With its recent announcement that it will add instruction on Native American history and issues to its history and social studies curriculum, the Mohawk Trail Regional School district has the opportunity to develop a history curriculum that could be a model for the state.
This is not a curriculum you can order from a mainstream education publisher – indeed, it exists nowhere. But it would be an invaluable addition to the prevailing Colonial narratives that most of us grew up with.
Their announcement was prompted by the school district’s recent decision to remove images of its Plains Indian mascot, which hearkens back to a similar decision by Turners Falls High School to remove its Indian mascot, and presages two pending bills in the state Legislature to revise the state flag and seal and prohibit public schools from using names and logos associated with Native Americans.
But where to begin? We suggest that Mohawk take advantage of the wealth of local historians and go to the experts. Following are some of them:
■Gary Sanderson of Greenfield, retired Recorder columnist, whose “Native Insight” columns provided a wealth of information about local indigenous people’ presence and histories in our region.
■Richard Little, professor emeritus, geology, Greenfield Community College, an expert in geological prehistory of the Pioneer Valley.
■David Brule, current president of the Nolumbeka Project, a Native American group that promotes knowledge of New England’s native cultures. A longtime educator, author and historian, Brule is an officer of the Nehantic Indian Tribe and coordinator of the Peskeompskut Battlefield grant project.
■Joseph Graveline, a member of the Northfield Historical Commission and a former president of the Nolumbeka Project.
■Roger Longtoe, Chief of the Elnu band of the Abenaki nation. Longtoe specializes in what he calls “living archaeology” of the 17th and 18th centuries, using materials and traditional stories to help people understand the way Abenaki peoples lived when they occupied vast regions in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and eastern New York.
■Christine DeLucia, an assistant professor of history at Mount Holyoke College and author of the recent book “Memory Lands.” DeLucia has challenged the narrative around the term “revisionist history.” “Revisionism is sometimes used as a curse today,” DeLucia said. “I, instead, would like to talk about the need to continuously revise these stories.”
■David Tall Pine White of the Chaubunagungamaug Band of Nipmuc Indians Tribal Historic Preservation Office.
■Battlefield Grant researcher Kevin McBride, a UConn archaeologist.
■Members of the Battlefield Grant Advisory Board — composed of the Aquinnah Wampanoag, Chaubunagungamaug Band of Nipmuck Indians, Elnu Abenaki, and Narragansett Indian Tribe, as well as historical commissioners from Montague, Greenfield, Gill, Northfield and Deerfield — responsible for coordinating this battlefield study of the complex massacre and counter-attack in 1676 that has marked our region over the subsequent centuries.
■Local Native Americans like Rhonda Anderson of Colrain, a member of the Alaskan Inupiaq Athabaskan tribe, who has a perspective both as a student who attended Sanderson Academy, Mohawk, and Turners Falls schools, and as a mother of a school-age daughter. Anderson says she has gotten to know many Native Americans in the area, and is currently curating an art exhibition with portraits of roughly 13 local indigenous people, to say, in her words: “We’re still here.”
“No one person has the whole story,” said Northfield resident and former Nolumbeka President Joe Graveline. He added that patterns start to emerge once you put together everyone’s accounts.
The speakers that the Mohawk school district brings in, and the additional local history that its social studies and history teachers develop, will contribute to a fuller understanding of our local history. As retired Sanderson Academy Principal Budge Litchfield, who serves on the Mohawk Trail School District Committee, said, “Any ability we have to access a rich description of pre-Colonial experiences, which is like 10,000 years’ worth of experience, that to me would be very, very valuable.”