Teaching Amerindian Autohistory

Teaching the history of Native North America is difficult. Teachers must ask students to read and to write about past peoples whose transmission of knowledge was oral and performative. The available pool of books and articles for assignment often work more as exercises in othering than understanding. And everyone in the classroom must find some way to engage essential questions of blood and relative ones of culture. Is there a way to teach such a course without being paralyzed by such basic ontological dilemmas? George Sioui's For an Amerindian Autohistory offers a way out. Sioui, a Wendat philosopher, calls for an approach to the writing of Native history that is rooted in certain cardinal aboriginal values, but his ideas work equally well as pedagogy.1 To say Sioui's teachings can lead non-Native students to a Native understanding of the past and of the world would be an inappropriately essentialist interpretation of his work, but the book does force students to come to grips with alternative ways of conceiving of personhood, community, and history. Faced with teaching a course on the history of Native North America, I found Sioui's work to be helpful in finding a new kind of conceptual ground on which to

Geography · Mathematics education · Sociology · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Psychology

• Maopewa iati bi

  Isaac J Emrick•2015

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