Strategies and Activities
My students are like many with generational poverty from urban school districts. Many are children of parents who did not finish high school, or if they did, they did not seek higher education. The family passes on survival skills for the urban streets and not the value of education. My students often lack basic literacy skills, including being able to identify main points, summarize, and connect information to outside sources or even personal knowledge. The nature of the strategies used to develop literacy skills are very dependent on the activities used. Therefore, I will present the strategies and activities together. The main strategy of the unit will be developing these historical literacy skills to understand both historical events and provide context and connections to those events. The more I have used primary and some secondary sources with the students the more I have seen growth not only in understanding history, but also in logic, thought processes and oddly enough personal connection and enthusiasm. It would seem that dry tertiary textbooks can be replaced with success. This actually surprised me, as I thought that the students would need all the traditional background information and overviews and then if we had time we could do some pictures or reading. It turns out that using the reading or picture as the hook invites them to find out the story on their own, and in a much better way.
As stated previously, the topic of the American Indian should be approached many times in the U.S. History curriculum in our standards. While this unit deals directly with the topic of relations of African Americans and Creek Indians in Oklahoma especially after the Civil War, I feel that it will be necessary to give some background information from before the Civil War. Therefore, the first time the theme of the unit will be introduced will be through quick glimpses in an overview of colonization and the American Revolution, like those mentioned above in the section on Early Contact. In order to introduce the students to the beginning interactions of African Americans, Whites and Native Americans, I would like to use the story of Ketch, the “Indian Negro” who, as a slave of Irishman George Galphin, became a trusted broker, interpreter and trader between the Creeks and the colonists. Ketch stayed with the Creeks after Galphin’s death and returned again after serving as a bodyguard to General Twiggs during the American Revolutionary War. When the Creeks were removed from Alabama to Indian Territory, Ketch went to live out his life with Thomas Woodard, a man who traded extensively with the new American government. Woodard mentions Ketch briefly in Woodward’s Reminiscences.22 I want my students to explore the idea of Ketch as an archetype: his roles, life and successes. We will read an excerpt from the Reminiscences and will use some type of group work to answer questions. Ketch’s story is a way for students to see someone who looks like them as an integral part of our developing nation through the story of one man who by all accounts was a strong, smart, and successful black man despite the label of slave. For those teaching Oklahoma History or African American History, this and other sections of Woodward’s letters would be an excellent primary source for students to understand the daily life of early America.
To introduce the concept of the changing treatment of race in the American Indian tribes of Oklahoma, I want my students and me to look closely at the work of author Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family. In the beginning of the book, he gives a small family tree. As discussed in the Background section above, the Grayson family is one that is well documented because one line of descendants became tribal leaders who were around at the critical times of allotment, Jim Crow, and the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act. Using short excerpts, or even lecture to introduce my students to the family, I will set up a background and exemplar family for them to follow all through the progress of the unit.
Perhaps one of the hardest things for my students to understand is the idea that history is not clean. There is not one right answer to anything except dates, and sometimes they are debatable. Maybe the messiness is why history dealt in dates and lists of places and people for so long. When we start looking at history, the students want to insist “is that right?” or “just tell me the answer to write down”. It takes a lot of work to get them to the point that they can come up with answers and justifications for those answers on their own. When the school year starts, I have to spend a lot of time encouraging the students to think out loud, to guess at reasons, to connect past to present, and understand the gray areas. The Grayson family history is very “messy”. I plan to present the first and second generation of the children of Robert Grierson and Sinnugee to my students, then use them to challenge the students by asking them to “imagine if.. “ or “what do you think happened when they moved to Oklahoma?”
In the next topic, the Dawes Roll and how it was formulated, I will use the continuing history of the Grayson family. And, I will also use the Dawes Roll for the students to begin making connections to themselves. The students will use the database of the Dawes Roll found on the Oklahoma Historical Society’s website.23 First as a class we will look up the surname Grayson. Hopefully, the results will engender an organic exploration of the topic. Nonetheless, I will still be prepared to ask them about the different categories listed, how they think individuals fit in those categories and the limits of the categories. Then, I will challenge the students to search for their own family names. I will also have some suggested names, for those who are reluctant. My suggestion will be the surnames of their favorite or least favorite teachers. The students will be asked to write down and turn in those names perhaps as an exit ticket. My purpose in this is twofold. One, I hope that students will take the results and questions home to family and have family discussions about the Dawes Roll and family history. The second purpose is to prepare them for the second database search which we will do later in the academic year with the Indian Pioneer Papers.
Since allotment is chronologically near the beginning of the curriculum school year, the part of the unit dealing with it will be an introduction to analyzing documents, sources, and putting evidence and personal evaluations together. My intention is to take a series of quotes, pictures and lists and have the students look at them. Appendix 1 contains some of documents and the questions that will be used for student analysis. There are several strategies that can be used to encourage this type of analysis. I will use a gradual release strategy. At first, I am going to be doing a lot of modeling. Therefore, in Appendix 1, I have questions in place, and will be having the students work as a class with me on the first several. I will gradually release them to work on the final few documents on their own. Higher level students or students who are accomplished at document analysis should be encouraged to draw their own conclusions with little to no guidance by questions. At the end of the analysis, I will have the students answer the basic question “Was allotment fair to Indians?” Then, I will ask the students to explain how allotment affected relationships between Native Americans and African Americans, especially in the Five Tribes.
If I teach Oklahoma History in the future, I will also use this unit to discuss the formation and history of the All-Black towns of Oklahoma. The number of towns and how they impacted African Americans across the nation is unique to this time period of Oklahoma. I will definitely bring in the work of Oklahoman Ralph Ellison and his essay “Going to the Territory”. The Oklahoma state standards for All-Black towns and Jim Crow are more in-depth than the standards for U.S. History. (See Appendix 2) As part of teaching U.S. History, I will probably revisit the topic of All-Black towns, especially as they relate to Jim Crow, the Great Depression and migration movements of African Americans.
Another strategy that I would like to discuss here in the unit is tied to the last section about Rebuilding. It also serves as a way to reteach some of the basic facts of the history of Native Americans to this point. As I mentioned earlier in connection to the Dawes Rolls, students will have written down a name that they have found on the Dawes Commission Rolls. When I introduce the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration, I will talk about the Indian Pioneer Papers. Students will search for the surname of the person they found before and will research any papers associated with that name. As an end product, I will have them create either a short summary or a short presentation of the stories that they find. For those who did not have success for one reason or another with the Dawes Rolls assignment, I will have pre-researched some names and have suggestions for stories that should interest the students. The Indian Pioneer Papers offer a glimpse into the lives of Oklahomans especially right before and around the time of statehood. Therefore, they would make an excellent resource for both US and Oklahoma history teachers. In Appendix 1 I will list some suggestions for stories with which to start as there are thousands of pages of interviews.
Finally, the last activity that we will do as a class for US history will relate to the Civil Rights movement and the American Indian movement. While this standard does not seem to relate to my unit topic, it does a lot to further the understanding of American Indian and African American relations. (See Appendix 2 for state standards) The two movements are intertwined, yet very separate. The Civil Rights movement starting in the 1950s took to the courts and shifts in society to begin to see changes in the treatment of African Americans. The movement continued and flourished in the 1960s and early 1970s. The American Indian Movement, just a small part of the American Indian’s push for equal rights did not begin to take off until the late 1960s and did not bear fruit until the 1970s and 1980s. A big part of this has to do with the termination policies of the 1950s. The US government decided that Indian policy should be to “terminate” or completely disband the Indian Nations across the country. Since none of the Five Tribes were the original targets for the early termination policies, I have not discussed this in any detail in this unit. However, I need to mention that it will be part of my teaching of the Cold War, Civil Rights and Indian Rights. I will use various resources for this, especially the chapter called “The Red and The Black” in Vine Deloria Jr’s work Custer Died for Your Sins. Students will read and analyze this chapter in an effort to close the circle on understanding African American and Indian relationships.
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