Hello! Module 1 introduces students in the First Peoples of North America course to historical and contemporary views of North America's indigenous people. One of the resources, Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians but Were Afraid to Ask, by Anton Treuer, an Ojibwee Indian, gives a candid and open look into everything from appropriate and inappropriate terminology when conversing with Native Americans, the distinct differences between terms such as nation, band, tribe or reservation, the history and first contact, and other interesting topics such as views on polygamy, homosexuality, gender configuration, genocide, politics and education. To give you a feel for the material, it also covers the “real” stories on who founded America, where the word Indian came from, Thanksgiving, Pocahontas, and why Indians look, dress, and act as they do.

In addition, one of the web sources I viewed was the Iisaw: Hopi Coyote Stories and Hopi Song, with Helen Sekaquaptewa, from the Words & Place: Native Literature from the American Southwest website. The eighteen-minute educational video from the University of Arizona’s Radio-TV-Film Bureau opens with over three minutes of film of the harsh landscape, barren, dry, sparse and desolate but beautiful and clean at the same time, including showing how native people grow crops such as corn and watermelon. I learned that a great deal of value is placed on oral history as opposed to other cultures that prefer written history, and singing is often used to ease the burden of work or even convey a message or story.  In this particular video, Helen Sekaquaptewa first tells the children a story about a not so wily coyote that ended up losing a battle of wits with a flock of birds as they prepare for winter. The lesson to the coyote - “See how it is. It’s the fault of your own heart. You came wanting to eat us, so we figured…., if we killed you, you couldn’t eat us”. The story is told slowly and carefully, with the storyteller being the center of attention, using not only words, sounds, voice inflections, but a multitude of hand gestures as well to bring smiles and laughter to the children listening.