Visiting the Native American Museum was an amazing experience. I had chills as I wandered in and out of the rooms. I could have spent days there. The museum was so alive, so fluid, so filled with voices. There wasn’t just one story being told, but instead a multitude of stories were being told at the same time, thus creating in the viewer the occasional feeling of sensory overload. There were videos playing; exhibits seemed to run together; objects at times felt almost crowded in their display cases. The museum exists in direct aesthetic opposition to our nation’s dominant museum norms and, because of this, tells a story that is non linear and, in my opinion, focused on human rights, human potential and resistance. At every level it is a museum about Native American life not just in the past, but Native American life today and the many dreams for tomorrow.

Some day I would like to write more about the museum experience and the different ways in which it made me really believe that museum exhibits can be places of interactivity and dialog. I have been to lots of museums, but nothing has quite ever moved me, or spawned such inner and outer dialog, as this one. If you have not been, I highly, highly recommend it. Give yourself a whole day to soak it all in. I think this kind of multi-level storytelling and viewer interaction is a perfect example of what museums have the power to do. They are not there just to show. They also have the potential to generate dialog and to remind us that stories overlap. Stories are messy. They also have the potential to transform.

I am curious. Other people that have been through the museum (folklorists or non)–can you share your thoughts?

Started in 1983, this organization was one of the founders of RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions ), and safegaurds seeds native to Native American communities in the southwest. What’s even more amazing is not only do they safegaurd the seeds, they also maintain what they refer to as a Cultural Memory Bank. Their website explains it this way:
“In the late 1990s, NS/S undertook to expand our seed bank efforts to include a cultural component, integrating cultural information – the agricultural practices, stories, songs, and recipes associated with specific crops in the seed bank – with our existing database of collection information. In effect, we would combine the geneticist’s concern for conserving unique traits of a crop with a folklorist’s concern for conserving oral history about the crop.”

Creating the Cultural Memory Bank was not a part of the original plan. According to their webpage, they actually set out to interview elders and share this information with those outside of the community. But in conducting the interviews with elders, they soon began to realize that this traditional knowledge was desperatly needed within the community as well. So they began documenting the stories of the elders in the community for the younger generations. One of their first projects was a student-centered CD-Rom focusing on Navajo agricultural traditions. Their work in documenting the community for the community is ongoing.

Additionally, anyone can order the seeds and try them out. In fact, if you plan on growing the seeds you can also become a part of the Gardener’s Network where you provide feedback and share your experiences about growing the seeds.
Gardener’s Network

A Model for Human Rights Education
In preparation for a grant writing project for Kentucky Remembers!, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what makes education human-rights based. What is human rights education anyway? Human Rights education is not just about the subject matter. It’s also about the approach. In other words, it’s not just about the kind of knowledge that’s being shared but also how that knowledge is being shared. I am constantly on the lookout for education programs that connect human stories with our daily lives and help us connect our daily lives with others daily lives. Stories that teach us how to take care of our fellow humans, take care of the land, take care of ourselves.
What I like most about the mission of this project is its ability to be intrinsically open and forever ongoing. For example, the goal of keeping a cultural memory bank is not just about the past. It’s about the future. And why just save the seeds for the communities from which they came? Instead, they share these seeds with anyone who wants to grow them.

I think, ultimately, what human rights education is about is making connections between ourselves, our community, and world. But for human rights education to be sustainable it has to not just teach us what those connections are, but also provide insight and inspiration which can in turn lead us as humans to to be more diligent in understanding how these connections fit together and to begin to look for these connections on their own.

I think a big part of what human rights education is teaching and learning how to always be asking, ‘how do these things work together?’

What do you think?

I just read about this textbook from Rethinking Schools. It was published in 2002. This resource textbook teaches students 4th-12th grades social justice issues as an interconnected web. As the authors say in the introduction (which can be found online as well),

“For example, in the Huaorani Indian struggle in eastern Ecuador (depicted in the role play, “Oil, Rainforests, and Indigenous Cultures,” p. 268), the debt crisis forces the government to aggressively seek sources of cash – like oil – to make interest payments to international banks. Transnational oil companies take advantage of widespread poverty to pay starvation wages to workers in terribly unsafe conditions. And like a bull in a china shop, they maraud through fragile rainforest ecosystems. In the quest for profits, oil companies treat people and the environment simply as resources to exploit. But not only are rainforests being ravaged, the indigenous cultures that depend on those rainforests are also in danger of being wiped out.

If oil companies successfully sucked all the oil out of the Huaorani’s territory in Ecuador – perhaps as much as $2 billion worth – it would power cars in the United States for only 13 days. Thus, the more we taught about issues in the Third World, the more it brought us home – home to an epidemic of consumption that links us to the poverty of others around the world, and links us to the growing ecological crisis that threatens the very existence of life on earth.”

The book includes exercises that address math, science, reading comprehension and problem solving skills. I have not read this textbook (other than the example essays and lesson plans online), but plan on interlibrary loaning it. Is anyone else familiar with it?