Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: African-American history is American history. As our friends at the 1619 Project have reminded us, there is a strong case to be made that centering African-American history is key to understanding the complete history of the United States. So whether you’re listening to this episode during Black History Month or not, remember that as educators we’re called to teach African-American history from slavery through freedom all year round.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This special episode of Teaching Hard History is about the WPA slave narratives. We receive a ton of questions about using this collection, so here’s some guidance for educators on this valuable resource.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: My three daughters were all born in the 2010s in Columbus, Ohio, at The Ohio State University Medical Center. For all of you college sports fans listening, you will appreciate that the labor and delivery ward for OSU hospital sits just beyond the south end zone of Ohio Stadium, the fabled Horseshoe, where the eight-time national champion Ohio State Buckeyes play their home football games. So I do not exaggerate when I say that each of my girls spent their first night swaddled in scarlet and gray, a touchdown pass away from "The Shoe," which probably explains why all three of them are so fanatical about the Buckeyes. In fact, I can’t even say "Michigan" in my own house. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I’m about to be in trouble for having just mentioned "The Team Up North" by name.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Now my brother and I, we were born in the early 1970s. First him. Then me. We came into the world in Brooklyn, New York—shout-out to the BK! Where Brooklyn at? And there we lived in Crown Heights until we went off to college—Binghamton in upstate New York for him, Morehouse down South for me. But before we left, we experienced the best the borough had to offer, from little league baseball games at Prospect Park to Sunday service at Cornerstone Baptist Church. We also experienced the worst of Brooklyn, from corner boys slinging crack to white mobs beating young Black men to death. After college, my brother moved back to the borough, where he continues to live in a building only a few blocks from where we grew up. I, on the other hand, never returned. I chose instead to make a life for myself far beyond the Republic of Brooklyn.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Our father was born at the tail-end of the 1930s, on the other side of the Hudson River, in Newark, New Jersey. But as a boy he often found himself in Brooklyn, sitting in Ebbets Field, cheering on Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers. To hear him tell it, he always had the best seats in the ballpark because his father—my grandfather—who had more than a little street hustler in him, had the "hookup" with some Italian gangsters. Again, to hear him tell it. Either way, he grew up attending Dodgers games and developed into a mighty fine baseball player himself, perhaps not quite the Hall of Famer that he led my brother and I to believe when we were youngsters, but I’ve looked up his stats—I'm a historian after all—and he really could ball, hitting for power and average as a fleet-footed, left-handed outfielder for Newark’s Barringer High School. In fact, my father was good enough to earn a scholarship to play baseball at Central State in Ohio, thereby escaping a life of industrial drudgery in Newark’s beer bottling and smelting factories.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Now my father’s father, my grandfather, was born in the 19-teens, exactly one century before my girls. I remember Grandpa Jeffries well, his hearty laugh and his massive hands. He was born in rural Jasper County, Georgia, but grew up in Akron, Ohio. His mother took him north when he was only three years old, following the death of his father, her husband, "at the hands of party’s unknown." She died a decade later, prompting his oldest sister to bring him to Newark. The Brick City is where he came of age, where he played semi-pro baseball against Negro League barnstormers, where he married my grandmother, where they had my father, and where he scored those Dodgers’ tickets.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Now my grandfather’s father, my great grandfather, was born in the early 1870s, also in Jasper County, Georgia. Jasper, by the way, is about two hours southeast of Atlanta. Monticello, the county seat, was named to honor the Virginia roots of the enslavers who displaced the Cherokee and Muscogee Creeks who had called the area home for countless generations. My grandfather didn’t have any personal memories of his father—he was too young when my great grandfather died, but many of his older siblings remembered their father well. And they shared what they knew: stories of Jesse Jeffries acquiring his own land, rising in leadership within the Masons, helping to establish a Black primary school across the road from the church where he is buried. The old folks passed down these stories for years, stories that finally reached my ears when I was in college.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Now Jesse’s father, my second great grandfather, was enslaved in Jasper County. That’s it. That’s all I know. I don’t know where or when he was born, where else he might have lived or even where he is buried. There are no known stories about his life for me to pass down to my daughters. In fact, the only evidence that he even existed is us: his son, his grandson, my father, myself, my daughters. Such is what it means to be a descendant of enslaved African Americans. Your family tree can end abruptly right around 1865.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I have often wondered what life was like for my second great grandfather as an enslaved person in Jasper County. On whose land did he live? Did he have any family nearby? What kind of work was he forced to do? How did he resist his bondage? How did he learn about emancipation and what did he do immediately afterward? But the answers to these questions are unknowable. Or at least I thought they were.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: While recording this episode of Teaching Hard History, I asked historian Lynn Lyerly to share the most compelling WPA slave narratives that she has come across while researching and teaching American slavery. The WPA narratives are interviews with formerly-enslaved persons that were conducted in the 1930s as a part of the Federal Writers’ Project. Out of a couple thousand possibilities, Professor Lyerly chose the narrative of 85-year-old Charlie Rigger of Palestine, Arkansas.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Rigger’s interview is indeed compelling. He talks about his family being sold to Floyd Malone, whose wife he called a "terrible piece of humanity." He discusses his mother working as a cook and a weaver, and his father—whom he identified as part Creek—as a field hand. He recalls his mother running away several times. He remembers a whipping that she received and one he did too. And he mentions Union soldiers conscripting his brother, whom he never saw again.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But what struck me most about Charlie Rigger’s interview was the very first thing he said: "I was born six miles from Monticello, close to the line of Morgan and Jasper County." Charlie Rigger, it turns out, had been enslaved and emancipated in Jasper County, Georgia, exactly where my people are from. I have no reason to believe that I am kin to Charlie Rigger. But I have every reason to believe that his experiences as an enslaved person in Jasper County are reflective of the kind of experiences my second great grandfather would have had. Rigger’s interview is a window through which to view slavery in Jasper County from the perspective of the enslaved, to glimpse what my second great grandfather would have had to endure and to see how he might have endured it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I still don’t know much about my second great grandfather, including his name. But thanks to a WPA narrative, I know more about the place where he was enslaved. I know more about how people just like him, how people he may even have known, lived and survived and resisted their enslavement. This is the power of the WPA narratives. They bring us closer to the last generation of enslaved African Americans, revealing what slavery was like for them, from their own perspective, and in their own remarkable words.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material, and offering practical classroom exercises.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The WPA Slave Narrative Collection at the Library of Congress can be a valuable resource in your curriculum about slavery. But these oral histories from formerly enslaved people are complicated texts. In this episode, I talk with Cynthia Lynn Lyerly about how to teach American slavery using the WPA narratives, including how to transform the challenges that these sources present into teaching opportunities. We discuss best practices for explaining the historical context in which these interviews were conducted, so that you can incorporate these rarely-heard voices and the history they illuminate into your lessons.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm so very happy to welcome Dr. Lynn Lyerly. Lynn, I'm so glad that you are able to join us.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: It's my pleasure to be here today.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, I have a special thanks, not only for joining us on this episode, and we have some great material and topics to cover, but really a special thank you for co-editing the book that really served as the inspiration for the podcast, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. So a double thank you, and we're really excited to dive into this material with you today.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Oh, excellent.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, one of the things that we have been talking about over the course of the podcast is to try to get teachers to think beyond the textbook. We know that textbooks are problematic when they come to talking about slavery. So we've been trying to get them to draw increasingly on primary sources. And of course, one of the terrific primary sources that will allow us to get at sort of what slavery was like, certainly from the perspective of the enslaved person, enslaved African Americans, are the WPA narratives. Could you just explain for those who aren't quite as familiar with the WPA narratives, what they are and how they came to be?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Absolutely. The WPA narratives began during the New Deal. The Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration decided to collect life histories and interviewed over 3,000 formerly enslaved men and women. And so they sent out interviewers who were largely white women, not solely but largely white women, because you had to be able to type, and you had to have a certain level of education. So these are largely middle-class and upper-class white women to interview formerly enslaved African Americans. And so that's the kind of genesis of the collection was to collect their life histories.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And if you could give us, in very broad strokes, a general demographic profile of those whose life histories would have been captured in the 1930s during the New Deal in this project.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Well, we have to remember that the people being interviewed were largely children during slavery. So their parents, their grandparents and other family members protected them to the extent that they could from some of the worst abuses and brutality of slavery, because they're seriously old by the 1930s. So we're talking about largely very elderly people. And it's not uniform. There's certain places in the South that no WPA interviewer went to, huge areas of the region are left out. So we don't have, for example, a lot of interviews with former enslaved people who are Catholics in Louisiana, that I'd love to have. The collection is over 3,000, so it is broad, it's extensive, but it's not in any way systematically collected. So we have to be careful because of that.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: These are very useful resources for teachers and for history students to delve into to understand. There's a lot of aspects of enslavement especially in the mid- and late-19th century: enslavement, emancipation, the Civil War, family dynamics, religion. A lot of different subject matter is included in these interviews. They do have problems that teachers have to be aware of before using them, but they're exceptionally rich resources. And these interviews are now available for teachers online through the Library of Congress, the American Memory website.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What are some of the other unique aspects of this particular collection that, before even delving into using them teachers should generally be aware of?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: The first thing that a teacher has to be aware of and has to explain to her students about, is that these collections are taking place in the Jim Crow South where race relations are incredibly fraught. And formerly-enslaved men and women, and particularly formerly-enslaved men, are not going to want to talk with white women in their communities about certain things that happened in slavery. There's racial taboos that are in place. We also have cases in these interviews I find very interesting where it's the daughter of the person who enslaved them is the person conducting the interview. So we have the power dynamics of race in the 1930s South that has to be taken into account.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: We also have these interviewers, some of whom were very diligent and tried to get the whole story. Many of them were interested in painting a rosy picture of slavery. So they wanted to hear about the good times, not the bad times. And they were interested in certain aspects of enslaved people's lives, like folklore, superstition, and not in other things. So they don't go at these interviews with open-ended questions. And you can often see in the interviews when the interviewers are trying to steer the conversation towards what white people would think of as safer places to go, places that don't reflect as badly on white people who enslaved people.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So how would those power dynamics, say, color what an enslaved person would say with regard to what life was like for them? Can you think of some examples of how we would have to read into what was being either asked or answered?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: One of the things that my students and I have found over the years in using these narratives, is if you read carefully enough you can often see the formerly-enslaved people finding spaces to tell the truth about slavery despite the fact that the interviewer wants them to tell a rosy story. So one of the things I think that's persistent throughout these is— I'm going to use the language that you'd see in the narratives— "My master was good. Didn't whip us very much, fed us very well. But the people down the street, they were really terrible." So this idea, I'm not going to speak ill of the white people to whom I was connected in slavery, because I know that that's very dangerous in my community, but boy I can tell you about in the neighborhood just adjacent to mine, they beat them all day long, they never had enough food. And so that's a really common trope in these narratives is for the person to absolve their own white enslavers, but then to condemn slavery by talking about slavery on other plantations. So that's one of the dynamics we see.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah, I can certainly see how that would require a certain degree of awareness on the part of the formerly-enslaved person, with regard to who's interviewing them, for example, the descendants as you had mentioned of their former enslavers, sort of absolving them just like you said, but yet indicting the institution as a whole. And I would imagine if, when you look at a bunch of them and everyone is saying, "My master was good, but everyone else's was bad," it gives you a different kind of sense of what people were actually facing at the time.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Here's one of my favorite examples of enslaved people using qualifications is Maria Hines from Norfolk, Virginia. Here's what she says. "I lived with good people. My white folks treated us good. There was plenty of them that didn't fare as we did. Some of the poor folks almost starved to death. Why, the way their masters treated them was scandalous. Treated them like cats and dogs. We always had plenty of food. Never knowed what it was to want food bad enough to have to steal it like a whole lot of them. Master would always give us plenty when he'd give us our rations. Of course we slaves were given food and clothing and just enough to keep us going good. My master would buy cloth by the loads and heaps, shoes by the big box full. Then he'd call us to the house and give each of us our share. Plenty to keep us comfortable, course it wasn't silk nor satin. No ways the best there was, but it was plenty good enough for us and we was plenty glad to get it."

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: I'm sorry I'm laughing there, because I just think she frames it as we had plenty. The food we got was plentiful, but it wasn't good food. The clothing ration we got was sufficient, but it wasn't the same thing that you would give your white children. So we see these kind of qualifications, where ostensibly she's saying, "Yes, everything was fine," but if you read very carefully and read her qualifications in the interview, you can see that she's saying, "Look, we understood that we were getting sub-par clothing and sub-par rations. Even if it was enough to eat and we had clothes to wear."

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: And it's clear she understood that there was a huge gap between the quality of food and clothing that this enslaver allotted to his enslaved people and what white people wore.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And it's all right there. It literally is all right there. You just read carefully and she's saying everything about the experience that was true within the context of the times.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Including people had to steal.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm-hmm.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Because they were starving. It was scandalous. Treating them like animals.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So one of the keys it sounds like, to effective use of these sources or a close reading of them, is being aware and paying attention to the qualifications that the enslaved people are making.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Absolutely. That's key. Look for the way they qualify, how they describe "good." Or another thing I see a lot is, "Yes, my master was good," and then a paragraph later some horrible incident like, "He sold me away when I was 11. Never saw my mother again." That kind of thing. So here's another example. This one is Mom Ryer Emmanuel. That's how she's identified. And she says, "My mammy, she was the house woman to the big house and she says that she would always try to mind her business. She never did get no whipping much. Yes ma'am. They was mighty good to my mother, but them other what never do right, they would carry them to the cow pen and make them strip off their frock, bodies clean to the waist. Then they would tie them down to a log and paddle them with a board. When they would whip the men, the boards would oftentimes have nails in them."

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: So here's a case where my mother knows she's fine, yep. She did well. But she clearly witnessed brutality.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And the kind of brutality. I mean, it's a sadism to it. And it's just hard to wrap your mind around it, but these narratives really personalize it in a way that you just can't escape from it.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: And it's telling that the sentence starts out, "Yes ma'am. They was mighty good to my mother." So she's answering a question: Were they good to your mother?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm-hmm.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: But she quickly then takes control of it. "But them other people who never did right," oh that's a frame for white people. That they would carry them down and then they would strip them to the waist and they would beat them over this board, right? It's absolutely—I mean, I just think that's not what the interviewer wanted to hear here.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right. And the pivot, right? Like you were saying, it's a great example of that, okay here's the answer to your question, and now here's the truth behind what you were not looking for.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Absolutely. And I think these interviews are so rich with that. They'll talk the talk, but then when you hear the details of what happened with that enslaver, you see the brutality, the ripping apart of families, the disregard for the humanity of the enslaved.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Really powerful. One of the things that leaps out immediately when you read the WPA narratives, is the use of dialect in the transcriptions of these conversations. Could you explain a little bit about what's going on there, and why to a certain extent it's both problematic and reflective of racial attitudes of the moment?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: In many of these WPA offices, the interviewers were told, we want to render the speech of the people who you're interviewing exactly. But these are white people who come from an era of minstrel shows, where minstrel dialect is how Black speech is rendered on the radio and in movies. And so many of the interviewers render whatever the formerly-enslaved person is saying, they render it into minstrel dialect. And sometimes it's in spelling and sometimes it's in other ways. So one of the things you see frequently is w-u-z for "was," for w-a-s. Now they're pronounced exactly the same, so there's no reason to write w-u-z when somebody says "was," but it makes the person speaking look like they're less educated if they spell it incorrectly. So these white interviewers interject these spellings that make it look like plantation dialect from the minstrel stage.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Obviously, if we hand excerpts or a full narrative to students, that's probably the first thing that's gonna leap out at them. I mean, it's in the first paragraphs, that sort of dialect. What would be your recommendation or advice for teachers, in advance of their students getting this and that being the first thing they lay their eyes on?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Well, there's several things you could do in the classroom that would be interesting. One is you could first introduce them to these variant spellings. You could write on the board, "w-u-z," "w-a-s," or "k-u-m," "c-o-m-e." These are some phonetic things that you see in the narratives, and ask your students to pronounce them, and remark on how, "Boy, that sounds like that's exactly the same word you just said." So—and then talk about what does it mean if I spell what you say this way versus spelling it that way. You could also just give them a brief lesson in, the interviews are gonna have these things that you're gonna have to sound out to figure what's being said there. And occasionally I can't even figure it out. It's rendered so deeply into some white racial imaginary, that I can't figure what word they're trying to use. So even a seasoned person with these can struggle with them. I tell students sound it out in your head and figure out what they're trying to say, and be aware that some of these are very egregious spellings of alleged dialect. So I warn them right up front about that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It sounds like going into using these in the classroom, that establishing the context not just for—not just the context of enslavement, but the context of the 1930s, and when they are—when these historical documents are actually being created is critically important for effective use in the classroom.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: I think that's absolutely true. In many of these interviews, the formerly-enslaved person is asked about things like the Ku Klux Klan or Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Booker T. Washington. So they reveal a lot. You could actually write papers from these interviews on Reconstruction, on the Ku Klux Klan, on Black education in the 1930s. I think that context, that racially-charged, racist South context of the racial power dynamics are crucial. If you put these in context, they show you how brilliant many of these people who are being interviewed were at getting the truths out, despite the fact that their interviewers did not want to hear them.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, there are always critics of sources, and particularly oral history, and this is very much a kind of oral history. What have been some of the criticisms of the WPA narratives, and what is your thought about those criticisms?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Some of the criticisms have been the questions are often loaded. You can literally see that in some places where the interviewer will include their question, "Wasn't your master good to you?" In other places, it's clear from the answer that the person was just asked a loaded question. So I think that's true. There are some that get heavily edited after they're done. I think that you go into these willing to say, "I'm not gonna use this next narrative because it's so suspect, and the intervention seems so deliberate and egregious." Or have your students come to that conclusion, that this is not a good representation of things. I think also historians have looked at the age of the people being interviewed. They were children in slavery, so it speaks more towards childhood, these narratives do, often, than the experiences of adults. That said, a lot of these interviewees talk about their parents' experiences. So it's not that you just get childhood experiences in the narrative. So like any source, these have problems and they're polluted in ways that you really have to go in consciously.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It seems that, almost with any good source—and thinking about the WPA narratives as not being a single source, but as you mentioned you're talking about several thousand, so it's a collection. And I think it's safe to say that not all of the narratives are equal, not only because of the interviewees but also—and perhaps more so—because of who was doing the interview.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: That's absolutely true. There's some Fisk University students, so they're African American who do some of these interviews, and those interviews show more brutality, more of the family separation. So as we would expect, Black interviewers elicited more honest answers when they were doing the interviewing than these white women who come from middle- and upper-class families.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There's a lot of different ways to use these narratives and, of course, they will become revealing about the enslaved experience. But also it seems that a useful exercise would be comparing what's being told in interviews that are conducted three-quarters of a century from slavery, from 1865 to the 1930s by, as you mentioned, these African American students from Fisk, a historically Black college, versus interviews being made by sort of middle-class Southern women. If and when those who was asking the questions is identifiable.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Oh, yeah. That would be an excellent exercise, and people have done that in their classrooms I know to good effect. You can also—I mean, there's also in South Carolina, in particular the Sea Islands, there is one interviewer, Genevieve Chandler, who is very interested in folklore and in Gullah language. So she also does the dialect in her interviews, but she's really focused on trying to get the precision of the language. So in her case, even though she does—she uses some of the same egregious dialect things that I've been talking about, she also gets Gullah grammar patterns in there. And so hers are a goldmine for things like, if you're interested in Gullah language or the African survivals and proverbs. So Genevieve Chandler, for example, as an interviewer is very good with folklore, but not every interviewer cares as much about it. So even with white interviewers, there's a variety of different good interviews and bad interviews in the collection.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We've already talked about and thought about the interviews as documents and sources. And keeping all of that in mind, what are some of the historical gaps and holes in our general understanding of what the experience of slavery was like, that these narratives, these oral histories fill for us? Where are they especially useful in providing us with insights into the experience of enslaved people and what slavery was?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: One of the things I think that the WPA narratives get at that maybe no other source does quite as well, is children. You're teaching students who are just out of childhood, so they're gonna have more empathy with children. And so the experiences of children under this brutal system really come through in these narratives. Children having to watch their parents being beaten. And so I think they can see through the eyes of children this institution, and I think it's gonna speak to them because they're just out of childhood themselves. And I think they're especially useful for the dynamics of the families, enslaved families. You see the ubiquity of family separation and some of the psychological costs of that, even though the interviewers don't ask what are the psychological costs, it comes through. "I never saw my mother again," right? "I left and I never saw my mother again. I was five years old." So I think the separation of families and the heartbreak that that rends is in these interviews. I think the importance of family comes through in these interviews. They're pretty good about the material culture of slavery: the living conditions, the food, clothing. Because they are asked about that. The white interviewers wanted to hear good things, but they do ask those questions. I think they're especially good about what kinds of work people did in slavery.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: And they're very good about the Civil War. The Civil War, I should have probably began with that, because they do ask about where you were when the Civil War started? What do you remember about the war? And there's a lot of reminiscences about the Civil War in these narratives, and how the enslaved experienced the war.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And from your reading, just to pick up on the Civil War aspect, I mean all of these are fascinating. Certainly the family separation, labor and work, which I imagine you can also extract some of just sort of the daily routine of enslaved people through some of what they're saying. I wonder though, immediately about the Civil War. I mean, wars often change those daily routines. Is there a way to pick up on the differences between enslaved life before the war and during the war? Or is what's being offered more about, "Well, this is just where I was and what was happening?"

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: You do get a sense that war changes everything. That the enslaved realized what the war was about. They're not confused; it was about slavery. And food shortages happen. I mean, that's something you see across the different narratives. For the people who were enslaved near front lines, they talk about hearing the cannons booming, seeing deserters come through, armies come through. You get also, I think—one of the exciting things about these narratives, you get the sense that freedom was palpable. They realized it was gonna be tangible and it was coming soon. And so that excitement of the end to slavery, I think, runs through these narratives. And how it comes. It doesn't always come with Union soldiers. Sometimes it comes with their former enslaver coming to tell them, "Get off the place," or "You're free now because the government told me I had to tell you that."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The delivery of the actual news of freedom, you know, it really—Lynn, it really strikes me the point that you had made about this sense that freedom is palpable, that freedom is possible, that it may even be near. I think when we take that and keep in mind that, you know, slavery in what becomes the United States begins in 1619, so you're talking about, you know, fully two and a half centuries, that if you were enslaved in 1700 or 1750 or 1800 or 1825, you know, freedom wasn't near.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And there's no hope on the horizon. And so it's almost hard to fathom that suddenly, you know, if you're enslaved on a particular plantation for three or four generations—James Madison's enslaved people, three or four generations, that this becomes something that you could almost touch. It would almost seem unbelievable.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: I think that that does come through in the narratives. And it's often described in religious terms. Jubilee, you know, God's intervention. That this is a world historical event, that God has intervened in human history here to stop this—this sin. I mean, I think that really comes through.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It would seem that, you know, if you literally are going back generations of being enslaved, that it would be framed as that kind of intervention needed in order to end the institution that you had been held in bondage to. It also seems that the narratives get at something that is hard for students to wrap their mind around because of the way we talk about slavery and enslaved people. And that is that they were not only feeling people, right? So that they felt the pain of slavery, but then also felt the love of the bonds of family. And sometimes we're a little bit better at that, but it definitely seems like we can get at family and family connections through the narratives.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But also the idea that we almost never get at is that these are thinking people. That they are fully aware, as you had mentioned, of sort of what's going on, and dynamics beyond just the immediate plantation, and that part of taking enslaved people seriously as human beings is taking them seriously as thinkers and political thinkers in a very real kind of way. What do you think about that?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: You're making me think of this exercise I use in my classroom. I have my students read the poetry of George Moses Horton who was an enslaved poet in Chapel Hill. And he has—"My genius like a bird, fluttered in my heart never to depart. It was like a cage," he talks about in his poetry. And I ask them to think about the intellectual theft that slavery was, and how much we lost of the gifts, the intellectual gifts of enslaved people by bondage. So I think the George Moses Horton poetry illustrates that very well, but I also think the WPA narratives do.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Part of the reason that I think I want students to struggle with these narratives and thinking about how they were created and thinking about how the Black people being interviewed creatively worked within this system of the interview itself to talk about the truths of slavery. And I think you really see how clever they are. Here's one example. Often the interviewer asks about Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln. What are your thoughts, what are your opinions? And what's really clever is how many formerly-enslaved people come up with stories. "Oh I don't—Jefferson Davis stole—I think he was a man who stole a lot of things," right? "And Abraham Lincoln, he snuck down here pretending to be a beggar but he told us to have hopes." So there's all this Lincoln lore in the WPA narratives about Lincoln wearing—showing up in disguise on plantations and talking to the enslaved people there. And they're just very clever in the way they talk about Lincoln and Davis without ever saying, "Jefferson Davis, you know, stole my people. And Abraham Lincoln helped free my people." They don't say it that overtly. It's clever. It's in this folkloric tradition that they wrap—you know, "Lincoln came down here dressed as a beggar, but he whispered in our ear and told us that freedom was on the way." That's clever. You know, to think about how you tell these stories, how you say we wanted freedom, we did not like slavery, when there's a white woman sitting there who doesn't want to hear that. I think there are intellectual gifts in getting their truths out in these narratives is something that comes through to me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What do the narratives tell us about resistance to slavery on the part of enslaved people, and the ways in which they were able to resist slavery or how they manifested this desire? And not only for freedom, but also to make life in bondage a little bit more bearable?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Well, I think the narratives speak—in terms of resistance, they talk about—running away is frequently found in the narratives, even if the person being interviewed is not the person who ran away. Running away is talked about a lot. There's a remarkable amount of physical resistance revealed in the narratives. I didn't bring the excerpt with me, but there's a woman who refuses to have sex with her overseer, and she gets whipped for it all the time. But she absolutely physically stands up to him. So we see literal acts of physical resistance. I think one of the ways the narratives speak to resistance is in talking about—I've mentioned this a lot, but family. And another way is religion. I really do think religion is something that white people were not—they were interested in, they asked about it. And the people being interviewed, the African Americans being interviewed, talked a lot about religion and the values that they held dear in religion, that you can see as a psychological resistance against the dehumanization of slavery. I think those things stand out to me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thank you, because it's so important that we talk about resistance and to be able to use these narratives to sort of piece together the ways in which African Americans resisted their enslavement is so vitally important for teaching. So I'm glad that there are things in the narratives that point to that that teachers can use.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Well, I think the narrative structure too, as I was talking about earlier, despite what the white people wanted to hear, the Black interviewees smuggled in often information about the horrors of slavery, I think shows you resistance, too. A creative kind of intellectual—verbal in this case, too—adroitness that I think was resistance to what bondage could do to your mind and your heart.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Just to introduce your students to the narratives, I selected two that are, like, one-page narratives. They don't have a lot of problematic language, but they clearly show that the interviewer is steering the conversation, and what the interviewer is asking. And they also show that the person being interviewed is trying to tell some truths about slavery. So one is Charlie Rigger, he's of Arkansas, and the other is Lydia Jones. She's also of Arkansas. I thought those two are excellent interviews that show that the conversation is being steered by the white person and the Black person is pushing at it in significant ways to get their truths out there.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So those two really seem to exemplify what you were pointing out earlier that, you know, understand the power dynamics and this aspect of steering. And yet African Americans, the formerly-enslaved, are determined and find ways when you read carefully and in context, to get at the truths of their experiences and the reality of what slavery actually was. So Lynn, how would you use them in the classroom?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: These are pre-selected. You could read them out loud. There's not problematic language in them. For Lydia Jones's interview, the header is: "Interviewer: Mrs. Bernice Bowden. Person interviewed: Lydia Jones." Who we find out in the interview was married, so she should be Mrs. Lydia Jones, but that's the racial caste system of the 1930's South. Her age is 93. She's interviewed at 228 North Oak Street, Pine Bluff, Arkansas. So here's how Lydia Jones interview opens: "My name's Lydia. Lydia Jones. Oh my God, I was born in Mississippi. I wish you'd hush. I know all about slavery. I never had but one master, that was old John Patterson. No, he wasn't good to me."

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: So you can see there was a question asked right there. "I wish you'd hush. I had two young masters: Master John and Master Edward. Master John go off to war, and say he gonna whip them Yankees with his pocket knife. But he didn't do it. They said the war was to keep the colored folks slaves. I tell you I've heard them bullwhips a-ringing from sun to sun. After the war, when they told us we was free, they said to hire ourselves out. They didn't give us a nickel when we left."

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: So this is just the first three paragraphs of Lydia Jones's interview. But you can see that, unless she's a schizophrenic person which she's not, that clearly the interviewer is asking questions. "Who did you belong to?" "Wasn't he a good person?" "What did you do after the war?" "How did you find out you were free?" These are questions that are being asked. That's why the interviews jump around. So I think that you could have students read this out loud and then have them as an exercise, go back and put the questions in. What question was asked to elicit this next sentence? So they can recreate the actual interview itself by imagining what was asked to get these answers. So I think that that way that takes them back to the production of these narratives.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I could easily see a follow-up question too to that exercise, is why do you think this question was asked in this particular way? What was the hoped-for answer, and then how does that compare to the answer that she actually gave?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Absolutely. I mean, I think that that's—I like that she doesn't only say no he wasn't good to me, he wasn't good to me. She says, "I wish you'd hush!" With an exclamation mark. So I mean her—which is a kind of Southern folk expression. I wish you'd hush, right? Almost like my mother would say, "Bless your heart," right? You're so simple-minded. So basically no, he wasn't good. Give me a break. And so I think we see these interjections here where Lydia Jones emphatically refuses to proceed down the yellow path that the interviewer is trying to get her to go down.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. What are some other ways to use either these narratives, or some of the others?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Well, I have excerpts that—when I introduce students to these narratives, I have excerpts from narratives that do things like qualify, or that do the "My master was good, but down the street." So there's Charlotte Foster, who the interviewer actually is summarizing Charlotte Foster's words. "She said her master never whipped any of the slaves, but she had heard cries and groans coming from other plantations at five o'clock in the morning where the slaves were being beaten and whipped. Asked why the slaves were being beaten she replied rather vehemently"—and now here we're quoting Charlotte Foster. "'Just because they wanted to beat them. They could do it and they did.'" She said she had seen the blood running down the backs of some slaves after they had been beaten." So here's a case where Charlotte Foster very vehemently says they beat them because they enjoyed the cruelty of beating them.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wow.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: So I think finding excerpts like that, you don't have to read the whole Charlotte Foster interview, you could just read that particular paragraph to talk about brutality.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Another example I can read for you here is Charlie Rigger, who's interviewed. I think it's another good interview if you wanted to introduce your class to these. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I just want to read a couple paragraphs of it. At the top of the interview for Charlie Rigger we have, "The interviewer was Miss Irene Robertson. Person interviewed: Charlie Rigger." And Professor Jeffries and I both know what this means. This is very typical, that the white person gets a title—Miss—and Charlie Rigger doesn't get Mister. So that sets off the power dynamic. "His age is 85-plus. Doesn't know his age. And the interview took place on a rural RFD three miles out of Palestine, Arkansas."

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: "I was born six miles from Monticello, close to the line of Morgan and Jasper County. Mother belonged to the Smiths. Her father was part Creek." And the interviewer put Indian in parentheses. "They all was sold to Floyd Malone. His wife was Betsy Malone. They had five children. When I was a child I lay under the loom day after day picking up the sickle. Ma was a cook and a weaver too. Malone was a good man, but his wife was one of them. She was a terrible piece of humanity. Father was a farmhand. They had a gin, a shoe shop and a blacksmith's shop all on Floyd Malone's place. I picked a little cotton before emancipation. Floyd Malone had to buy my mother to get her where my father was. Some of the boys wore dresses 'til they was 12 or 15 years old. One fellow rode a mule or cow, one of the others was preaching. When he sit talking to his gal at the window, a steer came up and et off his dress tail. Boys got to courting before they got to take off their long shirts. They wasn't so good to mother. She run off several times. She went about one and a half miles to her mother on the Compton place. They didn't whup her. They promised her a whipping. They whipped her and me too, but I never known them to whip my father. When they'd whip my mother, I'd run off to the place we lived and crawl under the house."

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: So we see from Charlie's interview here, you can tell there's a number of different subjects that are addressed. It jumps around, so you can see the interviewer's interventions here. But you also see—I mean, Charlie hid under the house when his mother was being beaten when he was a child. You see that cruelty there. And even though he said his master was "a good man," he claimed that his wife was "a terrible piece of humanity." And I think there's just all kinds of richness in this interview about clothing and what work children had to do, being sold, a father being part Indian. So we have all kinds of rich material in this just one-page interview here.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And as you were saying, I mean it speaks to so much in that short amount of time and space. As you mentioned, that description of the wife as a terrible piece of humanity. I mean, that says so much. The mother running away, and not just to some random place, or even trying to run away to freedom, but to her mother's. You know, where her mother was being held.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Speaks to this notion that flight was often sort of these temporary escapes, right? And reconnecting with the bonds of family. You know, I also—Lynn, I just wondered, I know you said that this was recorded in Arkansas, but they mentioned a Jasper County near the town of Monticello. I wonder if there's any reference to Georgia in there?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Well, there's Morgan and Jasper County, but you speak to a bigger issue, that where the interviews are recorded is not always where the person was enslaved.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Often, they were enslaved somewhere states away. And this may very well be the case. I'm not sure if it's Montecheller or Montaseller. I'm not sure what Charlie's saying here. But he could easily have been a Virginian.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: These experiences could be Virginia experiences. I was also moved by the humor that Charlie interjected in here of the kid who's at church, who has got his steer that he rode to church has eaten the tail of his shirt. I just think we don't see a lot of the humor of the enslaved, and I think that would have been a joke that a lot of people would have talked about. That time that this kid's steer that he rode to church ate the tail of his shirt as he was talking to a pretty girl.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. And are there other narratives that leapt out to you as particularly powerful in any particular way?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Well, one that really moved me was by Tom Robinson, because he was enslaved in Catawba County, North Carolina. That's where I was born and raised. And he says, "Where was I born, ma'am? Why, it's my understanding that it was Catawba County, North Carolina. As far as I remember, Newton was the nearest town. I was born in a place belonging to Jacob Sigman." And there's a lot of Sigmans around where I grew up. "I can just barely remember my mother. I was not 11 when they sold me away from her. I can just barely remember her. But I do remember how she used to take us children and kneel down in front of the fireplace and pray. She'd pray that the time would come when everybody could worship the Lord under their own vine and fig tree. All of them free. It's come to me lots of times since. There she was a-praying, and on other plantations women was a-praying. All over the country the same prayer was being prayed. Guess the Lord done heard the prayer and answered it."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Hmm. I guess the Lord done heard the prayer.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: We got religion there.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: And that he remembers this distinctly with his mother. And I think it speaks to something that students are always, in my classrooms when I talk about slavery, they're like, "Well, how did the slaves know so much of the Bible? How were the enslaved able to recite so much of the Bible?" And I'm like, "Well, even people who don't read and write can memorize huge portions of the Bible if they hear it frequently." And we see here, "their own vine and fig tree." Right from scripture, right? That language there, probably heard it at church. And so I think we see biblical literacy in this interview as well as the prayer for emancipation and this memory of mother.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wow. And the connection as we had mentioned earlier when we were talking about the coming of the Civil War and the possibility of freedom, and it being framed in this sort of religious, sort of God intervening on behalf of African Americans. Like, that just doesn't pop up out of nowhere, right? These are deeply spiritual people. And certainly that helps explain why they would see the coming of the end of this period of bondage—their Exodus if you will—as being framed and couched as this religious experience and requiring the intervention of God.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: And enslaved mothers. I think this idea that enslaved mothers all across the South we're doing this with their children. I mean, that image is powerful.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wow. You know, this is somewhat off subject, but to go back again to the Charlie Rigger story. As you were sharing it and I was listening to what he was saying, I couldn't help but think when you mentioned Monticello I was like, "Oh!" And Jasper. And I was like, "Oh, that's very interesting." This is why I asked you about that, because Monticello is the county seat of Jasper County, Georgia. Which one of the neighboring counties to the north is Morgan County, Georgia. And Jasper County, Georgia, is where my enslaved ancestors were held in bondage. My great-great grandfather, my family on the Jeffries side all come out of Jasper County, Georgia. Isn't that something?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: And that would make perfect sense, because the fact that his father was part Creek, Georgia would be a likely place for that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Hmm. Wow. And that wasn't set up. I didn't tell you about that before.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: You didn't. No.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Isn't that something? Wow. Well, thank you. A special thanks for sharing it. You know Lynn, thinking about the narratives as a whole, what do you think can be gained the most by students about knowing what slavery was and what that slave experience was from using these narratives in the classroom?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Well, I think what the narratives do—and I'd use them in combination, obviously. You wouldn't just use the narratives, you'd also use the autobiographies, you'd use music, you'd use runaway slave advertisements. I mean, there's all kinds of sources out there. But what I think the narratives do is they give us a picture of family life, of the violence on the plantations, of the continued fraught dynamic of Black people living in a racist society in the 1930s. I think they reveal the creativity of African Americans who—you talked about generations earlier, for generations have been taught this is the way you have to talk to white people. And so this isn't, you know, mom and dad help frame these narratives because the people who are—you know, the elderly people being interviewed in the 1930s, their parents, their grandparents, their great grandparents were all taught by their elders, you can't talk to white people in a certain way because they'll beat you, they'll kill you, they'll sell you. So you have to speak in these coded—this coded language. And so I think we see multiple generations speaking through the people who are being interviewed.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What advice would you give to teachers who are thinking about using these narratives in the classroom?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: The most important thing is you need to pre-pick the narratives that you're gonna use for illustration. Because you don't want—I mean, content-wise, especially for middle schoolers, there are a number of these narratives that talk about the sexual violence in slavery, some in graphic ways that would not be appropriate for middle schoolers. So you want to prepare that.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Some of the violence depicted is probably not appropriate for certain age groups, so you want to—that's why you want to have this all done ahead of time. You want to give your students the context of the interviews, and you want to—I give them questions. So I ask my students what is asked. And after they go and research in the narratives and read about a dozen or so, I ask them what was never asked? What did the interviewers never ask in any one of these that we would desperately like them to have asked? And one question that seems obvious to me is, "How did you psychologically cope?" And they never ask that. Nonetheless, the interviews reveal a lot of psychological coping mechanisms. So I think that thinking about what was asked, what wasn't asked, that these are shaped by racial conventions and by two people with very different goals in the room when they were made.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: I think that that really helps students work through that all sources have problems and contexts that must be understood before we can interpret them. I think that these interviews make students into good historians.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And you can't ask for much more than that, right?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Right. Right. That's what we hope for, right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That's what we aim for, right? Not only to learn the material, but as a bonus, to actually become good historians, meaning that you can read text, you can analyze—critically analyze sources, and do this hard work of not just accepting at face value what is on the printed page or what they see on TV screens or movie screens. Lynn, let me ask you too, where could these narratives as historical sources be used in a curriculum beyond just sort of the immediate and obvious okay, you know, we're spending a little time on slavery, let's use the WPA narratives. Are there other areas? You mentioned perhaps there's a lot of conversation in this dialogue—the conversation around the Civil War. Are there other areas that you think these narratives could be useful or woven into the American experience?

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: Well, I think the Civil War's an obvious one. I think the New Deal in the 1930s, the Great Depression. A number of these interviews start with the African American interviewee saying, "Are you from the pension office? Are you with the Social Security people who are gonna get me my check because I don't have any food," right? So we see the desperate poverty and hunger of the 1930s, as formerly-enslaved people are the poorest of the poor in the US. So I think they speak—they tell us a lot about the Depression. I think that the narratives could be used to talk about Reconstruction and the KKK. In fact, I've used them that way in classrooms. I think that they are extremely useful in just thinking about the power dynamics of race in the 20th century, the 1930s in particular.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: My husband and I watched some program that was on TV the other night, and it had an Australian who was climbing to the top of Mount Everest and he was interviewing his Sherpa. His Sherpa was in the interview and he said, "You know, I feel like we're almost, like, using you, because you suffer all the danger." The Sherpas are the ones who, you know, do all the dangerous stuff and take all the packs up for the rich, white people who want to go up to Mount Everest. And he's got this Sherpa on camera and saying, you know, "Are we abusing you?" And the Sherpa says, "No. When we're climbing we're all one family." And my husband turned to me and he said, "That's the WPA right there," right? That on camera, the Sherpa has to say, "When we're climbing, we're all one family." So I think that the power dynamics in these interviews and thinking about their production will be useful beyond even thinking about slavery.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: But other circumstances where the power differential is such that the person cannot openly speak truth. And how do you speak truth covertly? I think that that's a very useful thing for students. So they could be used in that way to talk about other kinds of interviews, oral histories, or contexts where the power situation is similar.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Dr. Lynn Lyerly, thank you so much for your scholarship, your research, your insights, your suggestions, as well as your reminders. This has just really been an informative and helpful interview. And I'm sure our teachers will really benefit from it as well as their and our students. So thank you so much.

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly: It was a pleasure to talk to you, Hasan.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Cynthia Lynn Lyerly is an associate professor of history at Boston College. She and Bethany Jay co-edited Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, which won the 2018 James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association. Dr. Lyerly is finishing work on a biography of Southern writer Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re the publishers of the collection of essays Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. Throughout this series, we have featured scholars to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that award-winning collection. We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials, which are available at Tolerance.org/podcasts. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching the history of American slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at Tolerance.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks to Dr. Lyerly for sharing her insights with us. This podcast is produced by Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our Associate Producer, with additional support from Barrett Golding. Gabriel Smith provides content guidance. And Kate Shuster is our Executive Producer. Our theme song is “Different Heroes” by A Tribe Called Red, featuring Northern Voice, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

 

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Resources and Readings

• Sarah Shear and Meredith McCoy, What's in a name? A note on terminology
• Dr. Debbie Reese, Teaching Hard History, Episode 6: Teaching Slavery through Children's Literature, Part 2
• Teaching Hard History: K–5 Framework, Essential Knowledge 3 “The rich cultures of Indigenous people persisted despite the colonial invasion.”
• Teaching Hard History: K–5 Framework, Essential Knowledge 15 “In every place and time, enslaved people sought freedom”
• Teaching Hard History: K–5 Framework, Essential Knowledge 16 “Enslaved people worked to preserve their home cultures while creating new traditions”
• National Museum of the American Indian, Native Knowledge 360°

Guests

Meredith McCoy (Chippewa), American Studies and History, Carleton College

Lakota Pochedley (Pottawattamie), Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Gun Lake Tribe

Leilani Sabzalian (Alutiiq), Indigenous Studies in Education, University of Oregon

Sarah Shear, Social Studies and Multicultural Education, University of Washington—Bothell

References:

• Turtle Island Social Studies Collective
• Combahee River Collective
• Sandy Grande (Quechua), Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought
• Leilani Sabzalian, Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools
• Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is not a metaphor
• Thomas King (Cherokee), The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
• United Nations, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People
• Montana, Indian Education for All
• Understanding Native Minnesota
• Dr. Stephanie Fryburg (Tulalip), Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots
• American Studies Journal, Designing a Teaching Unit on Chris Eyre’s Skins
• Confederated Tribes of Coos, Tribal Court and Peacegiving
• Chinook Indian Nation, A Letter to the President
• Christine Sleeter, Critical Family History
• Philip Deloria, The Invention of Thanksgiving: Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday, The New Yorker
• LaDonna Harris (Comanche), Indigeneity, an alternative worldview: four R's (relationship, responsibility, reciprocity, redistribution) vs. two P's (power and profit)
• First Nations Development Institute, Reclaiming Native Truth
• Lewis and Clark Trail, Tribal Legacy Project
• Native Web, Native Newspapers
• Adrienne Keene (Cherokee) and Matika Wilbur (Swinomish/Tulalip), All My Relations (podcast)
• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese), An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
• Leilani Sabzalian, Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools
• Learning for Justice, What Is Settler-Colonialism?

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Throughout this season, we’ve been outlining how teaching the history of Indigenous enslavement is critical to understanding the history and legacy of colonialism in North America. And that’s even more of a challenge when talking about Indigenous identity is new to most teachers. And most state standards don't offer much guidance or support.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The Turtle Island Social Studies Collective is a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars who live and work all around the country. These four educators collaborate on research, writing and making resources available to counter colonialism in social studies education and to amplify the work of Indigenous studies scholars and change-makers. My co-host Meredith McCoy is a part of the collective, and she’s going to bring us into a conversation with her creative community.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: As a teacher, this work can be difficult when you’re on your own. But building professional learning communities can be vital to sustain and grow your practice. This collective is an inspiring model, and I'm glad to share their work with you. I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material, and offering practical classroom exercises.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In our second season, we are expanding our focus to better support elementary school educators, to spend more time with teachers who are doing this work in the classroom, and to understand the often-hidden history of the enslavement of Indigenous people in what is currently the United States.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Talking to students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery. Our social studies classrooms play a big role in shaping how our students understand the world. We need to take a close look at what we’re actually teaching them about Indigenous identities through our history, civics and government curriculums.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In this episode, we’re going to hear from Meredith McCoy, Lakota Pochedley, Leilani Sabzalian, and Sarah Shear: the members of the Turtle Island Social Studies Collective. They offer us many insights, including the significance of our language choices, the context of treaties and tribal sovereignty, the need to incorporate Indigenous resistance and resilience, and dispelling myths of the erasure and invisibility of Native peoples. Throughout this episode, our guests will refer to the K-5 Framework for Teaching Hard History from Teaching Tolerance,citing specific essential knowledges. If you’d like to follow along, there is a link in the episode description. Or you can find the framework online at tolerance.org/hardhistory, all one word.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy!

Meredith McCoy: Welcome to a special edition of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. Today I'm in Austin, Texas at the National Council for the Social Studies annual meeting. And I'm so excited to welcome the Turtle Island Social Studies Collective to the podcast. Welcome, folks!

Sarah Shear: Thank you.

Leilani Sabzalian: Hi.

Lakota Pochedley: Boozhoo.

Leilani Sabzalian: Thanks. Happy to be here.

Meredith McCoy: I'm joined here in person by Leilani Sabzalian and Sarah Shear and via phone from Kalamazoo, Michigan, by Lakota Pochedley. These women are some of my scholar heroes, and they're my closest collaborators. And together we formed the Turtle Island Social Studies Collective. As a group of four Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars working together, we are committed to countering colonialism in social studies education, and to amplifying the work of Indigenous change-makers.

Meredith McCoy: Two of the scholars in our collective are Anishinaabekweg. Lakota is Potawatomi and I'm Turtle Mountain Ojibwe. For us, this idea of Turtle Island is really important, and it's part of our creation story. And we use the term Turtle Island to draw attention to the importance of ongoing relationships between Indigenous peoples and our homelands, and to the decolonial emphasis on Indigenous people getting our land back, as discussed by scholars like Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang.

Meredith McCoy: This matters in social studies education. All education after all, occurs on Indigenous lands. Now, any label runs the risk of erasing or homogenizing Indigenous peoples' multi-faceted experiences and ways of knowing, but we see our name as a way to reflect the shared experiences of colonization, our solidarity with one another and our continued commitment to anti-colonial education on this continent.

Meredith McCoy: I'm so excited to be here with the other members of the collective. And a note to our listeners: Native folks, especially those of us working in Indigenous Studies, when we introduce ourselves we often start in our language if we know any of our language. You may not understand exactly what we're saying, but what you will hear is us grounding ourselves in our language, and that's an important way of how we present ourselves in public spaces.

Meredith McCoy: Lakota, would you please introduce yourself to our listeners, however it feels comfortable to you.

Lakota Pochedley: Bozho jayék, Bodwéwadmikwe ndaw. Shishibéniyek ndebéndagwes. Mang o ndodém. Lakota Pochedley ndezhnëkas. Mnowedokwet nnishnabé noswen. Cleveland, Ohio ndë wtthbya. Kalamazoo, Michigan ėdayan. Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Bodwéwadmi nmiktthéwi.

Lakota Pochedley: Hello, everyone. My name is Lakota Pochedley. I am Citizen Band Potawatomi. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and then moved to begin working for my tribal nation, Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Shawnee, Oklahoma nearly 10 years ago. During that time I was attending my graduate program in Curriculum and Instruction in Social Studies Education at the University of Texas, so I had the opportunity to do my full-time student teaching in Oklahoma. I recently moved up to Michigan about two years ago, and now I currently work as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians, or they're also known as Gun Lake Tribe here in Southwestern Michigan.

Meredith McCoy: This is one of the things that I love about the collective - that we're a group of folks who are connected to communities. Some of us are working in practitioner contexts and some of us are working in higher education. Leilani, you're one of the folks working in higher education. Would you say hello to our listeners?

Leilani Sabzalian: Cama'i. Gui Leilani Sabzalian. Oregon-mi suullianga. My name's Leilani Sabzalian. I'm Alutiiq (Alaska Native), but I was born and raised in Oregon. I'm currently an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies and Education at the University of Oregon, where I teach courses like Elementary Social Studies Methods and courses in social foundations for future teachers. I also lead in-service professional development for teachers, and I'm a co-director now of our Sapsik’ʷałá native teacher education program, where we prepare Native teachers to teach and work in tribal communities.

Meredith McCoy: Thanks. And the next member of our collective, Sarah Shear. Sarah, hi.

Sarah Shear: Hi, I'm Sarah Shear. I'm an Assistant Professor of Social Studies and Multicultural Education at the University of Washington, Bothell. My primary teaching responsibilities at UW-Bothell are to work with our certification students in elementary and soon to be secondary social studies, and I've also been collaborating with my Indigenous education colleagues at other campuses at UW and at Western Washington University to write and implement the new tribal sovereignty coursework requirement for all teacher certification students in the state of Washington.

Meredith McCoy: And in case this is your first time listening in to Teaching Hard History, a framework for teaching American slavery, my name is Meredith McCoy. Boozhoo indinawemaaganidog. Meredith McCoy indishinikaaz. Chejauk nindodem. Nokom onji Mikinock Wajiw, gaye ndonji Northfield, Minnesota. I'm currently an Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where I teach Native Studies. My background is in social studies education as a middle school social studies teacher. I taught sixth- and eighth-grade social studies in Tennessee and Georgia. And I'm so thrilled to now be able to work with future teachers in my role of teaching history.

Meredith McCoy: So on today's episode, we're going to walk through a variety of topics that are really important in thinking about how teachers can bring the experiences of Indigenous peoples into the classroom. If you happen to have the website near you or the framework printed out, you may want to have it on hand. Some of what we'll be doing today will be citing directly from the framework in terms of strategies and language that we think provide really great opportunities for the classroom.

Meredith McCoy: I'd like to go ahead and start us off with terminology, because I know that it's really hard for teachers to even know where to start when they may not feel like they even know the right words. So before we do anything else, I want to turn to the right words. Teachers often ask what's the correct term to use when they're thinking about preparing lessons about Indigenous peoples' experiences. Seriously, this is one of the most common questions we all field in our work and in our personal lives. And it's a good question to ask. If teachers are going to do the hard work of teaching about Indigenous people's relationship to American slavery, they have to feel comfortable using the right language and the right terminology.

Meredith McCoy: So in recognition of the range of Indigenous experiences in what is currently the United States, we'd like to take a moment to explain the issues around the most common terms: American Indian, Native American and Indigenous. And I'll start here. In my house growing up, I used American Indian most commonly because my dad went to law school and studied Indian law. And in policy and law and education, American Indian is often the term that gets used. But at some point in college, I started realizing that most of my peers were using Native, so I gradually transitioned to referring to myself as a Native person. And of course, throughout all of that, I was always thinking first of myself as Turtle Mountain, and that my dad was a citizen of Turtle Mountain, that my grandmother was a citizen of Turtle Mountain, and that my identity was therefore wrapped up in this idea of citizenship to my particular nation. And I also like to use the term Indigenous to gesture towards international solidarity with other Indigenous nations and these shared experiences of colonization. Lakota, what do you tend to use most often?

Lakota Pochedley: At Gun Lake, I serve as their Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, working in the legal realm. And so a lot of my day to day work is with various federal agencies, state agencies and local government. So those terms of "American Indian," "tribe," are extremely important. I'm referencing them because they're listed in our constitution, because they're used in our laws, and so it's really important to continue to use that language. But also, I was a student teacher and did community education in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and what became really important to me was listening to my students, hearing what they preferred. And there's so many tribal nations down there, not only are you necessarily working with students from your own community, you're working with students from Absentee Shawnee Tribe, and Sac and Fox Nation, and Cherokee Nation, and Chickasaw Nation, and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe. And so that's where those language terms become really important.

Lakota Pochedley: While folks will use general terms like Native and Indian, when you listen carefully, you'll hear those other terms: Neshnabé, Stecate, Dene. And so you have to think about the context, and for what purpose are you discussing these topics about Indigenous people? Also when you're thinking more globally, “Indigenous” comes into play as well.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah. And I'm so glad that you brought up the idea of listening to Native youth and respecting whatever Native youth tell you in terms of what is the term that they feel comfortable using for themselves. And I think that that's really where this question is coming from teachers, is they're not wanting to speak out of turn or to speak incorrectly. And so I wonder Leilani, could you also speak to sort of how you navigate this in thinking about working with both Native and non-Native teachers in your teacher preparation work? How do you coach them in thinking about what is the right language to use and how they might engage in these conversations?

Leilani Sabzalian: Yeah. So one thing I do when working with teachers is think about the way our reach for a single term to perfectly narrate a diverse Native experience is itself part of the problem, right? Of course, I want teachers to have the correct terms. I want them to know what to do. But it changes depending on what community you're in, it changes across generations. It changes according to who you're talking to. I identify as Alutiiq, but some in my family and community identify as Aleut. There are others who have reclaimed Sugpiaq, which is our name in our own language that means "the real people." And so I think it's important to recognize that there's these differences and to, of course, listen, as Lakota said, to what communities want. You know, I find one of the most useful ways of responding to this question from teachers is to share a quote by Cherokee scholar Thomas King from his book Inconvenient Indian. In the preface, he writes, "Lately, Indians have become First Nations in Canada and Native Americans in the United States. But the fact of the matter is that there has never been a good collective noun because there never was a collective to begin with." And in this brief sentence, you know, King really historicizes and troubles this desire for the proper name. And I want teachers to teach this sentence in classrooms.

Leilani Sabzalian: I think students could examine the various collective nouns and think about how they, in one way, kind of collapse the distinct homelands and languages and knowledge systems and histories of Indigenous nations and communities. But then also collective nouns have been so useful for our struggles, whether or not we want to call ourselves Indian, American Indian, Native American, Indigenous people. So I would love for teachers to teach about the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, for example, which came from strategic and global organizing by Indigenous peoples to assert their collective right to dignity and humanity. Or as another example, teachers could teach about the National Congress of American Indians, which has been a way for Native people and Native Nations to unite and try to hold the U.S. accountable for that nation-to-nation relationship between the federal government and tribal nations. Notice that it's on the one hand, American Indian, on the other Indigenous, but both are working to support this collective struggle. And at the same time, Indigenous, American Indian, those don't really get at what it means to support a pathway towards Diné sovereignty, a pathway towards Alutiiq sovereignty, a pathway towards Ojibwe sovereignty, right? Because these are distinct futures for our people, and so they require distinct consideration.

Meredith McCoy: That was amazing. Beautiful answers! Holy smokes.

Sarah Shear: I can go home now.

Meredith McCoy: I know. We can all go home now. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lakota and Leilani for those beautiful reflections. These terms can be confusing at first. And the thing is that there are complex histories connected to each of the most common terms. Indian Country has always been an incredibly diverse place, and that's actually something that Teaching Hard History emphasizes in our framework. In Essential Knowledge Three of the Framework for Teaching American Slavery, we talk about the necessity of thinking about the diversity of Indigenous peoples. No single term can accurately work for all Indigenous people, and every person is going to have their own preference around what the correct term is to use.

Meredith McCoy: As you think about how to introduce these concepts into your classroom, take some time to really reflect on your own. Listen to Native people around you as Lakota is saying, listen to the words that people use for themselves. And if you're ever in doubt, just ask. It's really important that we call people by the names that they want to be called. It's a sign of respect, and it's something that we can all do. In addition to being thoughtful about the words that we use for Indigenous peoples, we know that tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, Indigenous governance is a critical area of discussion for Native and non-Native students alike. And yet this is something that many students across the United States are largely unaware of.

Meredith McCoy: But when we think about tribal sovereignty, it's important for teachers to understand—I know that this may be new terminology to a lot of folks—that tribal sovereignty is Native Nations' inherent right to self-governance. And it's something that predates the United States. Our inherent right to self-governance was affirmed by our treaties with the United States as they were engaging in nation-to-nation relationships with our governments. It's something that has been reaffirmed through statutes, through Supreme Court decisions, and it's important to remember that this is not something that is gifted to Native Nations. It is something that we already possess. And when Native Nations exercise their sovereignty, it is their inherent right to do so. And that's why when we think about the various levels of governance, we think about the federal government, and then states and tribal nations are sort of on an equal footing, and then local governments. And that's something that's going to be new to a lot of teachers, it's going to be new to a lot of students.

Meredith McCoy: And so the framework talks about this. The Teaching Hard History framework notes that, "Indigenous peoples have always governed their own nations in the lands that are now the United States." But social studies research, including some research in which the members of the collective have been involved, shows that state social studies standards don't offer a lot of guidance to teachers and neither do textbooks, especially when it comes to talking about Indigenous people after 1900 or Indigenous people in terms of our right, our inherent right to self-governance, our tribal sovereignty. Leilani, I'd like to turn to you. How should teachers be thinking about tribal sovereignty and Indigenous governance when they're in their classrooms?

Leilani Sabzalian: I think we need to discuss why these concepts are not currently taught in our classrooms, why they're not currently in our curriculum, why they're not currently emphasized in our text. It doesn't feel good to know that Native Nations with inherent sovereignty that predate the United States have been subject to violence, or were forcibly removed, or were dispossessed through treaties, or were overrun by settlers that illegally squatted on their homelands and then retroactively tried to legalize their presence there.

Leilani Sabzalian: So this knowledge doesn't feel good. And knowing this has implications, right? It makes us responsible for this legacy. It makes us responsible for redressing this violence. It makes us responsible for even considering repatriation. Sometimes it's easier to think of Native people as cultural communities rather than nations that have been wronged and may have legitimate land claims and a legitimate right to repatriate their homelands. And we know historically that knowledge has been created even for that very purpose of maintaining systems of violence. Indigenous peoples were not savages, but they were talked about as savages to justify colonization, to justify the theft of Indigenous lands, to justify assimilation. And Indigenous homelands weren't empty, right? They were framed that way to justify settlement and the development of settler societies on top of these lands. So I think this context was really important for teachers to understand. And then I think some of that context should be brought into classrooms as discussion.

Leilani Sabzalian: For example, when Native Nations and Native people actually exercise their rights, their sovereign rights, their rights to fish, for example, that are affirmed in treaties, they often have to defy the state in order to exercise their inherent rights. And they oftentimes have and continue to face hostility by people for exercising those very rights.

Meredith McCoy: Sarah, how do you see the framework making an intervention into the ways that Indigenous peoples are usually reflected in social studies curriculum?

Sarah Shear: This is a really important intervention because so much of what we have seen in the way that particularly U.S. history standards and textbooks have been written, is about the ultimate erasure of Indigenous peoples. It's very much the story of first contact with Pilgrims and the narrative around creating Thanksgiving. At first friend and then foe, because the United States needed to set up its reasoning for military movements west. And that is really the frame in which the standards and the books cast Indigenous peoples. And so the framework helps to further not only introduce students and teachers to additional histories and then also making the connections to contemporary conversations, but challenges the way that social studies has been very carefully crafted. Indigenous peoples were only in this box related to U.S. history, and African Americans are in this box related to U.S. history. So it really stretches our understanding. There were so many more layers, so many more interactions, so much more insidious decision-making on the part of the United States. It helps teachers introduce students to those complexities that are really important for us to understand why we are where we are now.

Meredith McCoy: You've done a lot of research, along with Leilani, about the ways in which state standards think about tribal governance. And I'm hoping that you can maybe share some of your findings with the listeners.

Sarah Shear: I led a team of researchers when I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri, and we looked at all 50 states and the District of Columbia's K-12 U.S. history standards. And what we saw as we unpacked them for their representations and inclusions of Indigenous peoples and Native Nations was that approximately 87 percent of any of the inclusions were pre-1900 in the U.S. history standards. And they were always framed in the erasure movement, in the westward expansion savagery that Leilani was talking about earlier as part of the reasoning, the justification for theft and for murder. The history study was in 2015, just as Washington’s Since Time Immemorial was coming out and Montana was doing its work with Indian Ed For All, and other states were beginning their initiatives. We see some states doing some really powerful work now, but we're still seeing these predominant erasures of Indigeneity and tribal sovereignty and nationhood.

Sarah Shear: So I like to give one example from the seventh grade in Minnesota. So here is one that includes tribal sovereignty and it reads, "The United States establishes and maintains relationships and interacts with Indigenous nations and other sovereign nations, and plays a key role in world affairs." Now simultaneously in the seventh grade standards of Minnesota, they have another standard that reads, "The United States government has specific functions that are determined by the way that power is delegated and controlled among various bodies. The three levels: federal, state, local, and the three branches: legislative, executive, judicial of government." So what I often think about is when I'm reading these standards and putting myself in the position of when I was a classroom teacher is how to make sense of documents.

Sarah Shear: What do I do when in one grade they have an inclusion that talks about tribal nations as nations in relationship to the United States and an erasure? And I think that's where a really important conversation comes into play with teachers about how do we form our lesson plans? Because when you look at the standards, there's very little support or materials. It's just there. And where is the advocacy in the work once these documents are made to support teachers bringing these conversations to their students?

Meredith McCoy: And that sort of overt erasure that you're talking about, where a standard might list federal, state and local governments and not talk about tribal governments at all, feels to me like we're putting demands on teachers to teach this content when they themselves never received it as students. And at least in my own teacher prep program, we certainly didn't cover these topics. So we really need to be thinking about the ways in which we're building in some scaffolding for teachers so that we're not just throwing them into the deep end. And I hope that that's some of the work that comes out of projects like these, where we are building up some support systems and some resources.

Sarah Shear: Particularly with the civics and government standards, if we really start to dig in and have the conversation about teaching students about tribal government and sovereignty, it forces us to confront who we are in the United States and what has been done. And it implicates greatly the role of social studies in supporting the problem.

Leilani Sabzalian: This idea that some knowledge is avoided or is suppressed, that has everything to do with slavery, about teaching enslavement. You know, people have avoided serious engagement with the institution of slavery just like they've avoided engagement with colonization or really thinking deeply about the implications of sovereignty because it represents difficult knowledge, because it may not feel good to know about its history or its legacy or its implications. I think that's important context for teachers to think about.

Meredith McCoy: Leilani, I think that’s exactly right. Lakota, I want to turn it over to you because when we think about tribal governance and your work working for a tribal government, the work of Native Nations is so important, and it really feels to me like most folks in the United States just don't see the work that Native Nations are doing. And so when you're thinking about, for example, what students in your area should know about the work that Native Nations, tribal governments are doing, how do you think about the way that that should impact the way teachers approach, for example, civics or social studies?

Lakota Pochedley: Most importantly, what I always emphasize is that we are dual citizens. We are citizens of our nations. And it's important not just for our youth to understand that, but for all youth to understand that. One of the most impactful lessons that I ever taught, it was in a U.S. history class while student teaching. We did a lesson specifically around Manifest Destiny in Oklahoma, but at that time was known as Indian Territory. The students were looking at various treaties for the tribal nations in Oklahoma and how they came to have their territories be in Oklahoma through forced removal. The treaty that comes to mind is the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations. And it is their removal treaty. And in the treaty, it uses the language of Choctaw Country. When the students saw that, Native and non-Native students, when they read that parts of Oklahoma were supposed to be Choctaw Country, it totally changed their thinking around why it was important for them to understand tribal sovereignty.

Lakota Pochedley: Also, there's four tribes headquartered in or around Shawnee, Oklahoma. And then another tribal nation that's just 20 miles down the road. More than likely many of these students, they're having some sort of daily interaction with the communities and those tribal governments, whether it is using any of their enterprises, potentially working for those tribal governments. Even if they end up marrying someone from one of those tribal nations, these things are embedded in everything that we see around us, but we are taught not to see them. So whether it is tribal police cars, it is our Indian health clinics, it is our business enterprises, or as simply as you can drive down a single stretch of road and pass "Entering Citizen Potawatomi Nation," and then 20 miles down the road "Entering Seminole Nation." These things are ingrained in the landscapes around us.

Meredith McCoy: We have to help people understand that tribal sovereignty is not some sort of zero sum game where we're trying to take something away from people. We have an inherent right to govern and an inherent right to protect and promote the interests of our people. And that usually ends up in benefits for non-Native folks as well.

Lakota Pochedley: Absolutely.

Meredith McCoy: Part of what you're saying that really is so true is when we are taught not to notice, that then permeates our entire lives. So there are real ramifications for the kind of erasure in the standards that Sarah and Leilani are talking about, that when folks are taught from a very young age that Native people are not around and they're taught that through our media, they're taught that through our schools, then what they're learning is this ingrained behavior of not noticing our presence. And this is what Dr. Stephanie Fryburg talks about as this new form of racism against Native people. That invisibility is the current form of racism and oppression against Native folks. Sarah, do you have an example of how this works?

Sarah Shear: I had an instant flashback to a student comment in a film class that I taught for elementary pre-service teachers, and we watched Chris Eyre's Skins. And at the end of the film we started discussing what they were seeing, what they were feeling while they were watching and connecting it to the readings we had done. And one student said, "They were dressed like regular people." That's an exact quote. I will never forget. And I said, "Please tell us more." Her entire mindframe of Indigeneity was the Thanksgiving stories that she learned in elementary school and watching Disney's Pocahontas. So to see Indigenous peoples in a contemporary context driving down the road, having family gatherings, was completely out of her frame of this is normal. And I think there's a great implication to how education in the United States has been the driving force of this monster.

Meredith McCoy: Leilani, I know you've thought a lot about this, too. Do you want to jump in here?

Leilani Sabzalian: I've been thinking about what are tools and frameworks I can offer teachers for them to read and interrupt the colonial logics that they see in curriculum and to complement and challenge that curriculum. And so two core concepts I'm thinking right now that teachers need to carry with them at all times are one, colonization and two, sovereignty. So we should just assume that your package curriculum is embedded with colonial logics. And when you know that, your role as a teacher, even if you don't have the perfect curriculum, is to question that curriculum along with your students. You ask questions with your students, like when explorers are going off to chart new lands, you say, "Were these new lands? Were these empty lands?" You know, "Were these discovered?" You just ask those questions and you trouble that with your students. And then just presuming that Native nationhood and sovereignty exist, this is an inherent fact, and helping your students to understand it, and even work in service of it.

Leilani Sabzalian: You know, I've been working with some fourth-grade teachers who had their students learn about the Chinook Nation's struggles for restoration of their political status as nations. And their class wrote letters, right? They didn't go, "Right. Save your letters," they looked on the Chinook Nations website and they said, "Hey, this is how you can help us. Write a letter. Write a letter to the president saying why this is important." And so these fourth graders, I think for a couple of years now have been writing letters and just recently received one from the president back. So, you know, look to the Nation's websites. Native Nations' websites are one of the richest sources that teachers can use Native nations' websites are one of the richest sources that—that teachers can use and that students can inquire within. You know, if they go to the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, for example, their website in Oregon, they'll learn about new initiatives they're engaging in. You know, they have an app that some teachers I work with download, a language app so students can learn about this Nation's active efforts to revitalize their language. If you look up the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua & Siuslaw Indians, right? They have the peace-giving court. Restorative justice, for example, is really being talked about as this new thing in schools, but it's a long-standing traditional practice among many Native Nations.

Leilani Sabzalian: And so their students would learn about how that's a tribally-specific restorative justice practice in that community. So tuning into the idea that colonization is always at work in curriculum, and helping your students detect and interrupt its logics, and then the other that you assume that Native Nations exist, you assume they have inherent sovereignty, and now your goal is to help your students learn about that. When you see standards that talk about local, state and federal governments you think, "Could there be other governments?" Talk to your students about tribal governments. That brings that concept of sovereignty to bear.

Meredith McCoy: Leilani, I think what you're saying that really is so important is that when students learn that these are things that they don't know, and this includes when teachers learn the things that they don't know, they're often angry. And they want to know, well, why was I not taught this? And what can I do about it? And one of the first things that we can do in helping them process that anger into something constructive is say, "Okay, let's listen to what Native Nations are telling us." Sometimes this is doing exactly what those students did, and it's just writing a letter in support, amplifying the voices of Native people who are already saying the things that they need. Sometimes it's going to a march. Sometimes it's supporting local tribal economies by buying local and supporting Native businesses. Whatever it is, there are tangible steps that people can put that righteous anger towards to support Native people and make sure that they're then engaging in their own personal reparations. Sarah, I want to just take a little aside here. You know Christine Sleeter, and you know her family's story of engaging in her own version of reparations. Can you just speak for a second about how she, as an educator and as a private citizen, has talked publicly about her family's experiences?

Sarah Shear: Part of Christine Sleeter's work was documenting the land theft and the claims that her family made in inheritance. The book particularly related to her critical family history, and she calculated the amount $250,000 that she returned to the Ute Nation. And one of the things that she's built from that, in addition to writing Inheritance, is having a website space for settlers like myself where people are sharing their own stories of critical family histories. And I think that's a really important site and space for us to begin to learn how to do it, and to see how other people are doing it and how they are not only taking responsibility, but taking the action beyond it. We have to confront where we've come from, who our families have been and who they are, in order to think about the future. And I think Christine's done a really amazing job of shining a light to think about that hard work, and the ways that we can be more than just saying, "I'm sorry." The apology has to come with an action of some kind. And so I think about my own family's background when I was reading Christine Sleeter's work, and the particular context of my mother's father's family being the Lewises of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Yes.

Meredith McCoy: Sorry, Sarah is responding because my eyes just got real big. Things I didn't know about my good friend.

Lakota Pochedley: Are we allowed to laugh on this?

Meredith McCoy: Yeah, we're allowed to laugh.

Sarah Shear: And, you know, as ...

Meredith McCoy: That's a real skeleton in the closet.

Sarah Shear: You know, as Meriwether's cousin—so as I've come to more fully understand the relationship I have to colonization and the fact that Meriwether Lewis is my cousin, it's—I know. It's a lot, y'all. I think about what I can do because I can't, even though I would love to, give back the Louisiana Purchase. But what I can do is make my life's work commitment to changing the curriculum and committing to working alongside y'all and other Indigenous educators and communities, to confronting what's in the textbooks, what's in the standards, and how we are preparing future teachers and working with our current teachers to do the important work and change the way that we talk about U.S. history in relation to Indigenous peoples, and really infusing tribal sovereignty and greater understandings there.

Leilani Sabzalian: I think what you're saying is so important because you don't need to be Native to challenge colonialism, right? You don't need to be Native to challenge curriculum. You don't need to be Native to create space and curriculum for Native voices, to create partnerships with Native people and communities. And so I hope, you know, in your story, other teachers who are non-Native can find themselves in this work and find a way to take up some of these commitments because, you know, in my opinion, we need all hands on deck. We need everybody on board to do this work. This is a shared responsibility, right? This isn't just the work of Native people. This is everyone's work.

Meredith McCoy: You know, Leilani, this is a conversation we can have with teachers, but also how should we be talking with students about these ideas of reparations or restitution?

Leilani Sabzalian: Yeah, I think one of the most promising aspects of social studies instruction and curriculum is that kids can have a chance to think critically and talk about, you know, controversial issues, about deep-seated dilemmas that we have in our society. And I feel like so much imagination and creativity is really wasted in our society sometimes because we spend time with adults talking about issues, but we are so deeply socialized into these systems that we are trying to work against. But kids, they are not invested in property the way we are, you know? They are not socialized into the systems the way we are. Like, I would love for teachers to put children's minds to work, to put youth's mind to work or teenagers, their minds to work on issues like restitution. What does it mean if we account for the legacy of attempted genocide and colonization? What does it mean to engage in processes of restitution and repatriation? What does it mean when we think of the history of enslavement and its ongoing legacy, to think about and enact reparations? And then even more so, what about the tensions between those two projects, right? I think kids are maybe the best positioned in our society to take that on and think about those, because they're not so deeply rooted in the system that we have inherited. They can think outside of it, and we should listen.

Meredith McCoy: This amazing, groundbreaking report called Reclaiming Native Truth just came out from the First Nations Development Institute and IllumiNative, that really describes the state of visibility of Native people and the perceptions of non-Native people of Indigenous America. In light of that amazing piece of research Sarah, why is it so important for you to center the stories of Indigenous peoples in social studies?

Sarah Shear: I keep coming back to this conversation I recently had with Tulalip educator Chelsea Craig about teacher preparation, and she said when we're thinking about the history of colonization in the United States, the ongoing efforts of Indigenous Nations, it's the least we can do. In one statistic coming out of the report, it was a massive number, I think it was something like 40 percent of people replying to the various survey questions did not even think Indigenous peoples were still alive. Social studies is guilty of helping make that number what it is, because if the history standards still say that Indigenous peoples stopped existing in 1900, there's only one conclusion to draw if you're in the fifth grade. And so the least we can do is take responsibility for that in social studies, and do the hard work to address it, addressing the written curriculum, building structures within our teacher education programs, and building relationships with our tribal nation community members, to also help in-service teachers with professional development and with resources and partnerships across organizations. It's a collective responsibility.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Sarah. And Leilani, how does that resonate with you and what are you thinking about?

Leilani Sabzalian: You know of course, I'm thinking of my own two Native children that could be sitting in your classroom. Or if there are no Native children in the classroom. This is our responsibility. I think that students need curriculum that's honest, that affirms Native peoples and knowledge systems and nationhood, that teaches an honest account of our history and our legacy, gives hope for the future. And thinking about the Reclaiming Native Truth Report, another fact in there, in the study led by Stephanie Fryberg, who's also Tulalip, said that learning about systemic oppression was the only information tested that led to significantly greater support for protecting tribal sovereignty, eliminating Native-themed mascots and providing Native communities with resources meant to promote resource equity. And so I think this project of Teaching Hard History, teaching Indigenous enslavement within the broader institution of slavery, can be a catalyst for social change, can be a catalyst for people to recognize people's dignity, their struggles, their aspirations, you know, and work towards a—I don't wanna be like, "I believe the children are the future."

Meredith McCoy: [laughs] We're keeping that in. We are.

Leilani Sabzalian: Teaching about hard history is a necessary step towards a more honest and promising and hopeful future.

Meredith McCoy: And the desire for that is borne out in the Reclaiming Native Truth Report too, right? One of their findings was that 72 percent of Americans support significant changes to the curriculum, such that more accurate history is being taught about Indigenous peoples. Lakota, how are you thinking about the importance of centering Indigenous people's experiences in the classroom?

Lakota Pochedley: We're conducting an activity during the after-school program back in Oklahoma, and we were talking about tribal sovereignty, encouraging students to think through their experiences as citizens of tribal nations, but also existing within the larger framework of Oklahoma. One of the comments that a student made was that they would not ever discuss these things in school because they exist in the shadows from everyone else. Even in their schools, they didn't even feel seen. And so understanding how that operates on a much larger scale as well, and the erasure and invisibility of Indigenous peoples. I think understanding those small personal experiences, it really helps to better understand why this work is necessary, because this is impacting people daily, and understanding who they are and what it means to belong in their communities.

Leilani Sabzalian: That was beautiful, Lakota.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah. And that is so heartbreaking, and is such a critical example of why this work is so necessary.

Lakota Pochedley: And I think so many Native students can point to an experience like that. You know, I even think back to my own experience with my AP U.S. history teacher in high school where after class I went up to him and asked why we had skipped a significant portion of U.S. history, that is Indian history as well, and he told me flat out, it doesn't matter. It's not on the test. So we all have these moments where we recognize the impacts of this legacy of not teaching these histories. And that's why we need to bring these histories to the forefront.

Meredith McCoy: And I hope that that lights a fire under everybody who's listening, because what you're speaking to is the importance of change in our classrooms, the importance of how we talk to our families, how we talk to our communities, and the importance of structural change, right? We have to change the tests, because that is clearly a metric of what we value as a society. We have to change the standards. We have to make sure that this is changed in statute so that it is rendered permanent. And then also that we create the supports to actually implement the statute, whether that is financial or curricular support. We cannot just nod to this and act like we've done our jobs.

Lakota Pochedley: Preach!

Leilani Sabzalian: #Fact.

Meredith McCoy: What we know as Indigenous people is our people have always resisted settler colonial oppression. This is not something that we've taken lying down. And it's so critical as we teach these histories that we talk about settler violence truthfully, and we have to help our students and our teachers really reckon with these hard histories. And while we're doing that, we also need to emphasize Indigenous agency and Indigenous resilience. And it is so important that we not get weighed down in only teaching this through victim narratives. The framework in Essential Knowledge 15 talks about how enslaved people have fought for their freedom. Teachers can think about centering stories about Indigenous people fighting for Indigenous liberation by connecting discussions of contemporary activism with longer legacies of Indigenous resistance. Like, for example, talking about the Pueblo Revolt. Also, the framework talks about how Indigenous peoples have fought for the resurgence of our life ways and the well-being of our nations through, for example, focusing on language revitalization and the centering of Indigenous world views. This is what Leanne Simpson talks about really beautifully as Indigenous resurgence. So, Leilani, would you share with us a little bit about why it is so important to discuss Indigenous resilience and agency with all K-5 students, Native and non-Native?

Leilani Sabzalian: You know, two thinkers come to mind that really help me answer this question. And the first is Eve Tuck. She's an Unangax scholar who has thought really carefully about research and representation that may cause people and communities and students to see themselves as damaged or as broken. She says that in exposing the pain or the hardship or the violence that communities have experienced, that we inadvertently risk inviting the public to think of these communities as damaged or broken. And worse yet, we risk viewing ourselves as damaged or broken, even if our goal is to expose this pain or violence in an effort to foster awareness or social change. And so to counter this, Tuck argues for desire-based frameworks that still account for the violence that we've experienced, but that also emphasize resistance, resilience, wisdom and the knowledge of our communities. And so that lens of desire, more than content to be taught in curriculum is a framework, it's a lens, it's a way of viewing communities, of talking about communities that teachers really need to bring with them to the curriculum.

Leilani Sabzalian: Another person that's really helpful here is Gerald Vizenor. He's an Anishinaabe scholar, and he coined the term "Survivance" to account for this idea that our communities have always done more than survive, and they have always done more than resist. Our communities have actively created spaces for their humanity and for their dignity and for their own aspirations. So this is another lens that I think teachers can bring to curriculum. And so this is why I really love some of these Essential Knowledges that have been carefully crafted in the Hard History framework. So a key point underneath Number Three, for example, 3C, states that, "The rich cultures of Indigenous people persisted despite colonial invasion. And many people are working hard to support the resurgence of Indigenous languages and ways of seeing the world."

Leilani Sabzalian: Similarly, Essential Knowledge 16 states that, "Enslaved people worked to preserve their home cultures while creating new traditions." And underneath this Essential Knowledge, "Students are encouraged to learn that Native Nations continue to develop and thrive, and that Indigenous people have had a profound and enduring impact across what is now the United States." So these lenses of desire and of survivance are so beautifully embedded in the Essential Knowledge, in the framework and the content that teachers are going to teach. And then they're also a lens that teachers can bring with them to all aspects of curriculum. Number 15, I think, is another beautiful example. It says—under Essential Knowledge 15 is a component that says, "Everyday acts of resistance, such as working slowly, breaking tools, feigning illness, feigning ignorance to avoid work and running away for short periods were common." And when I read this, I thought about how children in boarding schools engaged in these very same everyday acts of resistance. You know, we learned from scholars that children marched off beat, right? They ran away. They burned down the schools. I mean, they resisted in small ways and in big, in collective ways. And so I think those lenses that some Indigenous thinkers give us, this idea of desire and survivance are really important so that kids don't see our communities as victims, but as actively, courageously, creatively contesting systems that have sought to dehumanize us.

Meredith McCoy: Leilani, that is such a beautiful reflection. Now Sarah and I both worked as co-authors on the new version of the framework that Leilani just read excerpts from, along with many other talented scholars. And Sarah, I wonder if you can point us to some of the specific things in the framework that you think we really should be thinking about and working with right away.

Sarah Shear: When you visit the framework online, there's some really amazing resources already available for you to begin thinking about using these in your lessons. And there are lessons available, too. There's over 100 primary resource documents in the student texts link within the framework. It's a really great resource because one of the things I always see and hear from teachers, and I'm sure as you're listening you're probably nodding your head, is having time to find materials. And so what's great about the framework and the work that's been done to build it is that that vetting has been done in a really careful and thoughtful way. And so you can go to the student tools and see the resources. You can also look at the teaching tools and see the six sample inquiry lessons that have already been written that can draw inspiration for beginning this work with your students, and then thinking about your own particular specific community that you could then expand in your own lesson planning.

Sarah Shear: There's additional podcast episodes, and then also additional links to other resources such as those written and created by the National Museum of the American Indian, and thinking about Native Knowledge 360, and the really thoughtful connections that the framework has made to other communities doing this work to really show you that you're not alone in this, and there are resources and lesson plans already available to get you started.

Meredith McCoy: So we know that this work is really hard. Many teachers may feel scared about entering into these conversations with students. And right now there may be a teacher listening who wants to do this work and just is discouraged. Sarah, what would you say to that teacher?

Sarah Shear: We need to lean into that feeling, especially when there's so many things on your plate. I think a great way to begin is to learn with your students, to pick up resources, to look at tribal government websites, to read the new Young Reader's version of Indigenous People's History of the United States, and read it together and pose questions together, and speak honestly with your students that you're learning too, and that teachers don't know everything. But it's important that we begin.

Leilani Sabzalian: Yeah, I think the time for this work is now. You, at this very moment, have a Native kid in your class who, if not in your classroom, has already experienced bias or stereotypes or misrepresentation or felt erased or ignored in someone else's classroom. And even if there's no Native kids in your classroom right now, this work is important. And one of the things I see happen is this endless deferral of waiting to be ready in order to teach some of this material. But there's so many things that you can do right now. You can look to the place that you live and teach as Indigenous lands, right? And learn about the Native Nations in your area. You can work in small ways to bring in contemporary Native leaders and change-makers and authors and artists and athletes to give students a sense of the vibrant presence of Native people today. You can subtly or slowly incorporate Native perspectives into your curriculum. You know, if you have to teach about Lewis and Clark, then you can look to a website like Tribal Legacy and grab some quotes from Native people about what their experiences were of the military expedition.

Leilani Sabzalian: You can teach about Native Nations as nations. And like I said, you can look to those tribal nations' websites to do so. You can challenge the power dynamics in your curriculum. You know, when you see neutral words like "exploration" and "discovery," you can remember that we told you those aren't neutral words. Those are colonial logics that are embedded in the official curriculum. And you can disrupt those with your students, alongside your students.

Lakota Pochedley: Also, as you're learning and as you're exploring these topics with your students, don't be afraid to begin reaching out, to begin building those relationships. Rather than inviting someone to come to your school, go visit those tribal nations. Take the time to visit the community. See if there's a Director of Education or Tribal Historic Preservation Officer or a Language and Culture Director that has time to sit down and speak with you, who might be able to give you an idea of community events that might be going on. And from there, you can learn about all those resources. You can get a better sense of the context. Even as you're exploring those tribal nation websites, you may come across newsletters and newspapers, and think about how you can bring in those modern narratives and expressions of governance and community relationship-building.

Meredith McCoy: When I've been working with my students this term, one of the things that we keep coming back to, including with some of my students who plan to be future social studies teachers, is the need to listen. Do the work of educating yourself and then amplify. A lot of the work that you can do is just committing yourself to learn. Learn by listening, and then share when people are asking you to share, and to engage in ways that are respectful and that center contemporary experiences. So you can read a Native newspaper, you can follow Native voices on Native Twitter. But I think the first step really is what Sarah was saying about leaning in and just committing to do the work. All of us are in this work because we believe in a different future for our students, and because we believe in the possibility of a more just and equitable relationship between Native Nations and the United States.

Meredith McCoy: When I was in grad school with Dr. Keith Richotte, who's a Turtle Mountain legal scholar, tribal court judge, he talked about Indian law as being a tree with poisoned roots. And that's a visual that I have carried with me, that as the tree grows and continues to grow new branches, those new branches replicate those same poisoned roots. And so on the one hand, I struggle to have hope for our ability to ever really move the needle on the relationships between Native Nations and the United States when it's built on a foundation of short-cutting Indigenous rights. On the other hand, none of us works in education unless we are deeply hopeful about the future for our kids, about the future for our nations. And I think that the work, the interventions that we're trying to do in frameworks like Teaching Hard History, in teacher education programs, is we're trying to sort of push to the sides all of the misinformation and all of the constructed narratives that obscure the truth about tribal relations with the United States so that we can shine a light on the injustice and work collectively towards a different future. And so I just want to wrap up our conversation with that sort of grounding in why we do this work. And so I'll just turn it back over to Leilani. What gets you up every day to keep doing the work that you do with your teachers?

Leilani Sabzalian: I just have a stubborn hope, this stubborn, rugged hope that even despite everything our people have gone through, justice will happen for our people. And I'm so deeply hopeful about youth and about future teachers that I work with. I work with some of the most amazing Native teachers right now who are going to do the most beautiful things in their classrooms, who don't need to be convinced that teaching about slavery or colonization is important. They just want to get to the work of doing it in schools. You know, I've worked with students who are already at the youngest ages questioning the curriculum and questioning the teachers. So I really feel like it's some of these systems that hold us back. But the communities, the youth, you know, they're teaching us.

Leilani Sabzalian: And I feel like the land is teaching us all the time. Like, I watch what's happening right now on Mauna Kea, this Native Hawaiian-led movement to protect the mountain from this 30-meter telescope. And this is not only a Hawaiian movement. Just like Idle No More, just like Standing Rock, these are beautiful, diverse, multi-racial, land-based solidarities. And I just think we're seeing more and more of those collective efforts of people really learning what it means to be locally responsive, to engage in this place-based politics. I have a lot of hope for that. I have a lot of hope that the more we teach about that, people will take part in that. So yeah, I think our communities have been through so much, but I still just am hopeful.

Meredith McCoy: Sarah and I are over here, like, crying real tears. That was so beautiful. What about you, Sarah? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Sarah Shear: I think much like what Leilani was saying, this stubborn hope that we—and when I say we, the settlers who are listening, that we are capable of changing. We have to find our humanity because when we hear teachers and teacher educators talking about humanizing or pedagogies and things like that, it's this false sense that by recognizing tribal sovereignty or by breaking open, as the framework does, these really rich and complicated conversations about enslavement, that it brings humanity back to people who have been marginalized. But they've always had their humanity. It was the settlers who were inhumane. And so as we commit to doing the hard work, it's a hope that we are capable of being something different, and that we can be different to our communities and be different in our commitments to our tribal partners and our Indigenous education collaborators. And I think about Bettina Love's writing and the idea that we're planting seeds for things we may never see, but that doesn't mean we stop doing it.

Meredith McCoy: Sarah, what you're talking about really reminds me of something that Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about in Braiding Sweetgrass. She's got this beautiful analogy about plantain and how plantain makes a life for itself as compared to other invasive species. And here's what she says. "Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu and cheatgrass have the colonizing habit of taking over other's homes and growing without regard to limits. But plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to co-exist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well-integrated that we think of it as native. It's earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous, but naturalized. This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country."

Sarah Shear: That's really beautiful. And it makes me think about a teaching from the recently-released and Emmy Award-winning documentary, Dawnland, about the work that settlers need to do to become, and I quote from the documentary, "Neighbors with legitimacy, to think about this is where we live, the structures that are in place, confronting them and thinking about, yes, we the United States owes an apology to a number of communities. And it's not just the words, it's about taking action. What comes next to actually earn the right to live here?" And I think that's really important.

Meredith McCoy: I am so inspired by the work that our Nations are doing and that our tribal colleges are doing around grow-your-own-teacher programs. When y'all are talking about this sort of stubborn hope, that is what I think about is that our people have always kept putting one foot in front of the other and finding new ways to make space for our humanity and our dignity. And right now what I'm seeing is Native folks making the curriculum, Native folks changing the narrative, Native folks building the teaching force to make this a better space for our Native kids. And that, I think is such a hopeful story. And that's part of what I think gets me up in the morning.

Meredith McCoy: I am so grateful for the opportunity to learn alongside these women in our work as a collective. And I can tell you from our experiences this week at the National Council for the Social Studies meeting that there is a hunger that we are trying to work to meet. And we need partners in this work. We're four folks trying to make an intervention, but we need you to partner with us in this work and to make this commitment in your own classrooms. We're going to stop the conversation there in terms of this episode of the podcast, but the conversation continues. We hope to hear from you. Please let us know whether these strategies are working in your classrooms. Please make sure that you're finding your own ways to connect to this work. I just want to say a big chi-miigwetch to my collaborators here with the Turtle Island Social Studies Collective. It's been such a beautiful conversation here with you today on this episode of Teaching Hard History. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us. And I look forward to hearing from our teachers as they listen to the podcast.

Lakota Pochedley: Thank you guys.

Sarah Shear: Thank you.

Leilani Sabzalian: Thank you.

Meredith McCoy: Thank you so much.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Lakota Pearl Pochedley is Citizen Band Potawatomi. She is the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Gun Lake Tribe in southwestern Michigan. And she received her Master's degree in Curriculum and Instruction in Social Studies Education at the University of Texas.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Leilani Sabzalian is Alutiiq. She is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies in Education at the University of Oregon, where she is also the Co-Director of the Sapsik'wałá Teacher Education Program.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And Sarah Shear is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies and Multicultural Education at the University of Washington, Bothell. She is working with Indigenous education colleagues at both the University of Washington and Western Washington University to prepare the new tribal sovereignty coursework requirement for the state of Washington for their teacher certification students.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, helping teachers and schools prepare their students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance offers free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find these resources online at Tolerance.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of what is currently the United States, or how its legacies still influence us today. Now in our second season, this podcast is part of an effort to provide comprehensive tools for learning and teaching this critical topic. Teaching Tolerance provides free teaching materials that include over 100 texts, sample inquiries, and a detailed K-12 framework for teaching the history of American slavery. You can find these online at tolerance.org/hardhistory.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks to Ms. Pochedley, Dr. Sabzalian and Dr. Shear for sharing their insights with us. This podcast is produced by Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer, with additional support from Barrett Golding. Gabriel Smith provides content guidance. And Kate Shuster is our Executive Producer. Our theme song is Different Heroes by A Tribe Called Red featuring Northern Voice, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Selva de Mar and Chris Zabriskie.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University.

Meredith McCoy: I’m Dr. Meredith McCoy, Assistant Professor of American Studies and History at Carleton College. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Meredith McCoy: And we’re your hosts for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

 

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