Overview
Reading Resistance: Using TribalCrit and Indigenous Lens
Author:
Danielle Witten, Library, Media and Literacies Learning Specialist, Humboldt County Office of Education
Danielle Witten lives and works on the unceded land of the Wiyot peoples. She was a high school English and Journalism teacher for nearly two decades. She is a Redwood Writing Project Teacher Consultant and teaches pre-service teachers in the Cal Poly Humboldt State University Secondary Education Program.
Grades: 11-12
Suggested Amount of Time: Three 90-minute blocks or five 45-55 minute traditional periods
Curriculum Themes
- History
- Cross Curricular Integration
Learning Goals
Identify a colonial mindset and analyze the ways writers and artists misrepresent, and erase the histories, experiences, and voices of Indigenous peoples.
Apply the “Lens of Survivance” tool to identify specific aspects of misrepresentation and erasure.
Research the histories, voices, and experiences of Indigenous peoples and disrupt the erasure by providing an Indigenous perspective.
Understanding:
Colonization is endemic to society.
Colonization is a structure, not an event (Wolfe), and still dominates what we learn, how we learn, and how we read texts and the worlds around us.
For millennia, Indigenous peoples shape and are shaped by their culture and environment. Each generation teaches the next generation their values, traditions, and beliefs through their own tribal languages, social practices, arts, music, ceremonies, and customs (Smithsonian: National Museum of the American Indian)
European contact resulted in devastating loss of life, disruption of tradition, and enormous loss of lands for American Indians. Hearing and understanding American Indian history from Indian perspectives provides an important point of view to the discussion of history and cultures in the Americas. Indian perspectives expand the social, political, and economic dialogue. (Smithsonian: National Museum of the American Indian)
Exploring genocide must be coupled with survivance-informed analysis.
Federal policies surrounding land and relocation changed the ways that different Native communities engaged with the place. The resulting tensions are ongoing.
White settler colonialism perpetuates the erasure of Indigenous peoples, histories, cultures, and voices to relieve “settler guilt and haunting” and obscure past and present complicity (Tuck & Yang, 2012).
Unit Overview
Texts are powerful tools to transmit our histories, our hopes, and our imaginings for our collective futures. However, texts are also powerful tools used to erase and distort. Students must develop ideological awareness and come to understand how their personal understanding of history, ideology, and systems of power influences their ability to read critically--texts and our world. Survivance is not simply a counter-narrative or different interpretation of U.S. history. It articulates narratives of Indigenous resistance, resurgence, and renewal as acts of defiance against dominant-group interpretations of U.S. history” (Hopkins, pg. 81). In this project, students engage in reading “against the grain” or critical reading of dominant interpretations. Such reading is an important skill as students encounter a world where dominant interpretations are present and ubiquitous. However, students also engage in another type of reading- reading to unearth or uncover voices and erase histories.
Teacher Background
One of the primary goals of any liberal arts class is to immerse students in narrative. In humanities classes, we supply students with the tools to read stories and histories. We make meaning of texts, and we hope students learn to read their worlds to make meaning too (Freire). James Baldwin writes that “Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal but sacred.” Many students come to texts (and their world) seemingly inoculated with these “colossal” American myths --stories that perpetuate not what was or is but what we wish to believe. Distorted stories of Indigenous peoples--their histories and their cultures--circulate in their analysis and often remain unchecked in the absence of other voices and perspectives. As Leilani Sabzalian writes in Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools, uncritical examination of representations of Indigenous peoples leads to thinking that the path to progress lies in “fixing” individuals rather “rather than the oppressive systems that they somehow, despite relentless dehumanization, ignorance, and erasure, still engage and contest with courage” (Sabzalizan, pg. 7).
Several “Enduring Understandings” about colonization and “survivance" help educators and students alike orient their reading of texts. In Indian Education for ALL, John P. Hopkins writes, “A survivance-informed analysis extends beyond the inclusion of tribal voices by emphasizing how tribal peoples historically have resisted, challenged, and sought to overturn settler colonialism and ongoing violence. Survivance is not simply a counter-narrative or different interpretation of U.S. history. It articulates narratives of Indigenous resistance, resurgence, and renewal as acts of defiance against dominant-group interpretations of U.S. history” (Hopkins, pg. 81).
In this project, students engage in reading “against the grain” or critical reading of dominant interpretations. Such reading is an important skill as students encounter a world where dominant interpretations are present and ubiquitous. However, students also engage in another type of reading--reading to unearth or uncover voices and histories erased. It is this juxtaposition of texts and voices that gives students the tools to dismantle dominant messages but to actively seek voices and amplify their presence--an act of resistance in itself.