Native Americans – Thinking Beyond the Text Book
READING ASSIGNMENT
Listen to/read along with Sherman Alexie’s A Good Story, noting anything of interest, unusual, that jumps out
at you; read the info on this page and the assigned sections in the textbook. Consider the introduction/story
summary written by Mae Dunsworth as her introduction for her Speech Team performance of this piece.
Read in the Textbook:

page 284
People In History: Sacagawea

Page 291-292
Frontier Conflicts

Page 343 – 347
Conflicts over Land

Broken Promises On Display At Native American Treaties Exhibit
- in packet
WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Compare and contrast the Native Americans vs the “White Man’s” rights, role and outcome.
What are key points, what thoughts did you have as you learned more? Using proper writing,
including introductory and closing paragraphs, describing what you know now.
Write a powerful essay (AT LEAST 1 FULL page, single spaced) that tells about the plight of
the Native Americans.
DUE Weds March 11
A GOOD STORY – by Sherman Alexie
SHERMAN ALEXIE BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Sherman Joseph Alexie Jr. is a Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-American novelist, short story writer, poet, and
filmmaker. His writings draw on his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from several
tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and now lives in Seattle, Washington.
A QUIET SATURDAY RESERVATION AFTERNOON and I pretend sleep on the couch while my mother pieces
together another quilt on the living room floor. “You know,” she says. “Those stories you tell, they’re kind of
sad, enit?”
I keep my eyes closed.
“Junior,” she says. “Don’t you think your stories are too sad?”
My efforts to ignore her are useless.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
She puts down her scissors and fabric, looks at me so straight that I have to sit up and open my eyes.
“Well,” she says. “Ain’t nobody cries that much, you know?”
I pretend to rub the sleep from my eyes, stretch my arms and legs, make small noises of irritation.
“I guess,” I say. “But ain’t nobody laughs as much as the people in my stories, either.”
“That’s true,” she says.
I stand up, shake my pants loose, and walk to the kitchen to grab a Diet Pepsi with cold, cold ice.
Mom quilts silently for a while. Then she whistles.
“What?” I ask her, knowing these signals for attention.
“You know what you should do? You should write a story about something good, a real good story.”
“Why?”
“Because people should know that good things always happen to Indians, too.”
I take a big drink of Diet Pepsi, search the cupboards for potato chips, peanuts, anything.
“Good things happen,” she says and goes back to her quilting.
I think for a moment, put my Diet Pepsi down on the counter.
“Okay,” I say. “If you want to hear a good story, you have to listen.”
INTRODUCTION/STORY SUMMARY BY MAE DUNSWORTH
Over the past 300 years, the American Indian population has decreased by 90% and conditions on reservations
are comparable to those of developing countries. According to the National Congress of American Indians, they
have the highest rates of suicide, alcohol abuse, hard substance abuse, high school dropouts, and are more likely
to be diabetic than any other ethnic group in the United States. Though I am not of Native American descent I
found that this story, “A Good Story” by Sherman Alexie, was too good not to be shared.
THE STORY
Uncle Moses sat in his sandwich chair eating a sandwich. Between bites, he hummed an it-is-a-good-day song.
He sat in front of the house he built himself fifty years before. The house sat down at random angles to the
ground. The front room leaned to the west, the bedroom to the east, and the bathroom simply folded in on
itself.
There was no foundation, no hidden closet, nothing built into the thin walls. On the whole, it was the kind of
house that would stand even years after Moses died, held up by the tribal imagination. Driving by, the Indians
would look across the field toward the house and hold it upright with their eyes, remembering Moses lived
there. It would be just enough to ensure survival. Uncle Moses gave no thought to his passing on most days.
Instead, he usually finished his sandwich, held the last bite of bread and meat in his mouth like the last word
of a good story. “Ya-hey,” he called out to the movement of air, the unseen. A summer before, Uncle Moses
listened to his nephew, John- John, talking a story. John-John was back from college and told Moses that 99
percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to the human eye. Ever since, Moses made sure to greet what
he could not see.
Uncle Moses stood, put his hands on his hips, arched his back. More and more, he heard his spine playing
stickgame through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years. He looked at the position of the
sun to determine the time, checked his watch to be sure, and looked across the field for the children who
would soon come.
The Indian children would come with half-braids, curiosity endless and essential. The children would come
from throwing stones into water, from basketball and basketry, from the arms of their mothers and fathers,
from the very beginning. This was the generation of HUD house, of car wreck and cancer, of commodity
cheese and beef. These were the children who carried dreams in the back pockets of their blue jeans, pulled
them out easily, traded back and forth.
“Dreams like baseball cards,” Uncle Moses said to himself, smiled hard when he saw the first child running
across the field. It was Arnold, of course, pale-skinned boy who was always teased by the other children.
Arnold ran slowly, his great belly shaking with the effort, eyes narrowed in concentration. A full-blood
Spokane, Arnold was somehow born with pale, pretty skin and eyes with color continually changing from gray
to brown. He liked to sit in the sandwich chair and wait for Uncle Moses to make him a good sandwich.
It took Arnold five minutes to run across the field, and all the while Moses watched him, studied his
movements, the way Arnold’s hair reached out in all directions, uncombed, so close to electricity, closer to
lightning. He did not wear braids, could not sit long enough for his mother.
Be still, be still, she would say between her teeth, but Arnold loved his body too much to remain still.
Big as he was, Arnold was still graceful in his movements, in his hands when he touched his face listening to a
good story. He was also the best basketball player in the reservation grade school. Uncle Moses sometimes
walked to the playground just to watch Arnold play and wonder at the strange, often improbable gifts a
person can receive.
We are all given something to compensate for what we have lost. Moses felt those words even though he did
not say them. Arnold arrived, breathing hard. “Ya-hey, Little Man,” Uncle Moses said.
“Hello, Uncle,” Arnold replied, extending his hand in a half-shy, half-adult way, a child’s greeting, the
affirmation of friendship.
“Where are the others?” Uncle Moses asked, taking Arnold’s hand in his own.
“There was a field trip,” Arnold answered. “All the others went to a baseball game in Spokane. I hid until they
left.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to see you.”
Moses smiled at Arnold’s unplanned kindness. He held the child’s hand a little tighter and pulled him up close.
“Little Man,” he said. “You have done a good thing.”
Arnold smiled, pulled his hand away from Moses, and covered his smile, smiling even harder.
“Uncle Moses,” he said through his fingers. “Tell me a good story.”
Uncle Moses sat down in the story chair and told this very story.
THE FINISHING
My mother sits quietly, rips a seam, begins to hum a slow song through her skinny lips.
“What you singing?” I ask.
“I’m singing an it-is-a-good-day song.”
She smiles and I have to smile with her.
“Did you like the story?” I ask.
She keeps singing, sings a little louder and stronger as I take my Diet Pepsi outside and wait in the sun. It is
warm, soon to be cold, but that’s in the future, maybe tomorrow, probably the next day and all the days after
that. Today, now, I drink what I have, will eat what is left in the cupboard, while my mother finishes her quilt,
piece by piece. Believe me, there is just barely enough goodness in all of this.
Broken Promises On Display At Native American Treaties Exhibit
James Clark
NPR 1/18/2005
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/01/18/368559990/broken-promises-on-display-at-native-american-treaties-exhibit
For centuries, treaties have defined the relationship between many Native American nations and the U.S. More than 370
ratified treaties have helped the U.S. expand its territory and led to many broken promises made to American Indians.
A rare exhibit of such treaties at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., looks
back at this history. It currently features one of the first compacts between the U.S. and Native American nations – the
Treaty of Canandaigua. Also known as the Pickering Treaty, the agreement was signed in 1794 between the federal
government and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, or the Six Nations, based in New York. The deal secured an ally for the
young U.S. government after the Revolutionary War and returned more than a million acres to the Haudenosaunee. But
their territory has been cut down over the years. More than two centuries later, the U.S. has kept one promise.
"Article 6 says that they will provide goods in the amount of $4,500, 'which shall be expended yearly forever,' " explains
museum director Kevin Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. Every year, those goods from the U.S.
government include bolts of cloth to distribute to tribal citizens. Haudenosaunee leaders have said that cloth is more
important than money, because it's a way to remind the U.S. of the treaty terms, large and small.
"The physical treaty, like all things, will eventually fade," Gover says. "But that doesn't mean the commitments that were
entered into are completed or are undone."
At least seven other original paper treaties will be featured in rotation at the museum before the exhibit "Nation to Nation"
ends in the fall of 2018. For now, the documents not on display are kept at the National Archives, where one almostforgotten treaty is stored underground.
The light-blue pages of Treaty K are signed without ratifying seals or ribbons — like 17 other unratified treaties signed by
representatives of the U.S. government and Native American nations in California during the Gold Rush.
California lawmakers pressured the U.S. Senate not to ratify the treaties, which promised reservation land to the Native
American nations. There was one reason the lawmakers didn't want the treaties, according to the exhibit's curator Suzan
Shown Harjo of the Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee Indian nations.
"The answer is always gold," she says. "And if it's not gold, it's silver. And if it's not silver, it's copper. And if it's not, go
right through the metal chart."
Harjo says many American Indians in California suffered without treaty protection.
"They were not only scattered from their lands, and lots of people murdered during the Gold Rush, but they were erased
from history," she explains. While many treaties resulted in tragedies, Harjo says she hopes museum visitors will take
away the full span of this diplomatic history.
"People always think of broken treaties and the bad paper and the bad acts, and that is our reality. But it didn't begin there.
It began on an honorable footing," she says. Anyone who wants a strong grounding in American history, Harjo adds,
needs to understand the history of these treaties.
"The people who are citizens of the U.S., these are your treaties. They aren't just the Indians' treaties," she says. "No one
gave us anything. No one was dragging any land behind them when they came here. This was our land."
Ohio Indian Wars https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Ohio_Indian_Wars
During the late 1780s, the Northwest Territory was a violent place as U.S. settlers moved onto land that
several groups of American Indians had long claimed as their own. The United States government lacked the
funds to equip an army to deal with the so-called American Indian threat adequately. Henry Knox, the
Secretary of War, requested that Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, establish a peaceful
relationship between the settlers and the American Indians of the region. St. Clair called for a meeting with
American Indian leaders to negotiate an agreement. The meeting took place at Fort Harmar and began on
December 13, 1788.
The American Indian nations present included representatives from the Wyandot, the Delaware, the Ottawa,
the Chippewa, the Potawatomi, and the Sauk. These attending American Indians hoped that St. Clair would
agree to establish an American Indian reservation consisting of the land west of the Muskingum River and
north of the Ohio River.
St. Clair refused and demanded that the American Indian leaders agree to a reservation boundary established
by the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in 1785. Under the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, Ohio's American Indians were to
relinquish their lands in southern and eastern Ohio.
How Starved Rock Got Its Name
Starved Rock is named for after a legendary battle between the Illiniwek Confederation of Indians and the
Potawatomi, and while it is possible this event took place there are no verifiable historical accounts. According
to the story, Ottawa Chief Pontiac was murdered in 1769 by a member of the Illiniwek Confederation of
Indians, after which the Chippewa, Potawatomi, Ottawa and Kickapoo sought revenge for the killing of the
great warrior. The Illiniwek engaged in a battle with the Potawatomi, eventually making their way to the place
commonly referred to by Indigenous tribes as “The Rock.” This high vantage point was generally considered to
be a tactical advantage in warfare, but rather than engaging the Illiniwek, the Potawatomi, knowing there was
limited water and food at the top of the precipice, decided to wait them out. If they descended the rock for
food and water, they would be killed or they would die of thirst and hunger if they stayed. The legend
recounts that only a handful of the trapped Illiniwek escaped this perilous situation; the majority stayed on
the top of the rock and died. The rock was thereafter referred to as Starved Rock.