An indigenous rights organization works to preserve and revitalize indigenous communities and their lands by recording tribal creation songs. The songs spiritually reconnect Native people with their land, establish indigenous territorial rights, and preserve endangered languages. An ethnographic audio recording training program will enable tribes…

The work of experienced and student lower primary teachers in three schools in Southern Malawi was studied, using lesson observations, interviews and pupil tests. The use teachers make of songs is given as an example of how they use oral culture. The function of songs in lessons is mainly to manage the class rather than to teach content, in…

This Amana (Iowa) Folklife Curriculum has been planned as an easily-implemented sequence of activities comparing community and family folklife traditions with current practices. The K-5 activities are planned to coincide with holidays in the regular school calendar whenever possible. All activities compare and contrast present-day practices with…

This collection of Aleut stories was originally collected by Russian ethnographer Waldemar Jochelson in 1909-10 in an attempt to preserve Aleut culture. An introductory chapter offers historical background, information about Aleut dialects and dialect groups, notes on the original fieldwork, and descriptive and technical information about the…

This conference report argues that folk arts, which are transmitted informally by community word of mouth and example, represent the core culture of the community. Since a central goal for education is to prepare students to understand, live in, and contribute to their culture, the traditional folk arts represent valuable classroom resources. They…

In the Western Apache discourse community, landscape is not just the realm of nature in its sheer physicality. Neither are places in the landscape to be read as metaphors. Rather, places, visual things by reason of their identification with aspects of social hierarchy are literally giving moral messages, are imploring people to live right. This…

Two Native people describe their respective journeys to healing, journeys that involved the rediscovery of language and culture. In Part I, "Healing the Tears of Yesterday by the Drum Today: The Oneida Language Is a Healing Medicine" (Grafton Antone), the first narrator taught the Oneida language to adult students at a community center.…

Numerous studies have linked reading aloud to preschoolers and these children's later success as readers. But some of the parents with whom teachers work, whether they work at Head Start, childcare centers, or primary grades, have limited reading skills. However, the Hispanic, Native American, African American, Irish American, and many other…

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…