Based on cowboy poetry and songs, this lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand that Old West cowboys produced a category of literature, people still write cowboy poetry, and cowboy poetry or songs have certain characteristics. The main activity in the lesson involves students in analyzing a classic of cowboy literature…

The emergence of the Native voice in academia has provided much outstanding scholarship rising out of analysis of oral histories and textual authority of Native peoples. In the 1990s, however, attempts to discredit Native scholarship included the claim that "I, Rigoberta Menchu" was a willful fraud, debates over the Bering Strait theory…

Proposes that one way to view storytelling in First Nations cultures is to look at the epistemology that informs it. Recommends that storytelling be central to environmental education, ethics, and practice. (Contains 19 references.) (DDR)

A grandmother teaching fishtrap building by actually building one while telling a story provides a model and criteria for success in teaching Nlakapamux children, the most important criterion being the presence of cultural experts--grandmothers. Role-modeling, storytelling, and hands-on experience combine theory and practice and provide a mnemonic…

A member of the Oglala Lakota describes his traditional childhood; his boarding school education; and his career in the army, university, and tribal council during the American Indian Movement. In his 40s, he became aware of the spirits and changed his life. He tells the Lakota creation story and laws and advises future generations to carry the…

Sets forth three calls to education: (1) "Education begins when people are seeking to be whole"; (2) "Education must use memory and her/history as crucial sites of resistance"; (3) "Education must serve to name and to voice." Various strategies for educational change and social empowerment are given. (BF)

This first in a series of essays on electric writing focuses on communication efforts of the preceding oral, written, and print cultures. Topics discussed include face-to-face versus distant communication; political power; correlations between social structure and access to information; information accumulation; costs; authorship; and the content…

Reviews 10 children's books, published or reissued 1988-93, about daily life, traditional culture, and schooling among Taos Pueblo, Zuni Pueblo, Navajo, Inuit, Guatemalan, and other Native peoples, as well as tales from Native American oral tradition, the life of a buffalo, and Cherokee and Athapascan historical fiction. Includes grade range and…

Defines digital storytelling, the application of multimedia techniques to the telling of stories. Describes how digital-storytelling assignments, designed to use an online conferencing facility, were developed for a college class. Provides examples of students' approaches to the personal narrative assignment. Discusses how to evaluate the…

Pentecostalism is the result of an interesting amalgamation of different traditions: black and oral cultures, middle-class and proletarian languages, catholic and evangelical spiritualities. These traditions are contextualized in Western, Latin American, Asian and African contexts which produce a bewildering pluralism. This "post-modern…

''Stories do not simply contain knowledge, they are themselves the knowledge'' (Jackson (In: K. Eagan, H. McEwan (Eds.), Narrative in Teaching, Learning and Research, Teacher College Press, New York, 1995, p. 5)). How can we teach well? Perhaps we can find answers through our stories from the classroom. It is through our stories that we make sense…

The American Indian Philosophical Association (AIPA) was created in May of 1998 by a group of American Indian philosophers; it grew out of the American Philosophical Association's (APA) Committee to Advance the Status of American Indians in Philosophy. It is associated with the APA but remains an autonomous organization dedicated to the…

Iona and Peter Opie's contribution to children's literature began with a volume on the origins of nursery rhymes. A nursery rhyme tells a brief and memorable surrealist story about people, animals, or familiar activities. Most nursery rhymes were not originally composed for children but were fragments of ballads or folk songs, remnants of ancient…

This book of essays draws on a cultural geography project in which an ethnographer and Apache consultants mapped the area around Cibecue, on the Fort Apache Reservation (Arizona). The essays focus on different Apache individuals and examine the ways that Apache constructions of place reach deeply into other cultural spheres. Many Apache place…

This volume contains 31 narratives traditionally told by Kipnuk (Alaska) elders, printed in both the Moravian and modern writing systems, without English translation. The elders relate rules of ethical behavior, prohibitions and commandments, and warnings against committing transgressions. The stories reveal the results that ensued from adherence…