Making an Iroquois village - Lessons: Social Studies/The Arts - appreciation of Native American life at Charlotte Central Valley School, Davenport, New York

Instructor, Oct, 1999 by Meg Lundstorm

Have your students experience, and appreciate, Native American life

While cold winds whistled outside, fourth graders at Charlotte Valley Central School, in Davenport, New York, listened to stories and nestled warm and cozy in an 18-foot-long Iroquois long-house they had built with their own hands. Although teachers guided them and parents pitched in, the life-size Iroquois village these children had constructed was based entirely on their own research, the outgrowth of a unit on the Iroquois Nation taught by Grace Coddington.

For the past eight years, Coddington has had her students create historically accurate Iroquois "artifacts" after weeks of independent research. Her goal was to make history come alive while teaching specific study skills and to integrate history, culture, art, and music into the curriculum. "When they see things, touch things, and do things, students will learn," Coddington says. In 1997, fellow fourth-grade teacher Gail White had the idea to build a life-size longhouse outside the school, and construction of a whole village soon followed.

Five weeks before the school's autumn open house, Coddington and White assigned general reading from social studies textbooks and asked children to find areas of Native American life that interested them. They divided their two classes of 25 students each into seven groups: food, music/dancing, farming, hunting/fishing, festivals/religion, transportation, and housing.

To research their topics, children read books including The Iroquois, by Craig A. Doherty and Katherine M. Doherty (Franklin Watts), and Indians of the Eastern Woodlands, by Rae Bains (Troll Associates). Their teachers guided them in using indexes, taking notes, and making a plan for constructing facsimiles of Iroquois objects. Each child created his or her artifact using natural materials such as wood, rocks, and leather (plastic was not allowed). Students spent about an hour a day in class consulting with their teachers, discussing research, and displaying handiwork, but they created the objects primarily at home during evenings and weekends.

One youngster crafted pottery using dirt from her backyard; another child found dried gourds in her grandmother's kitchen and made music rattles with them. With the help of her father, one girl carved a canoe out of a log. All the children designed Iroquois costumes and jewelry.

In the food group, children dried deer meat and tried succotash recipes. The hunting group carved spears and made fishing nets. The farming group created a "cornfield" out of dried cornstalks and hay.

Members of the housing group were asked to bring in notes from mothers and fathers agreeing to help construct the longhouse. "There was a slight bit of alarm, but for the most part parents were very good-humored about it," recalls White. On a Saturday afternoon, teachers, children, moms, and dads gathered in the school's kickball field and bent long saplings (from one grandfather's farm) to fit into holes in two rows about eight feet apart. Other saplings were woven in lengthwise. Hay and cornstalks from family fields were tied in bundles and threaded into the structure. The two classes decorated the interior with animal hides for beds and with drying herbs, fish, and apples collected from gardens and ponds.

The day of the open house, students from other classes were invited to tour the "village." Excitement was high as they visited the longhouse, the cooking fire, the field of crops, as well as separate areas for playing games, digging out a canoe, making baskets and hunting tools, and performing ceremonial dances.

Parents came that evening, and they, too, were spellbound. Says White: "When it's cold outside but warm inside, when you're surrounded by great smells of hay and corn husks and food and looking at people dressed like Iroquois, it creates the feeling of 'I understand this.'"

MAKE YOUR OWN NATIVE AMERICAN VILLAGE

Charlotte Valley's Iroquois village can easily be modified: Build a longhouse or a teepee in the gym or on a stage or craft a small replica of a longhouse or village. Display your students' artifacts in a classroom or library "museum" and have the students be "tour guides." In rural areas, children may be able to gather saplings, hay, cornstalks, and other natural items from nearby. In suburban and urban districts, take a field trip to a forest or farm where the gathering of such materials is permitted, or find creative substitutes: basket-making kits or wampum beads from craft stores, modeling clay for pottery, sheets over a wire frame for the longhouse.

First choose a specific Native American nation as the focus of your study, perhaps one from your own region. Then have students:

* Read about that nation in textbooks and library books. This will help everyone determine his or her main area of interest. Visit local or state historical museums, which often have great resource materials, and search the Internet.

* Submit to you in writing three choices of subject groups they'd enjoy working in. Divide them into groups according to their interest.