Native American Curriculum Introduced Across Illinois

by Suzanne Hanney

“As educators, we have spent our whole lives waiting for such legislation,” Dorene Wiese, PhD. said of a state law enacted this past August that will mandate a Native American curriculum in Illinois social studies classes from middle school through high school.

“It’s amazing that it happened at this time,” Dr. Wiese said as moderator of a September 27 panel at the Harold Washington Library about the curriculum, which will begin with the 202425 school year. “There’s so much that brought us to this point. We stand on the shoulders of our elders. They suffered so much to get us to this time.”

Dr. Wiese is founding president of the American Indian Association of Illinois (which co-sponsored the panel), an enrolled member of the Minnesota White Earth Ojibwe, and CEO/professor emeritus of NAES, Inc. (formerly NAES College). She has a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in education from Northern Illinois University. Her life’s work has been advocating for urban American Indian education and Urban Native health. She was the first American Indian appointed to the Cook County Health and Hospital Systems board and the highest ranking American Indian Illinois Community College administrator in a 20-year career there.

Co-panelist Clovia Malatare said she hoped the curriculum would describe Native American resilience, “the true history of Native Americans, how we are still here and survived in spite of the barriers to stay true to our identity as Native Americans.” Malatare is an Oglala Lakota elder, an adult educator, a public school parent and grandparent and faculty emeritus at NAES College. She was the first Native person to receive a master’s degree in public health from the University of IllinoisChicago, and served for over 22 years as a manager, in the audit section, Office of the Inspector General, State of Illinois. Malatare said her second concern is, “what are the things we want our children to learn and non-Natives to learn.”

Introduced into the Illinois General Assembly by State Rep. Maurice A. West II, an African American Democrat from Rockton, the legislation will require instruction in Native American history in every course pertaining to American history or government. Topics will include the genocide and discrimination against Native Americans, as well as tribal sovereignty, treaties made between tribal nations and the United States, and circumstances around forced Native American relocation. The instruction may be included with material on the Holocaust and genocides.

The State Board of Education will develop the curriculum in consultation with a Native American community chosen by the individual school districts.

“This is the culmination of an effort that took many months and was the hope and dream of countless Illinois American Indian residents over many years,” Andrew Johnson, executive director of the Native American Chamber of Commerce of Illinois, said in a news release. “We feel this history will now include perspectives from our vantage point through resources that have been properly vetted by leading Native American scholars.”

West told WREX in Rockford that the bill started with a student movement at Hononegah High School to change its Indian mascot. He filed a mascot bill, but federally-recognized tribal members throughout Illinois told him to go bigger. Hononegah High School was named for Ho-no-ne-gah, the HoChunk/Potawatomi wife of Stephen Mack Jr., founder of the town of Rockton. (1)

"Today, we take another step forward in repairing generations of harm and building a brighter future for our state's Native American and Indigenous Peoples," Gov JB Pritzker said at the August 4 signing ceremony. "At its core, this legislation is about respect. Respect for those who came before us and those who will come after—and that is why we want to teach our children this history, to avoid the mistakes of the past and to instill that respect from an early age."

According to the legislation, curriculum will encompass not only Native American contributions and self-determination but, “Native American history within the Midwest and the state since time immemorial.”

That’s good news for Fawn Pochel, the third member of the Harold Washington panel. Pochel is First Nations Coordinator of Gender & Sexuality; Indigenous/Native American Community Relations at the Angelina Pedroso Center for Diversity and Intercultural Affairs at Northeastern Illinois University. She is the first Native Grow Your Own Teacher candidate at NEIU and the first Native master’s degree candidate. She is a cofounder of Chi-Nations and founder of the First Nations Garden in Albany Park.

“The first thing is, teachers should throw away lesson plans about the ‘land bridge,’ because we all have stories about our own creation,” Pochel said. “Those are the stories that need to be uplifted. I am not interested if Western science says our creation stories can be proven.”

An old archeological theory was that, 13,000 years ago, people we now know as Native Americans walked or came by boat from Asia across land that is now the Bering Sea and then moved south. But in the last two decades, new research says that their settlements in North America are much older than the land bridge would allow.

Pochel is grateful to have been born in Chicago, the ancestral home of her father, who was a Woodland Cree member of the Swan River First Nation in Manitoba. She described deep psychic ties to this land to the Harold Washington audience. “The Great Lakes has sustained us since time immemorial,” she said.

The Great Lakes and the Chicago River system facilitated travel and trade for 150 tribes speaking 200 languages – and by the 1600s, for Europeans too. “Chicago was developed to spread west across the Mississippi River,” Pochel said. “Think of Manifest Destiny, the railroads. They were all centered in Chicago. The waterways gave access to trade."

“Manifest Destiny,” however, was deliberately harmful to Native Americans. Coined in 1845, the phrase embodied the idea that the United States was “destined – by God, its advocates believed – to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent,” according to history.com. “The philosophy drove 19th century U.S. territorial expansion and was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans and other groups from their homes.”

Malatare wants the curriculum to cover how Native Americans lost their land, treaties, and how the government tried to kill Indians. “It was genocide. They gave them blankets for smallpox. That was the reason they killed all the buffalo, to get rid of the Indians. In the end it was all about the land – the precious land.”

A Google search of “Native Americans given blankets that induced smallpox” calls up multiple links, starting in 1763, after the French and Indian War, which the French lost. As the victorious British expanded their military presence in the Great Lakes, Chief Pontiac fought back and won smaller forts – until he reached Fort Pitt (the present-day Pittsburgh).

Smallpox had broken out among the British soldiers, and during peace talks, the British commanding officer of Fort Pitt gave Lenape (Delaware) warriors several items taken from smallpox patients, according to history.net. “We gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital,” Capt. William Trent of the garrison militia wrote in his journal. “I hope it will have the desired effect.” The idea was ratified by Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of British forces in North America.

A smallpox epidemic in 1837-38 killed anywhere from 17,200 to 150,000 Mandans on the upper Missouri River. A University of Michigan study, however, said that there was no evidence blankets were shipped there from a military smallpox infirmary in St. Louis. Instead, the source may have been a blanket from an infected worker on a steamboat that docked there. An Indian Bureau subagent even suggested an aggressive inocu- courtesy of PBS. lation program to prevent spread of the disease, according to a paper by an assistant professor of sociology at Lamar University.

Regardless, “smallpox in the blankets” is a legend that “can’t be dismissed because it is founded in a mixture of limited historical fact and widespread circumstantial evidence,” according to history.net. It remains a powerful, negative thread in Native American memory.

“Unintentional contagion was common, particularly in wartime,” according to scholar Elizabeth A. Fenn. “By the second half of the 18th century, many of the combatants in America’s wars of empire had the knowledge and technology to attempt biological warfare with the smallpox virus.” For all these reasons, smallpox contagion may have been more common than has been acknowledged, Fenn wrote.

Mass killing of the buffalo was equally destructive to Native Americans, Dr. Wiese said. “One buffalo could feed a whole village for the winter, and then that protein source was gone.” She referred to an upcoming Ken Burns documentary on the decimation of buffalo herds to the brink of extinction.

Native Americans used the buffalo not only for food, but for clothing, tools and shelter. Yet the massive animals competed with the grazing needs of settlers’ cattle, according to Texas Monthly, and their hides were also sought-after for belts used in machinery.

Most of all, U.S. Army policy used intentional slaughter for Manifest Destiny. Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan wrote to a subordinate in October 1868 that their best hope to control Native Americans was “to make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them,” according to Pochel and Karina L. Walters, Ph.D, of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute at the University of Washington.

In winter 1883-84, when the buffalo slaughter was at its peak, an estimated 10 percent of Plains Native Americans died of malnutrition and disease, according to Texas Monthly.

Even when Native Americans relocated to land they thought would be undesirable to whites, they lost out. The Osage Indians moved from Kansas to a rocky part of northeast Oklahoma – and then oil was discovered there, Dr. Wiese noted. She was awaiting a movie on the subject, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” directed by Martin Scorsese and featuring Leonardo di Caprio and Robert DeNiro, which was due in theaters October 20.

Education was also used as a means of annihilating Native American culture and language. “Children were forcibly taken from their homes and not allowed to see their parents for many years,” Dr. Wiese said.

Malatare was sent from the Pine Ridge, S.D. reservation to a boarding school where she was not allowed to speak her Native language. Pochel’s father was taken by the Canadian government, sent to a variety of boys’ schools, and then adopted out to a farm family in Normal, IL. He made his way to Chicago in the late 1970s.

In the 1950s, Congress began to end federal obligations to tribes – and actually terminated some tribes. The government also began to relocate people from reservations and villages to urban areas for training and employment. Because Chicago had a lot of unskilled factory jobs, it became a center for Urban Natives.

“The reason we had any education here was because of federal funding. It was a way to keep people here so the government could take the land,” Dr. Wiese said. “It’s always been about the land.”

Once here, the community “put together building blocks for their survival,” she said. “No thread runs deeper in the American Indian community than support: for employment, economic development, seniors.” Dr. Wiese started the first Native adult learning center in Chicago, which was copied across the U.S. Since she had relatives who had dropped out of school, she knew what they needed, she said.

Getting an education was not easy for any of the women, but Dr. Wiese said she and Malatare had it easier than their parents’ generation. Still, 50 years later, Pochel is, as Dr. Wiese was, one of just seven Native American students at Northeastern Illinois University.

Pochel attended Chicago Public Schools from pre-K through middle school and then high school in predominantly white northwest Indiana, where she relied on her mother’s mostly Irish heritage. Terming herself “pretty much done with education,” she moved back to Chicago to spend eight years working with different Native American organizations, determined to hold onto her father’s Native American culture. She took seven years to get her bachelor’s degree and credits the local nonprofit Grow Your Own Teachers and Ebony DeBerry at ONE Northside for seeing her through it. Now she is working on her master’s degree.

Pochel has never had a Native American teacher, but she said she hopes the new legislation will create a pipeline for them.