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Ask Us Anything about bringing Indigenous voices into the classroom with Jerad Koepp and Natalie Martinez // 10-02-2023

Kathy Hays

We are truly honored to welcome  (Wukchumni) and  (K’awaika-meh, Laguna Pueblo) to the OER Project community this week to answer your questions on incorporating Indigenous voices into the historical narrative. In addition to hosting the OER Project’s five new Indigenous American history videos, Jerad is the Native Student Program Specialist for North Thurston Public Schools in Lacey, WA, where he provides support to Indigenous students, conducts outreach to tribal governments, and create curriculum supports for bringing Indigenous knowledge into the classroom. Dr. Natalie Martinez is a professional educator who served as principal and teacher at her Pueblo Nation, teaching middle and high schoolers in New Mexico. She has collaborated on numerous Indigenous-centered curriculum projects including the curriculum guide for An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People. Her research focus is education for Indigenous youth, professional curriculum development, and education policy. She’s hosting OER Presents: Incorporating Indigenous Voices on October 3, in which she will discuss how to expand our collective understanding of the appropriate historiographical approach to indigenous cultures and explore the pivotal experiences of specific indigenous groups through history. 

Histories of Indigenous American peoples have often been excluded from dominant world-historical narratives, and we’ve invited Jerad and Natalie to answer your questions on how to better incorporate Indigenous voices into the historical narrative and how to best support Indigenous students in your classroom.  

What questions do you have for Jerad and Natalie? Some questions you may consider: 

  • How should I teach Indigenous American history in my world/big history classes?
  • How can I best incorporate the OER Project resources to help my students understand the narrative of Indigenous peoples?
  • How can I best support Indigenous students in my classroom?
  • How do you ensure all student voices are incorporated into the historical narrative?

Be sure to check out the new OER Project Pueblo Histories Series in which Jerad speaks with several Pueblo educators, leaders and historians about the Ancestral people in the American Southwest and the importance of this history to the Pueblo communities today. 

You don’t want to miss Natalie’s blog Indigenous Histories: Teaching from both sides of the mirror in which she shares how only looking at one side of the picture often erases important voices from history. If you’re interested in joining Natalie’s Incorporating Indigenous Voices presentation, click here to register. Be sure to come back and share what you learned during the session. 

Share your questions and ideas in the comments below. We look forward to learning from you! 

  • These resources are fantastic,   and I'll share them with my US history counterparts! In my explanation about the 2.1 lesson on the Americas, I use my own research into the First Nations groups in Canada. The picture of the white pine in this slidedeck was taken by me, in Canada, on the land of the Mississauga and Anishinabewaki -- and I share the First Nations searchable map with my students to explore where our school is located & encourage them to search for places that they've visited.  

    My question would be how and when to appropriately include land acknowledgement in our lessons (especially if there isn't one in place from our school district).  

    And a future ask -- will there be any development of materials for the First Nations? 

  • in reply to Gwen Duralek

    Gwen, thanks for your question on land acknowledgements. Our district has an adopted acknowledgement, land acknowledgement policy, and we fly the tribe's flag at all 24 of our schools. I'm proud to say it's a part of our district's culture to regularly acknowledge and collaborate closely with our local tribe on whose lands our district resides. We also have district-wide lesson K-12 lesson plans where 15 thousand students have an opportunity to learn or refresh every year about the importance, significance, and call to action that land acknowledgements represent. In addition, students in our 5th grade ethnic studies class and our high school Native studies program have made district videos on what their importance is and why we do them.

    Consider having a land acknowledgement as part of classroom culture rather than just part of a lesson. Everyone should know on whose lands they live, work, play and the story of colonization behind it. It sounds like you are doing an amazing job teaching that to your students already. Much like the tribal flags outside of our schools, acknowledgements should serve as a reminder to learn more, be a better neighbor, and support Native issues and sovereignty as an ally and an accomplice. Indigenized lessons or content are steps forward, but can fall short if Native peoples continue to be omitted or diminished and settler narratives privileged everywhere else. Fostering Native visibility and calls to action are meaningful skills for life.

    Land acknowledgements encourage a way of seeing ourselves in the world and should cause us to reflect and be inspired to interrogate and dismantle settler colonialism however we can. They should cause us to seek, center, and elevate Native knowledges, voices, and causes. Hopefully, the more we can put depth and action to acknowledgements the more we can work together as peoples to create a more just and beautiful world. Acknowledging lands acknowledges us, our relationship to place and our other-than-human relations. The land is us and we are the land. They can be steps forward to understanding relationality, reciprocity, and being a better relative. 

  • in reply to Jerad Koepp
    Jerad Koepp said:
    Consider having a land acknowledgement as part of classroom culture rather than just part of a lesson.

    Last night's talk was amazing! I agree with  and really found the resources shared to be very valuable. I will say- when I was fully remote in 2020-2021, I made efforts to make land acknowledgement part of classroom culture/ part of our introductions. As we headed back to the building, my lessons changed and I honestly forgot to include this. It is SO important! I will be starting to integrate this into my classroom culture again. 

    Last night my breakout group and I brainstormed ways to utilize the "Land You Live on Teacher Resource" . There are so many amazing resources in here. I specifically like the map that allows students and teachers to look up their neighborhood to see what Indigenous lands they reside on or their school building resides on. I am a BHP teacher and we talk about scale a lot. I think this could be an awesome tool to use for scale. In Unit 1 a driving question is "Why do we look at things from close up and far away?"- if presented with this map tool, students could become aware of the Indigenous lands their neighborhoods reside on. They can then zoom out on the map and acknowledge just how many indigenous groups lived on broader and larger land masses. Looking close up and zoomed out gives a more complete story. Great way to teach a BHP skill (scale) while also building a classroom culture of land acknowledgement! 

  • in reply to Adriane Musacchio

    It's so great to see such excitement, inspiration, and use of great resources. I'd like to offer a subtle but powerful note to help you supercharge your instruction even more: we still live on those lands. Even in the far too many instances of dispossession from our homelands, we still have intimate relationships with those places and our ancestors and other-than-human relatives still reside there. So, here's a liberatory language offering to add some wow to your already great work:

    Zooming out on the map reveals the extent of Native presence and relationship to place. How do the realities of contemporary land bases reveal an ongoing story of colonialism and dispossession that continue to impact Native people today? By zooming out we can see just how many Indigenous Nations inhabit the ceded and unceded lands our neighborhoods reside on. How does this knowledge add depth to our acknowledging of land and acknowledging peoples and their ongoing relationships to land, their lifeways, and their other-than-human relatives? By acknowledging land and peoples, what can we learn about their efforts and struggles to maintain relations with homelands and reclaim and preserve those sacred places? What can the scale of traditional homelands and those environments inform us about how they sustain Native peoples and lifeways? What are some of the impacts that level of dispossession have on those nations? What are the implications of this knowledge for non-Native people?

    Whether it's the Tongva living in their homelands of urban Los Angeles or a reservation in Oklahoma, it's all Native land. These lands have always been and will always be our homes. Keep up the excitement, curiosity, and great work.

  • in reply to Jerad Koepp
    Jerad Koepp said:

    Zooming out on the map reveals the extent of Native presence and relationship to place. How do the realities of contemporary land bases reveal an ongoing story of colonialism and dispossession that continue to impact Native people today? By zooming out we can see just how many Indigenous Nations inhabit the ceded and unceded lands our neighborhoods reside on. How does this knowledge add depth to our acknowledging of land and acknowledging peoples and their ongoing relationships to land, their lifeways, and their other-than-human relatives? By acknowledging land and peoples, what can we learn about their efforts and struggles to maintain relations with homelands and reclaim and preserve those sacred places? What can the scale of traditional homelands and those environments inform us about how they sustain Native peoples and lifeways? What are some of the impacts that level of dispossession have on those nations? What are the implications of this knowledge for non-Native people?

    Thank you so much for these thoughtful questions  ! These are amazing questions for students (or honestly... everyone) to discuss and explore! I will be sure to also pass these questions along to the other history teachers in my building. This could most definitely be turned into a Socratic Seminar of sorts to really allow for the time and space to start the discussion and continue it throughout the year. 

  • My students just started learning about the Columbian Exchange and will be analyzing the impacts of the Columbian Exchange on the Americas in a DBQ on Monday. With that coinciding with Indigenous Peoples' Day it seems like the perfect time to have students consider the moniker of Indigenous Peoples' Day versus Columbus Day. 

    Do you have any recommendations for how to facilitate this conversation?

  • in reply to Jerad Koepp

    Thanks for taking this important question Jerad. I agree, and would also add that reaching out to any local Nation might provide additional resources to information.
    It’s a first step just to demonstrate to students that they have the power to offer an acknowledgment. 

  • in reply to Anne Koschmider

    yes, Anne, the timing is good. I shared the Zinn Abolish Columbus Day resource in my presentation on Tuesday. I will drop the link below:

  • in reply to Anne Koschmider

    What a big and wonderful question. How a Genoese sailor became such a recognizable symbol of American identity is a fascinating one. The origin of Columbus Day is a curious, complex, and revealing story. You can find a few well done mini-docs on YouTube to learn more. The story of the holiday challenges us to to ask the question of why do we celebrate the people we do? How could a country rally around a murdering enslaver (who was also known in his own time as a monster) and how could this country be so complicit in the tacit approval of that legacy for so long? The longevity of the holiday is revealing of the power of settler meta-narratives to persist and recreate themselves across generations. What other American mythologies challenge us to interrogate and dismantle them? Hint: Thanksgiving is coming up.

    When it comes to facilitating conversations, it can be very important to prepare students for triggering topics. Prepare students to be thoughtful with how they react and how they conduct themselves in conversation. A lack of respect for the weight of the story could cause harm particularly to Native students when discussing Columbus. To help with this, try to incorporate as many Indigenous perspectives on the topic as possible. Videos are great for this because they add connection, humanity, and authenticity to the conversation. It's also worth noting that, while a problematic colonizer himself, De Las Casas was a contemporary of Columbus and wrote at length against his actions. The work continues after the conversation with providing students in class a time to heal and restore themselves and their community.

    It's important during these sorts of conversations for students to understand that both of these topics still impact people today. History doesn't just inhabit the past. Columbus symbolizes colonization which is ongoing today. Celebrating Indigenous People's day also begs the question of what other holidays or events do Indigenous peoples recognize and what do they reveal of Indigenous values? For example, there is Wear Orange Day, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Day, and local events which could recognize treaties and local tribal leaders.

    What a gift your question has been. I hope your class experience is wonderful.