Students experience Native American Cultures of Michigan in IAH 211C

In Professor Joel Geffen?s IAH class, students examine stereotypes of Native Americans which have reduced them into a single cultural form: 'The Indian.' However, Native Americans offer a different narrative about themselves. Through their eyes students are introduced to ways that literature is employed to speak to past inequities and misunderstandings, to what they identify as pressing concerns and conditions today, and to the ways that they envision the future. As part of this course, students participate in two field trips and visit sites of Michigan Native American cultures:

Visit to the Ruthven Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
In order to better understand the cultural context of stereotypes of Native Americans in the United States, students were taken to the Ruthven Museum of Natural History. There they considered the question of why Native Americans, but no other American groups, were displayed along with information about geology, dinosaurs, human evolution, and Michigan flora and fauna. Museum staff explained the history of the dioramas of Native American life. Students then viewed these miniature dioramas with their miniature figures. Afterwards, they used photographs they took there, sketches they made of exhibits there, and notes they took there to develop creative projects through which they showed the understandings of stereotypes obtained.

Visit to the Nokomis Learning Center, Okemos, Michigan.
A second fieldtrip of the semester was to the Nokomis Learning Center. Professor Joel Geffen made arrangements to have Native American docents speak to students about traditional native ways of life--and how past traditions in many instances show continuities with contemporary practices. This visit was designed as a counterpoint to the Ruthven exhibits. For one, students listened to living native peoples explain their perspectives and experiences. Secondly, students received information to help them differentiate between stereotyped and non-stereotyped descriptions (representations) of Native Americans. By introducing students to members of the Native community, the class engaged in a form of outreach, blending academic knowledge with practical experience. As with the Ruthven visit, after spending time in the Nokomis Learning Center, students developed creative projects to illustrate their understandings. In the case of Nokomis, those understandings pertained, as indicated above, to continuities and discontinuities in traditional Native American ways of life (focusing on the peoples of Michigan).

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