An ambitious and innovative undertaking that highlights my commitment to collaboration and engaged scholarship, Native Peoples of North America features twenty-four thirty-minute lectures created in partnership with The Teaching Company and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian.
This project took more than three years to complete and required that I work with The Teaching Company’s in-house editors as well as four staff members at the NMAI who served as peer reviewers. The latter were specialists in American Indian art history, anthropology and museum studies, law, and history. I also delved deeply into the archival and photograph collections at NMAI and other institutions to identify illustrative material for the DVD-version of the lectures and the guidebook.
The Teaching Company’s target audience includes primarily adult lifelong learners, and I embraced the opportunity to share what I had been teaching in university classrooms with a wider public audience.
I have been surprised and humbled to hear from people who have written to me after watching or listening to the lectures and to discover the uses to which Native Peoples of North America has been put.
Peggy Berryhill, a Mvskogee Creek and trailblazing figure in the field of public broadcasting, wrote to let me know that she led a viewing and discussion of it with twenty retirees at the Coast Community Library in Point Arena, California. She also interviewed me on her radio program, “Peggy’s Place,” on KGUA in Gualala, California. You can hear that interview here.
Another individual wrote with questions for me in anticipation of leading a lifelong learning seminar with thirty participants at a public library in Oak Island, North Carolina.
A public school teacher with a seven-year old who wanted to do a project on Native American history to show to her Montessori class after the summer used my course to educate herself on the subject. “I just wanted to thank you for the profound gift that is this course,” they wrote. “I am now excited to share with my daughter what I have learned from you. I most appreciate how you weave a refreshingly new perspective into this subject.”
Another viewer spoke directly to a similar aspect of the “public good” Native Peoples of North America has done. “Thank you for making such a complex, misunderstood, and important topic accessible to all of us,” they wrote. “I wish I had this great resource available to me when I was studying history.”
Native Peoples of North America is important to me because it affords an opportunity to extend the reach and boundaries of my research—to make it public facing, engaged, and integrated in ways that give it greater salience, relevance, currency, and impact.
In other words, it allows me to share what I am passionate about with others.
Here are links to text versions of two of the lectures:
Modern Day Native Americans: A Story of Survival and Sovereignty