their generation — perhaps through that heretofore perceived as pernicious mass media.
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