{"id":1193,"date":"2019-05-28T09:00:29","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T16:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ecampus.oregonstate.edu\/news\/?p=1193"},"modified":"2024-07-23T10:58:18","modified_gmt":"2024-07-23T17:58:18","slug":"reclaiming-tribal-histories-one-page-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ecampus.oregonstate.edu\/news\/reclaiming-tribal-histories-one-page-at-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Reclaiming tribal histories, one page at a time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oregon State professor is out to open students\u2019 eyes to the lost histories of Indigenous peoples<\/h2>\n
\"\"

\u201cStudents come to class with almost nothing and are super surprised to find this history,\u201d says David Lewis, Oregon State University anthropology and Native studies adjunct professor. \u201cThen, they start asking questions: How come we were never taught this in school?\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

If you aren\u2019t asking hard questions of history, you probably aren\u2019t learning very much.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the truth about scholars, ethnographers and students according to Oregon State University anthropology<\/a> and Native studies instructor David Lewis.<\/p>\n

A Grand Ronde tribal member, Native American anthropologist and educator, David is committed to shining a light on our nation\u2019s forgotten and suppressed tribal histories, and sharing what he learns with the next generation of thinkers brings that work full circle.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudents come to class with almost nothing and are super surprised to find this history,\u201d he says. \u201cThen, they start asking questions: How come we were never taught this in school?\u201d<\/p>\n

Many non-Native students have little knowledge of Native American culture and history beyond a collection of stereotypes gleaned from movies, television and traditional American history education, David says, which rarely probes past the tales of Lewis and Clark and the Oregon Trail.<\/p>\n

This can also be true for Native students, he adds, who comprise about one in 10 of his students in any given course. \u201cThe assumption is that Native people already know the history, and that\u2019s not true,\u201d he says. \u201cThey don\u2019t know because it\u2019s been covered up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Serving tribal communities<\/h2>\n

With support from culturally competent faculty and staff, OSU is increasing its outreach to Native communities in Oregon and across the country by enabling tribal members to earn college degrees through our nationally ranked online programs.<\/p>\n

Learn more<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

In the Peoples of the World-North America and Introduction to Native American Studies courses he teaches in person and online through top-ranked Oregon State Ecampus, David encourages his students to challenge countless historic assumptions and misconceptions about Pacific Northwest tribes.<\/p>\n

Along the way, he adds, they are confronted with a painful pattern of genocide, removal, relocation, treaty-making and treaty-breaking. \u201cThere are these colonial structures in place that privilege the histories of the conquerors in a sense \u2014 the \u2018Americans\u2019 \u2014 and show the things they did were good, saving Native people from their savagery,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

As they study this history, students examine portrayals of Native peoples in a multitude of mediums, from historical documents and presentations to films, TV shows and even computer games. Then, they trade impressions during lively weekly discussion groups, either in person or online.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudents are very surprised when they take my course,\u201d says David. \u201cIt\u2019s somewhat outside the box and covers subjects not taught by anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond \u2018quaint notes\u2019<\/h3>\n

David\u2019s teaching is informed by his work as an archivist and ethnohistorian reinterpreting scattered tribal history source materials \u2014 things like maps, stories, treaties and ethnographic notes.<\/p>\n

As the previous director of the University of Oregon\u2019s Southwest Oregon Research Program, David helped to gather 150,000 valuable pages of scattered ethnographic tribal documents into a single, locally accessible archive.<\/p>\n

In his quest to recover Tribal history, Lewis also mines traditional anthropological source documents, looking past what he calls the \u201cquaint notes\u201d describing people \u201cdancing in circles and wearing feathers,\u201d to glean valuable insights about a tribe\u2019s daily life \u2014 how its members lived, hunted and organized themselves.<\/p>\n

“<\/span>What we\u2019re doing is reframing how Native people are thought about in our society to not just be objects of research or stereotype, but people with their own thoughts and minds and cultures and ideas. And that reframing of context in our society is important for everybody.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Distilling and sharing such insights is a key goal of Native American anthropology, and this more humanistic and interactive approach offers his students a framework for challenging their own assumptions and misconceptions about Native history.<\/p>\n

\"\"

David Lewis connects with the student staff of OSU’s Kaku-Ixt Mana Ina Haws during the university’s annual Salmon Bake.<\/p><\/div>\n

For OSU\u2019s growing population of Native students, participating in this process of discovery affirms and augments their own understanding of their culture and history, David says, and empowers them to call out injustice and stereotyping in a more nuanced way.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey know it intrinsically, through lived experience, but maybe they haven\u2019t thought about various ways of addressing that or various ways of thinking about it,\u201d David says. \u201cI\u2019m here to help them take the next step: What do you do now that you have this knowledge, this context?\u201d<\/p>\n

Some Native students will put that knowledge to work in the service of their tribes after graduation. Others, like David, will dedicate themselves to education and research, giving Native peoples a larger voice in academia.<\/p>\n

But the skills David is teaching \u2014 asking and answering well-formulated scientific questions, pushing past assumptions and considering history through a critical lens \u2014 are an asset to any student entering any career or discipline, and also an asset to American culture at large.<\/p>\n

The key is to keep on asking those difficult and essential questions, David says, of our histories and each other and especially ourselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is reframing how Native people are thought about in our society to not just be objects of research or stereotype, but people with their own thoughts and minds and cultures and ideas,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that reframing of context in our society is important for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/span> 4<\/span> minute read<\/span><\/span>A Grand Ronde tribal member, Native American anthropologist and educator, David Lewis is committed to shining a light on our nation\u2019s forgotten and suppressed tribal histories, and sharing what he learns with the next generation of thinkers brings that work full circle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":1195,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,6,9,3,672,676],"tags":[116,75,26,439,169,25,24,130,470],"class_list":["post-1193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all","category-ecampus","category-faculty","category-features","category-learning-experience","category-why-osu","tag-anthropology","tag-college-of-liberal-arts","tag-distance-education","tag-kaku-ixt-mana-ina-haws","tag-online-degrees","tag-online-education","tag-online-learning","tag-online-teaching","tag-tribal-communities"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ecampus.oregonstate.edu\/news\/assets\/David-Lewis.jpg?fit=744%2C478&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7BNSE-jf","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1344,"url":"https:\/\/ecampus.oregonstate.edu\/news\/native-american-students-benefit\/","url_meta":{"origin":1193,"position":0},"title":"Paying it forward to benefit Indigenous students","author":"Tyler Hansen","date":"November 19, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Luhui Whitebear has been closely connected to Oregon State University\u2019s Kaku-Ixt Mana Ina Haws in different ways during her academic career. 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