“Rethinking early Native American history is a difficult enterprise,” Robert Morrissey argues. In the latest Teaching the JAH, Robert Michael Morrissey provides a teaching supplement for his December 2015 article, “The Power of the Ecotone: Bison, Slavery, and the Rise and Fall of the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia.”
In this Teaching the JAH, Morrissey includes six exercises that tackle the scarcity of primary sources from a Native American point of view. These exercises present students with interdisciplinary sources that they may not expect, such as ecological maps of biomes and soil, as well as more traditional sources like memoirs, letters, and excerpts from language dictionaries.
By providing an opportunity to interact with a diverse group of documents, this teaching guide will encourage students to consider a more nuanced, demythologized history of Native Americans.