Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), The Round House (2012). Indigenous peoples were here before the founding of the United States, and we have a responsibility to include their voices and stories in our classrooms.įor teachers who have the willingness and ability to either change the primary indigenous text or add a second one, might I suggest including one of the following seven books for readers in the upper grades. It also shows students that Native peoples still exist, and it infuses much-needed cultural diversity into often Euro-American-centric book lists. Teaching indigenous texts is one tiny step toward correcting the historical inaccuracies about Native peoples that are built into the standard American K-12 curriculum. But it was written in 1986, and other authors have written equally powerful stories in the last 29 years. Of course, Silko’s lyrical prose and spiritual narrative deserve to be taught Ceremony became canonical over time for good reason. If high school students are introduced to Native writers at all, it is usually through Leslie Marmon Silko’s (Laguna Pueblo) Ceremony (1986), a now-classic story about a troubled Native American man who returns from serving in a war to rediscover his identity and to heal his body and spirit.
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