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The Museum is very happy to announce that classes are again visiting Miwok Park for two-hour guided tours. Betsy Magladry and Haley Dowell, our interpretative guides, have been engaging students, taking them to various parts of the park, and offering some hands-on activities.
The visits begin with a land acknowledgement, learning about the diversity of Native America, the history of the museum, and offer a basic understanding of principles common among Indigenous populations. Our guides reach out to the audience to ask…Are any of the people present Native American, including those whose family or ancestors from Central or South American?
Betsy and Haley engage students with lots of questions, such as, when the group is standing by creek, why would this site be a good site for a village? The interconnectedness of the Indigenous life is stressed as the students learn about how the Indigenous peoples respected and maintained the balance in the environment. Eyes widen as our guides describe all the animals and birds that lived here, so many birds they darkened the sky and huge herds of deer and elk.
The students explore the park and the reconstructed structures, such as the kotchas of tule and redwood as well as the granary to gain a deeper understanding of reciprocity, sustainability, and traditional ecological knowledge particularly related to the Indigenous peoples of California. The tour ends at the Grandmother Bay Tree where visitors appreciate the size of the tree and smell the cocoa-coffee fragrance of bay nuts. The students form small groups to answer questions about what they’ve learned.
Our tours can be adapted to accommodate grades levels from K-12. Teachers can now sign up using the museum’s website, https://www.marinindian.com. If you are a teacher or have a teacher friend, please spread the word: we have returned, following strict COVID protocols!
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Residential Schools. Indian Residential Schools existed in Canada from the 1860s all the way until the 1990s. These schools acted as a way to erase Indigenous cultures and assimilate Indigenous Peoples into Christianity. To put it bluntly it was an active form of genocide. This erasure included stealing children from their homes and forcing them to attend school without seeing their families for months or even years, banning children from speaking their own language, cutting their hair, forcing them to abandon their traditions and punishing them for daring to practice them. These schools were responsible for abuse on every level as well as responsible for the deaths of thousands of Indigenous children. Why is this important to us? How does this affect us even though this is Canada’s history? Well, more than 6,500 Indigenous children had been discovered in mass graves during May-June of 2021, and there will be more to uncover as First Nations continue the process of excavation of former Indian Residential School grounds in Canada. As of June 2021, Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, announced the Federal Indian Boarding School initiative which will investigate deaths and burial grounds related to United States Federal Boarding Schools and lasting impacts that the schools had on Indigenous communities. Boarding schools were the United States’ form of active genocide and followed the same protocols as Canadian Indian Residential Schools.
under such crises as COVID-19. The pipeline that is being constructed is to replace a defective pipeline that was built across Leech Lake and Fond Du Loc reservations. The defective pipeline will just be left behind. Indigenous water protectors and allies have been giving their all and yet the President seems to still be refusing their demands. Indigenous People’s Day has passed, and Native American Heritage Month approaches and the construction of Line 3 still persists. The best way to celebrate is through RECOGNITION AND SUPPORT of Indigenous sovereignty.
