Contemporary American Indian History

The Unit

For the most part, the unit will proceed chronologically.  I will introduce it by showing my class the Facebook page for KOSU’s Invisible Nations project, and playing a short segment on Tulsa’s early history posted there (“Tracing Tulsa’s Creek Roots”). After that I will project Tulsan J. D. Colbert’s map of early tribal allotted lands overlaid onto a map of modern Tulsa and have students come up and mark the spot where they currently live, so they can see what was there around 1900. Taking them back about 80 years prior, we will begin reading the first two chapters of Tulsa: From Creek Town to Oil Capital by Oklahoma historian Angie Debo (“Ancient Tulsa” and “Tulsey Town in the West”), to establish the context of early Tulsa as a Creek community. We will then watch the PBS documentary, Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo, to provide more information about the writer and her audience, as well as her purpose (challenging the accepted version of events in early Oklahoma history).  At this point, students will be reading chapters from the book at home (they will have one chapter at a time to read every two days, with a study guide and rhetorical analysis assignment to guide their reading; these will be discussed in class the following day). We will also be looking at photographs from the Tulsa Historical Society and Tulsa’s American Indian Resource Center that illustrate some of the people and events in the book, as well as entries from the “Indian Pioneer Papers”, an Oklahoma oral history collection covering 1861-1936. 

As students are reading the Tulsa history book, we will also begin reading chapters in class from Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria, as there is an overlap in themes (abuse of Indians by whites, America as a corrupt society, and communal land as a link to cultural identity).  For example, in Chapter Six, Debo discusses how the thriving Creek settlement of Tulsa began to change as it became a cow town and attracted more white settlers, and in chapters seven and eight she goes on to describe the mounting crisis of “a series of events that was to make of the Indian Territory a white man’s land”.⁶ These included admitting Tulsa to the Union, the discovery of oil, and the work of the Dawes Commission and the allotment process. There is a connection to this in Deloria’s chapter, “Indians Today, the Real and the Unreal” when he writes, “Land was the means of reorganizing the Indian as a human being. It was the method whereby land could be stolen legally and not blatantly”.⁷  This gives us an opportunity to take Deloria’s ideas and see how they relate to our local history. Students will use close reading strategies to analyze the rhetorical and stylistic components of Deloria’s chapters, including how his treatment of the subject matter is influenced by the context in which he was writing.

Activities will include a research component focused on Tulsa’s American Indian past, utilizing local resources such as the American Indian Resource Center, and Gilcrease Museum, and a reading of the poem “Leaving Tulsa” by Jennifer Louise Forrester, which ties into the nonfiction works thematically (addressing identity and land loss).  In addition to taking notes, students will identify and chart text-to-text, text-to-self and text-to-word connections on post it notes, to increase their engagement with the reading.  Students will also analyze photographs from American Indian photographer Horace Poolaw, using the OPTICS analysis protocol (described in the activities section), to conceptualize what Deloria is saying about Native stereotyping by contrasting the dynamic Poolaw photographs with the static photographs of Edward S. Curtis’s “vanishing Indian”.⁸  To bring in a present day illustration of this contrast, we will also watch the short video “Smiling Indians” by the Native comedy troupe the 1491’s, which is dedicated to Curtis and presents an alternative view, as artist Ryan Red Corn explains, “they [Curtis’s portraits] shouldn’t dominate our idea of how Indians look or who they are”,⁹ much like Poolaw’s.  We will also watch video clips from the movie “Reel Injun” when we read “The Problem of Indian Leadership”, where Deloria discusses media stereotypes.  And when we read his chapter on “Indian Humor” we will again look at a few skits from the 1491’s and also read “Humor Is My Green Card.  A Conversation with Sherman Alexie”, in which Alexie talks about using humor as “a way of joining their tribe”.¹⁰  Students will also compare and contrast Alexie’s ideas about Indian politics in this article with Deloria’s.  We will also reference that chapter when we discuss the use of humor in Winter in the Blood.

Building on what students have learned, we will conclude the unit by reading an important work of American Indian fiction, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood.  Having just read Deloria’s ideas about the need for “retribalization”,¹¹ students will connect that to the process the nameless narrator goes through in Winter in the Blood.  They will apply the same analytical process used with the first two works, to determine how the historical context influences the author’s rhetorical and stylistic choices as he conveys themes of isolation, loss, and the process of cultural recovery through reclaiming homelands.  Welch is responding in part, once again, to “the pain that is history as told by the dominant culture”,¹² and the novel culminates with what Welch refers to as “quiet resolutions”,¹³ with the narrator finding “a tribal rather than an individual definition of ‘being’”.¹⁴  As we read, students will also discuss questions of self-identity and integration (how we see ourselves, which culture we identify with, and how assimilation does (or doesn’t) play into that; how does who and where we come from inform who we are?).  Activities will include writing "Where I’m From" poems, as well as additional close reading activities analyzing the rhetorical components of the text. This unit will be aligned with the Oklahoma Academic Standards for 11^th Grade English Language Arts.