The Challenges of Teaching Native American Literature

It was very interesting to read the English Journal article, "The Way to Confusion," about the teacher who is trying so hard to do a good job teaching Native American literature.

I think that as this unit is progressing everyone is starting to see just why this is such a good topic for English 4800 -- teaching Native American literature raises many very difficult, complex, and controversial questions. It is hard to know how to do it well and hard even to know how to approach the subject!

I do appreciate that the teacher, Gary McLaughlin, wants to teach Native American literature, but, honestly, I was not really blown away by his methods. I don't think you simply solve the problems by only making the reading individual and not addressing, as a class, any texts in common or any of the issues involved. He seems to think that is the way to avoid controversy.

I don't think that the point is to become an expert on every Native American group -- something he is right to say that would be impossible, but what about becoming a bit more informed about one or more Native American group.

The issue is to understand the contexts of Native American literature and to involve authentic Native American voices in the classroom.

With that in mind, I wonder why there seems to be no examination of the history of Native Americans, no look the story of Native American and EuroAmerican interaction, no consideration of Native American life in the present, no direct study of stereotypes and fake representations of Native Americans in Mr. McLaughlin's class.

He tells us at the outset that many of the students in his school are Native American, but then this fact simply seems to disappear in his article. What happened to this kids? What about their world, their culture, their parents and grand parents? Are their lives allowed to become a focus in school? A source that the other kids could learn from?

Mr. McLaughlin seems to be a bit more bound up in his own frustration and in the sense of hostility toward the experts he meets at NCTE, than in really learning more both about the topic at hand and from the appparently interesting community in which he teaches.

Well, maybe he never had a class like 4800...

Native American Mascot

Native Americans reduced to mascots -- What a grizzly conclusion to a history of invasion, slavery, murder, genocide and apartheid.

Sort of like the Nazi's using THE JEW as their mascot. I guess they could say what they wanted since they eventually murdered most of the Jews. Who was going to speak up?

The American attitude toward sport is deeply troubling to me. It is tied up with an overwhelming and thoughtless determination to win for one's side. Questioning the process is considered "disloyalty to the team" -- and those who are "disloyal" are ridiculed, excluded, subjected to violence.

What is the relationship between sports and racism? Between sports and warfare? Between warfare and racision?

ECHELON

Now here is "secret" government program that will raise hairs on the back of your head in the same way as if your TV set, cell phone, and Ipod all started blinking and repeating "Big Brother is Watching You," "Big Brother is Watching You," "Big Brother is Watching You"!

An international system created between the secret services of America and England to monitor radio and satellite communication, phones, faxes, emails, and other "data streams."

According to Wikipedia:

US intelligence agencies are generally prohibited from spying on people inside the US, and other Western countries' intelligence services generally faced similar restrictions within their own countries. There are allegations, however, that ECHELON and the UKUSA alliance were used to circumvent these restrictions by, for example, having the UK facilities spy on people inside the US and the US facilities spy on people in the UK, with the agencies exchanging data.

The problem is as utterly outlandish as this sounds, given who is in charge, it is completely believeable. Yow! At least they are not monitoring blogs! We are safe!

Questions Raised For Me

I am intrigued by similar dysutopian visions in the novel 1984 and in the films Minority Report and V for Vendeta. Do these common themes between diverse artistic expressions suggest common concerns even fears about trends in our own society, in the "real world"?

I know I can enter more richly into imaginative works, such as novels and films, through role play. As a teaching tool, I want to understand the goals of the activity. What is the purpose of a role play? How does the dialogue it generates relate to the themes and ideas that are under investigation? These are questions that the role play raised for me.

An Imaginative Role

Let's just imagine...

That we are concerned about what is happening to our youth, so many kids dropping out of school, so many attracted to alcohol and drugs, so many young women ending up pregnant, crime, venereal disease. Should we really be blind to the influence of the media? Of course not all films promote dangerous life styles, not all rap music supports drug use or tears down women's self esteem, not all radio commentators advocate challenge traditional morality. But some do. Some that our young people listen to. And with dire consequences. Of course we live in a free and democratic society and I strongly support those values. I believe also, based on our culture's profound and diverse religious traditions that there are core values, that there are certain behaviors we can identify as immoral, as unethical, as inappropriate especially for young people. We need to maintain our values and protect vulnerable people from the inappropriate, damaging pornographic and illicit garbage that is actually dangerous. Standing up for our most basic believes and principals demands that we do this. Some have called us "censors," but we are not "censors" so much as preservers and protectors of the values our society most cherishes, of the fundamental rights and responsiblities that our constitutions protects. It is in the name of "we the people" that we need to keep young people in that "we" not falling by the wayside.

Minority Report

I watched the film "Minority Report" despite what I think of Tom Cruise as a person... I do like Philip Dick as a sci fi writer though, and, in general it is a genre I like. (I just saw another film based on a Philip Dick story at the university theater this weekend, A Scanner Darkly.

It was a cool movie, with enough creepy, not-so-future world stuff at the same time that there was a plot that kept you wondering. The plot was strongest, I think, when John Anderton (played by Cruise) learns that he is going to kill someone and has to try to out think / out race the future. I thought the "precogs" were a little wierd, maybe ridiculous, and that preventing crime by anticipating it was a little beyond the pale. Nonetheless, the vision of a police state future world where basic rights have been suspended and technology is turned by the state into survellence, that is, unfortunately, all too believeable. In fact it is coming true!

In this sense the film does have points in common with 1984. The whole eye-scan thing is actually possible now, isn't it? And is it being used, or do we know?

A film that I think gets it frighteningly right is, Enemy of the State. So, citizens, defend your freedoms!

Censorship

The English Journal article we read was certainly interesting. While I do realize that censorship is an issue, especially self-censorship, I want to repeat that I think cases of English teachers being reprimanded, or heaven-forbid, fired, for teaching something supposedly "inappropriate" for students are extremely rare. I do not want to downplay legitimate concerns, I am also just not wanting to fan the flames of fear. There have been studies of secondary English teachers that show that they believe, for the most part, that they have a great deal of freedom.

Yes, there are many, many texts and materials that I would not show to secondary students. A couple of examples are referred to in the article, examples that teachers in fact DO and DID teach. The Roman Polanski film of "Macbeth" discussed in the article -- which I saw many, many years ago (30 years?) has a good bit of full frontal nudity as I remember. (It was produced by Playboy, but, believe me, it is not "sexy.") I think it is just pretty good common sense that a movie with full frontal nudity is likely to cause more classroom uproar than lead to careful analysis.

Also, personally again, I would not teach Beloved to high school students. I would teach novels about slavery -- in fact I think that is very important -- but there are scenes in that novel that are so horrible that I just think that it requires a very mature audience, indeed. I did teach the novel once to college students in a 200-level course. I designed the whole course to lead up to the novel and I ended the class with it.

Along with one of the teachers quoted, I think if I were teaching an article from Playboy I might just cut the title of the magazine out of the xerox copy. Maybe you consider this paranoid or old fashioned, but it just seems sensible to me.

On the other hand. I would go out of my way to teach literature with postive portrayals of homosexuals. I would teach literature that raises religious issues and questions, including atheism. I would teach the Bible or the Koran. I would teach meaningful works with sexual scenes -- if the scenes were were PG or R (for upper classmen), but not if they were X. I would teach words with swear words, if they were good works of literature. And I would openly discuss the issues involved in our class reading these works.

If some controversy arose over works like these, then I would, of course, defend my right to teach and my students' right to learn -- knowing that the conversation was important and educational for all concerned.

Advertising

When you think about it, most media is driven by ads. I know it is hard to believe, but the ads must actually work. The people who pay to put ads in magazines or on TV or on the radio or internet, must do serious research to see if it is worth the expense. They must show that it pays -- that people do what the ads want them to do. Are we robots to the media?

Old Media

I had a long conversation with a friend of mine this weekend about how the media has changed since we were kids. Dave is a few months older than I am -- and I turned 49 this summer.

We talked about how, once a year, "The Wizard of Oz" used to be shown on TV. Every kid in the neighborhood (and Dave and I grew up in different states) would look forward to that night. At Dave's house his mom made popcorn, and they would all gather around and watch that movie. We talked about the old black and white "monster movies" that used to be show on Saturday afternoon. One of our neighbors got color TV and so, of course, we used to all hang out at their house. We talked about how the only radio was AM and the excitement we experienced when we got our first radios. Dave remembered one Christmas his parents bought him a tape recorder and how amazing the device was, and how he became popular in his neighborhood because all the kids wanted to record their own voice and listen to it.

Our phones in those days were only dial phones and if you wanted to make a long distance call you had to call the operator first. Long distance calls were very expensive and even your parents were reluctant to call your grandparents in another state for fear of the expense.

We used to spend a lot of time playing board games like monopoly, Stratego, clue, and Life. We played chess and cards. I learned to play bridge with my parents when I was 13. The kids played outside in the summer. There were a lot of kids on my block and we played capture the flag, kick the can, back to the boneyard, 10 steps around the house, and variations of "war" -- day after day.

The new media is so much more integrated into our lives. We have so many more choices about what we watch and do, and we can contribute our thoughts and communicate with others, and gain information SO much more easily. It is amazing really. Is there also something that has been lost?