U & D

Resources come in surprising places. I would not have thought that the federal government and an independent Native organization could come together smoothly in providing quality, and needed, resources.

Then today I received my free copy of Lessons of Our Land, the k-college curriculum created by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation and the Tribal Education Departments National Assembly (TEDNA). The curriculum, which comes on CD and which can also be downloaded online here (Guides are available for download from TEDNA), is valuable in and of itself. Apple users will find it a bit confusing to use at first because it has been created as an autorun resource for Windows users. However, I was able to open all of the resource files for 6-8, open the folders, and download and read the .pdf and .doc lesson and resources files.

As I read through the lessons, whose primary goal “is for all Indian students to become intellectually reconnected to the land and to internalize its significance to their past, present and future as sovereign and land based peoples“, I realized that much of the content is already embedded in my curriculum and in the goals of LD 291. Use of stories, local habitat (flora, fauna), historical mapping and study, for example, will appear in the Maine Wabanaki Studies benchmarked curriculum. This indicates to me that we are heading the right direction.

I followed up on many of the resources for the 6-8 lessons. Unfortunately, some government sites (those from FEMA) have disappeared due to reorganization. But two online resources impressed me in their usefulness in the classroom.

• The EPA maintains a Tribal Program Portal for land-based legislation, actions, and grants affecting federally recognized tribes. Hidden within the site are the most current factual information I have found about the land holdings, populations, and programs affecting the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Micmac and Maliseet tribes. Find these at the New England Portal.
• The government also has created a javascript driven mapping application called Map Maker – nationalatlas.gov.  As students add the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy reservations to the Maine map, then layer on toxic waste, dams, rivers, federally owned land, and other data points, they can begin to make some conclusions about the land, and land use, of lands lost by and lands held by the Wabanakis. It is interesting, for example, to note how many toxic sites are found in Maliseet lands and near the Penobscot River watershed.

I urge Maine’s teachers to access this new curriculum. Its spirit, at any grade level, is well aligned to the Essentials for Understanding.