Introduction
What is fascinating about looking at other cultures? I would think that people and their cultures would be. In the seminar Native Americans: is about Understanding the Past through Things we look at the lifestyle of natives and how they used their environment to be successful in daily life. This unit will attempt to bring a few beliefs and cultural practices to life about certain North American Indians, using their resources to teach important concepts. As I sat in this seminar observing the discussions on things I appeared to have a moment of amazement: how did these early civilizations come up with such an elaborate and systematic way of living? As my seminar leader Mary E. Miller, Vincent J. Scully Professor of History of Art, explained about cloth, I saw several different things going on, especially teamwork, leadership, planning and teaching. For example, I watched an Inca woman in Peru spinning cotton, and that seemed to be all she did. But all of the aspects and skills of a great collaboration were going on. This collaboration was not seen until the final product. Even before they could get to the spinning or the weaving, they had to have llamas, just to get the yarn. This use of one's own environment shows that most cultures adapt and learn from their surroundings. How were environments used by the Incas, especially since they lived both way up high in the Andes Mountains and right near the Pacific Ocean? The Nazca were the ones who made animal shapes in the desert. Later, the Inca, in the 15th century, made their capital look like a big puma. The city looks like it has streets laid out along an irregular grid, but from an aerial view it looks like a shape of a cat. This same group of people made roads that are over 3,000 miles long. I wonder how the indigenous peoples of other countries learned to manage their environments, how they survived and, and how they lived daily with the things that were around them, even sometimes coming up with the same ideas that people had in other faraway places.. When the Native Americans arrived in the United States as we call them today, how they made their environment livable is still up for some debate. First, of all, according to current knowledge, they arrived by land or water. Most Native Americans are descendants from Siberia. Nowadays only 2 % of America is Native American with six million identifying themselves as so (Encarta, 2002). I will talk about them in ways I hope are appreciated and teach about how they used their environment to live and even thrive before settlers came to this land.
I have chosen six Native American nations, or tribes, to explore. (Some Native American Indians call themselves tribes, and some call themselves nations. Here I will call them all nations.) It is cleverly done because I attempted to look at only certain regions in the United States; during this exploration my students and I will be looking at an art genre that each of the nations contributed to and shared with their people. Our experience will be based on carefully selected strategies. These strategies have been enlightened by a reading from the seminar called Thinking with Things; Toward a New Vision of Art, by Esther Pasztory. This book questions what is or isn't art. I find that this is a question of who is defining the art form or the work. Pasztory refers to an essay by Thomas McEvilley, in which he summarized definitions of art. According to him, Formal art is based on beauty. Content art is based on the idea that art is expression and not form. Designation art is based on whatever people value regardless of form or content. Honorific art is designating an importance and value and it has no other meaning (Pasztory p.8-9). Along with this information it should be said all Native American things are considered to be art regardless of the use that the thing may also have or even not have. In this unit I have chosen to look at art in the same way, but using a different theory, so that my students can understand it.
This unit that I am writing will prove to be interesting and rewarding. It is for a kindergarten classroom but may be used in any early childhood classroom grades kindergarten thru third grade.
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