American Indian program instills new perspectives

Wall Street may never be the same, once Christopher Smith gets there.

Smith, now a junior in finance, will bring at least one extraordinary talent to whatever brokerage firm is lucky enough to claim him. Smith is perfecting his skill in the rare art of listening, fully and intently. The venue for his work is Rosemary Ackley Christensen’s American Indian Issues class.

Note taking is strongly discouraged here, and, in fact, this writer is the only one of the 20 or so present with a pen in hand. However, everybody pays the strictest attention to what others have to say this afternoon on the subject of American Indian art.

“Art is sacred. It’s wrong to sell it.”

“Is it wrong to be compensated for a skill?”

“If art is sacred, couldn’t the artist give it as a gift?”

“How is the artist going to eat and pay rent?”

“By getting another kind of job, maybe?”

“It’s a different way of learning than many of these students are used to,” says Christensen, who is teaching this year in the American Indian Studies Program. “Usually, there’s a teacher imparting ideas or facts, and the students soak them up by taking notes. I try to throw out some ideas and let the students make up their own minds about things through listening to stories and talking among themselves.”

Christensen has shared this native approach to learning in colleges and universities, public school districts, government agencies and nonprofit organizations over the course of more than 20 years of teaching and research.

Smith says it took a few weeks to get comfortable with Christensen’s instructional methods. However, he says the adjustment was well worth the effort.

“Rosemary’s approach is very holistic,” he says. “You begin to get a sense of how all things are related, and how specific actions can have an effect beyond the immediate and the obvious.”

The classroom glows with engagement. Even reserved members of the class seem to be relishing the chance to chew out loud on questions with no simple answers.

“Too often we exhaust the thoughts of one outspoken person and never explore those of the quieter and maybe more observant person,” he says. “Indian cultures hold that no one in a group speaks twice until everyone has spoken once. I think that’s a wonderful concept.”

Inclusion is a staple of native councils, Christensen says. “Once, everyone sat around a council fire. The people didn’t ask the tribal elders expressly what to do, but discussed with the elders what probably would happen in the near future by applying lessons from the past to the present, by looking at what had happened before.”

Down Bascom Hill in the Humanities Building, Ned Blackhawk brings the lessons of the past, the native past, to students in his American Indian History class. Newly arrived last fall in the History Department and American Indian Studies Program, Blackhawk aims to give voice to America’s extensive and significant native history.

“Indians have played a central, not marginal, role in this country’s development,” he says. “We have an extreme need for comprehensive undergraduate courses in Indian history — we need to convey as much of the diversity and complexity of the subject as possible,” he says.

Blackhawk does this by covering themes and topics long ignored in the classroom: the pivotal role native peoples played in America’s evolving economic, political, environmental policies. Blackhawk tells his class that native groups played a crucial role in the formation of the federal government because the Articles of Confederation failed to provide effective national land, military and economic policies, many of which revolved around large native confederacies, particularly, he says, the Iroquois and Creek.

Senior Nicole Vanden Meullen, one of about 70 students in Blackhawk’s class, has had a number of eye-openers. For example, “The Sioux are not one uniform nation. The people we call ‘Sioux’ are actually Dakota, Lakota and Nakota,” she says. Blackhawk notes that the early colonies had a similar loose alliance.

Such shifts in perception are precisely what Ada Deer has been hoping would happen in program classrooms. Deer, a distinguished lecturer in the School of Social Work, has directed UW–Madison’s American Indian Studies Program since the first of this year. She says the educational climate that faculty such as Christensen and Blackhawk are helping to foster is critical to the program’s success on a number of fronts.

“We must continue to attract to our faculty effective, talented Indian people who will not only teach about our people and our history but assist in the very important task of retaining Indian students,” she says.

Deer says program course offerings are a vital element in achieving that goal. For the spring semester, the program offered a half-dozen courses, many cross-listed with other departments. Students can choose from the Ojibwa language to archaeology of native sites in Wisconsin to contemporary American Indian literature to independent study. Currently, Deer and colleagues are examining the course listings to find ways to enhance the program.

While Christopher Smith plans on taking what he learns to the world of finance, Nicole Vanden Meullen will carry her new insights into the halls of justice. Now majoring in history and political science, she intends to enroll in Law School and ultimately specialize in discrimination law.

“It’s been so helpful to get so many different perspectives” on particular events in history, she says. “I think being exposed to that really is going to help me represent disabled people.”

“We have a collective obligation to educate the next generation,” says Ada Deer. “Those of us involved in the American Indian Studies Program will do our part — every student is our relation.”