Teaching the Book
This site is intended to offer instructors a multi-dimensional portal into the book for teaching purposes. The book was written with a mainstream audience in mind and has been used successfully in undergraduate and graduate classes ranging from Native to regional to women's history. Priced at just $30 and available as an ebook or in hardcover, the book is also an affordable choice for course adoption.
Instructors who assign the book can encourage their students to review the primary source documents included in each chapter exhibit so that they can engage directly with the evidence that informs the book's arguments. Instructors who read the book as reference for their lectures and classroom discussions can use the same primary sources featured in this site to invite their students to practice historical analysis and interpretation.
Instructors are encouraged to have their students review the legal documents exhibited on this site and ask questions about exclusion and inclusion, omission and commission, overt and covert forms of colonialism, dispossession, and violence. Instructors and students with interdisciplinary interests can also review the cartographic, periodical, photographic, and poetic elements of this site to assess the holistic approach to Indigenous women's poetics and politics discussed in the book's introductory and concluding chapters.
An exercise my own students have enjoyed is to write the text for a memorial marker that explains the significance of each woman's contributions to their tribal and regional histories. Other short writing exercises might include asking students to write a case brief for these women's legal claims or to compare the application of parallel statutes to Indigenous women in Arizona and Washington. Your students might also enjoy researching Indigenous women's legal histories in their own communities and pinpointing the lasting legacies of those rights claims in their communities today.
The image below was taken by the author and is a tile mosaic that marks the "Scheuerman Block" in downtown Seattle. Christian Scheuerman married Rebecca Lena Graham's Duwamish mother and raised Rebecca along with her half-siblings just West of Salmon Bay. Markers associated with "founding" generations often obscure Indigenous women's presence, but your students may find archival and ethnohistorical accounts to affirm their persistence in your communities from the nineteenth century to the present.
