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Ojibwe and Dakota PLT Lessons

Laura Duffey| PLT State Coordinator | laura.duffey@state.mn.us

mn.gov/plt

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Agenda

	Powerpoint: History and understanding
	Do an activity Questions, if time

mndnr.gov/plt/plt-ojibwe-dakota-lessons.html

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Laura Duffey,

Minnesota Project Learning Tree Coordinator

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School Forests in Minn.

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Acknowledgement: The city of St. Paul is on Dakota land, specifically in the former town of Kaposia

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Optional Tagline Goes Here | mn.gov/websiteurl

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mndnr.gov/plt/plt-ojibwe-dakota-lessons.html

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Respect and Knowledge

Generic:

indigenous, Native American, American Indian, First Nations

Tribe: Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Chippewa), Dakota (Sioux)

Band: Bois Forte Ojibwe, Mdewakaton Dakota

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English	Dakotah	English-Dakotah Translation	Ojibwe	English- Ojibwe Translation
Lake Calhoun	Bde Maka Ska	White Earth Lake	Gaa-waabaabiganikaag-zaagan’igan	White Earth Lake
Lake Minnetonka	Mni Thanka/Bde la Thanka	Great Water/Great Talking Lake	Misi-zaaga’igan	Grand Lake
Mendota	Bdote	Confluence	Zaagiwakiing	At the outlet-land
Minnehaha Falls	Mnihaha	Waterfall	Gakaabidejiwa	Waterfalled stream
Minnesota River	Minsota Wakpa	Clear Water River	Ashkibagi-ziibi	Greenleaf River
Mississippi River	Hahawakpa / Wakp Thanka	River of the Falls/Great River	Misi-ziipe	Great River
St. Paul	Imnizaska othunwe	Little White Rock City	Ashkibagi-ziibiing	At the Greenleaf River

https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2018/01/20/minneapolis-st-paul-in-dakota-and-ojibwe/

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Indigenous uses of the land influences who we are today and the places where we live and work.

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Image used with permission from Minnesota Historical Society

circa 1860 - circa 1890�Watercolor on paper by Robert O. Sweeny.

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Image: Minnesota Historical Society Archives

The Battle of Sugar Point, or the Battle of Leech Lake, was fought on October 5, 1898 between the 3rd U.S. Infantry and members of the Pillager Band of Chippewa Indians in a failed attempt to apprehend Pillager Ojibwe Bugonaygeshig ("Old Bug" or "Hole-In-The-Day"), as the result of a dispute with Indian Service officials on the Leech Lake Reservation in Cass County, Minnesota.

Often referred to as "the last Indian Uprising in the United States", the engagement was also the first battle to be fought in the area of the United States known as the Old Northwest since the Black Hawk War in 1832. It is sometimes considered^[^who?^] to be the last battle fought between Native Americans and the U.S. Army.

Such is the story of a Northern Minnesota leader that most local schools still don’t teach, even though these buildings rest on the land his people once ruled unequivocally.

Chief Bagone-giizhig, or Hole in the Day the younger, was a remarkable Ojibwe leader during early Minnesota statehood. He negotiated the formation of the White Earth Ojibwe reservation. For most of the 1860s, the U.S. government regarded him as the leader of all Ojibwe people, though not all Ojibwe people recognized him as such.

His father, Hole in the Day the elder, was a respected chief who led the Mississippi Band of Ojibwe in Central Minnesota and negotiated early treaties for his people.

However, the son, Hole in the Day the younger, was more brash, charismatic and revolutionary.

Hole in the Day sought to unite all Minnesota Ojibwe at a time when native people were being killed, starved or relocated to smaller reservations. Hole in the Day the younger favored supporting the Dakota during the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

He told Ojibwe men that the U.S. Army would conscript natives for the Civil War so they would join the cause. This wasn’t true. Another group of Ojibwe warriors surrounded Fort Ripley in a defensive formation to prevent war. This incident divided Ojibwe people, leaving many disillusioned with the would-be chief.

On June 27, 1868, shortly after departing for Washington, D.C., Hole in the Day was shot and killed outside Crow Wing, Minnesota, by a group of 12 Leech Lake Ojibwe men. The reasons why remained a mystery for years.

The most comprehensive history of Hole in the Day comes from the 2011 book “The Assassination of Hole in the Day” by Anton Treuer. Dr. Treuer is a professor of Ojibwe language and culture at Bemidji State University.

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Indian children at boarding school

Image used with permission from Minnesota Historical Society circa 1900.

Trauma of boarding schools. Separated from family, land. Hair (source of power) cut. Made to wear hard shoes and not feel the earth. Taught to farm. Punished for speaking or praying in own language)

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/10/03/stories-of-life-in-indian-boarding-schools

Denise Lajimodiere's interest in the Indian boarding school experience began with the stories of her parents.

"Mama was made to kneel on a broomstick for not speaking English, locked in closets for not speaking English,” she said. “They would pee their pants and then the nuns would take them out [of the closet] and beat them for peeing their pants.”

Lajimodiere is Ojibwe, and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota. She was an educator for 44 years, working as an elementary school teacher and principal before ending her career recently as as an associate professor of educational leadership at North Dakota State University in Fargo.

Her parents were separated from their families and sent to federal government-run boarding schools as children. Thousands of Native children met the same fate during the boarding school era, which scholars estimate lasted from the late 1800s to well into the middle of the 20th century.

Denise Lajimodiere's grandfather Benjamin an his sister Martha, circa 1898.

Denise Lajimodiere for MPR NewsThe children were sent to the schools to be purged of their Native cultures, languages and spiritual practices — forced to learn English, and often abused.

The experiences of those children, now with children and grandchildren of their own, have left a deep scar on many in the generations that came after them.

“Papa was beaten with a belt. He saw one of his fellow students die from a beating at the school,” she said.

Her parents rarely talked about their boarding school experience. She only was able to coax stories from her father in the last years of his life.

“Papa said, 'I just couldn't learn that language,'“ she said, “so they put lye soap in his mouth and the kids would get blisters."

Lajimodiere believed her parents’ boarding school abuse was a reason for the family dysfunction she grew up with, so she began a decade-long quest to understand it, interviewing people who went through the experience.

"It's a journey I had to go on to forgive my dad for the way we were raised, for his temper, his verbal abuse and for the beatings,” she said. “So, it was a long journey to understand why my father was the way he was."

What she found was a trove of stories closely guarded for decades by those who lived them. She tells those stories in their own words in her new book, “Stringing Rosaries.” She collected the stories using strict academic research protocols, but the listening was intensely personal.

'The Wolf at Twilight'Novel explores the legacy of Indian boarding schools

'Older than America'Film crew revisits Indian boarding schools

Many of the former boarding school residents she interviewed prefaced their stories by telling Lajimodiere, “'I've never told anybody my story. I've never told my kids. I've never told my grandkids. I had to think about these stories all my life about what happened to me. I don't want my kids to have to think about it or know about it,’” she said.

Denise Lajimodiere, author of “Stringing Rosaries.”

Amber Mattson | Courtesy of Dreamcatcher Photography

For most people, Lajimodiere promised anonymity before they would share with her the stories.

She recalls one elderly woman who refused to even let family know she was being interviewed for the book.

"She became very quiet, even though it was a huge house, and no one was in the house,” recalled Lajimodiere. “She started whispering about being sexually abused and she said, 'I don't know why I'm telling you. I have not told anybody.' Almost every survivor in the book experienced sexual abuse, or they witnessed it."

Lajimodiere found that, while the stories people told her were often infused with painful and traumatic memories, that pain was not universal. Some people recalled their time at a boarding school fondly. But Lajimodiere says even those people — who said they preferred the school experience to alcoholism, abuse or hunger they experienced at home — shared stories of abuse in the boarding schools.

As she traveled the country doing research on boarding schools and collecting stories, Lajimodiere said she would often find herself sitting in her car, sobbing, after an interview.

She realizes now that she was experiencing the collective intergenerational trauma of losing language, culture and identity. Her parents both spoke their native languages, Ojibwe and Cree, before they went to boarding school.

"My father never spoke Cree again; that was completely beaten out of him,” said Lajimodiere. “So, now, at my age, I'm trying to relearn Ojibwe. Ojibwe is the language of our ceremonies — and our ceremonies have come back very strong."

'Pure love on the dance floor'Celebrating the jingle dress tradition

Minnesota sounds and voicesOjibwe women singers learn from their ancestors' voices

Lajimodiere thinks connecting with traditional ceremony and culture is helping Native Americans across the country recover from the generational impact of the boarding school era.

She asked people she interviewed what it would take to heal from the trauma they experienced.

“Some of the people in the book say an apology would be a recognition of what the government did to us. Others have said, 'Boarding schools destroyed my childhood; I'll never get that back, so an apology would mean nothing,’" she said.

“Many of them said [what would be healing would be] a return to tribal spirituality and to the languages, our traditions and our ceremonies," she said.

Lajimodiere felt compelled to share the stories because many who attended boarding schools in the first half of the 1900s are now elderly and dying.

She's clear that she doesn't want the stories to elicit pity. She wants understanding.

“I want the world to know that part of why we are the way we are,” she said, “with high alcoholism, high diabetes and a lot of other health issues, one of the overarching reasons is the boarding school era.”

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American Indian people are still current in Minnesota. It’s OK to refer to the past, but make sure students recognize that they are real people living in Minnesota today.

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Respect and Knowledge

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American Indian values of love, respect, courage, humility, wisdom, truth, honesty, are the same values taught to children today.

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Respect and Knowledge

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Invite a tribal member to your class to share lessons with students, whenever possible.

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Larissa Harris-Juip

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Mndnr.gov/plt/plt-ojibwe-dakota-lessons.html

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New features

50 effective, field-tested activities
Designed with NGSS in mind

mndnr.gov/plt/plt-ojibwe-dakota-lessons.html

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Each lesson has:

Grade level
Standards correlations
Background information
Step-by-step procedure for doing the activity
Student handouts
Assessment opportunities

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Lessons reflect Ojibwe and Dakota heritage in Minnesota

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Some photos from the lessons

Original

Contemporary

Historic

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The Star in the Cottonwood Tree

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New features

50 effective, field-tested activities
Designed with NGSS in mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPVvIKEi_d8&t=57s

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�Compare��

New features

50 effective, field-tested activities
Designed with NGSS in mind

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New features

50 effective, field-tested activities
Designed with NGSS in mind

	Star in the Cottonwood Tree	Paul Bunyan and Babe
How did something in nature come to be?	A little star wanted to hide in a tree to stay close to beautiful sounds of good people	Paul dragged a giant plow behind Babe, creating the Mississippi River channel
Who are the main characters?	The little star and the elder stars	Paul Bunyan and Babe
When did the events take place?	“A long time ago”	“A long time ago”
What is this story type (genre)?	Myth, Dakota	Myth, American
Where did these events take place?	Where cottonwood trees grow in Dakota lands	In Minnesota and through the center of the U.S.

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New features

50 effective, field-tested activities
Designed with NGSS in mind

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�Parting message: Teach Outdoors Whenever You Can!��“Kids can actually pay better attention in class after an outdoor lesson,” she says. “This is nice for teachers, because you don’t have to stop teaching and you still get that bump in attention.”�

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New features

50 effective, field-tested activities
Designed with NGSS in mind

�Original research “Do Lessons in Nature Boost Subsequent Classroom Engagement? Refueling Students in Flight” - 2018

Dr. Ming Kuo, Matthew Browing, and Milbert Penner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Home - Understand Native Minnesota (understandnativemn.org)

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Laura Duffey

Laura.duffey@state.mn.us

651-259-5263