Work to be Done

Fall 2015 was exciting and exhausting. The MLK Study of Race Series featuring John Quiñones, Sacramento Knoxx and Marcus Winchester challenged the community to become active bystanders and not be afraid of letting our voice be heard. Those in attendance felt the presenters were inspiring, knowledgeable and motivating for everyone to participate in the difficult dialogues on social justice and racial issues.  It was a reminder that not only charity; but effective change begins at home.

As the Spring 2016 semester begins and winter truly arrives, there are a plethora of opportunities to converse with your peers, faculty and staff. The celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. commenced with the Interrace Forum, where comparisons of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s and 2015 Black Lives Matter Movement.  Professor Richard Pierce provided insight and commentary during the discussion.

OSA Professional Development with Art Force 5Art Force 5 - SDN Community Project

Students and Student Affairs staff creating mosaic tiles for the MLK Community Project – January 14, 2015

MSPS hosted Art Force 5, Alfred University’s Drawn to Diversity team, as they worked with the Notre Dame community to create a social justice art piece. Student Affairs administrators, staff and students contributed to the mosaic mural at McKenna Hall, North and South Dining Halls and LaFortune student Center.  Look for the finished piece, which will be on the first floor of LaFortune. On Friday, January 15 Art Force 5 will conduct a workshop in the Notre Dame Room on Art and Social Justice.

The President’s Office is sponsoring a variety of events during their Walk the Walk Week. The first event will be a midnight candlelight vigil beginning at the Hesburgh Library on Sunday, January 18 (12:00 a.m.).  A community lunch will be held at the Joyce Center (ticketed) with acknowledgements also occurring in North and South Dining Halls for students, faculty and staff. Make sure to have your ID cards. Monday evening will conclude with MSPS MLK Study of Race Series Lecture, Black Lives Matter: The Hashtag behind the New Civil Rights Movement in Debartolo 101 at 7:00 p.m.

The month will conclude with the MSPS Unity Games from January 24 – 30, 2016.  MSPS will collaborate with other Student Affairs departments to sponsor team competitions throughout the week. Prizes will be awarded to the winning teams at the end of the week.  If you are interested in participating register at https://theunitygames.squarespace.com/registration/.

February is Black History Month. MSPS and student clubs are planning several events that will highlight the African Diaspora. It will begin on Thursday, February 4 with Dr. Shannen Dee Williams, History Professor from the University of Tennessee. Watch for advertisement on the remaining activities.

Peace,

Iris L. Outlaw

Iris Outlaw `90 MSA

Director

 

The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools – If We Knew Our History Series

If We Knew Our History Series

The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in SchoolsMarch 16, 2012

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By Bill Bigelow

“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:

… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak

December day,

The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive

Us all away

They set my roof on fire, with their cursed

English spleen

And that’s another reason why I left old

Skibbereen.

 

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By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affectedonly the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

“Paddy’s Lament” recounts the famine and the Irish diaspora to America.

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”

“Stuffed and Starved”: Raj Patel’s comprehensive investigation into the global food network is useful for students to reflect on patterns of poverty that persist today.

Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19thcentury Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.

But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.

Hunger on Trial teaching activity available online.

As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?

These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.

So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.

_________________________________________________________________

Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the online Zinn Education Project, www.zinnedproject.org. This project, inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn, offers free materials to teach a fuller “people’s history” than is found in commercial textbooks. Bigelow is author or co-editor of numerous books, including A People’s History for the Classroomand The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration.

Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor ofRethinking Schools magazine, co-director of the online Zinn Education Project, www.zinnedproject.org, and is author of A People’s History for the Classroom.

 

For Americans Fighting to Reclaim Their Culture, Thanksgiving Means More Than Food – Diverse Issues in Higher Education


Category: American Indian Issues,News,Views | 

by Colleen Fitzgerald

Every fourth Thursday in November, Americans find time for family, sharing food, traditions and language. Stories of that iconic first Thanksgiving evoke images of Pilgrims and Indians, but as is so often the case with history and popular culture, some details are missing. Two of the biggest ― those Indians were the Wampanoag, and within two centuries, their language ceased to be spoken.

Today, the Wampanoag and other Native American tribes give thanks for those who fight to bring their languages home again.

Food is not the only thing humans crave. Losing your language creates a hunger for that piece to make you whole again. This hunger is seen in so many U.S. indigenous communities. It is a hunger to reconnect with heritage, to regenerate culture and traditions, and to revitalize heritage languages.

Language is a powerful badge of identity. The Wampanoag know this. The restoration of their language, powered by Jessie Little Doe Baird and the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, includes summer language camps where children experience their tribal language ‘set within a cultural context,’ for example, learning how to plant, harvest and cook traditional foods. These foods, plants and animals are familiar to those of us who are not Native Americans. Words like squash, persimmon, hickory, chipmunk, skunk andpossum made their way into English in a route that originated in different Algonquian languages, writes linguist Ives Goddard.

Native American languages have more to them than words borrowed into English. Whether the language is Norwegian or Navajo, fluent speakers weave words into tapestries that express the full range of human experience, explain the natural world and its phenomena, and preserve memories across the generations. When a language ceases to be spoken, it means that intergenerational transmission of language, culture and memories gets interrupted.

In the centuries following European contact in North America, there was a series of destructive interruptions of Native American families. Particularly tragic were Indian boarding schools, which removed children from their families and sent them to schools off the reservation. Forbidden from speaking their Native languages, even amongst themselves, many Native students vowed that they would never teach it to their children. Physical and other punishments for violating school edicts linked trauma to Native American language use for generations of young indigenous children.

UNESCO classifies a language as safe when it is ‘spoken by all generations; (and) intergenerational transmission is uninterrupted.’ Boarding schools disrupted the acquisition of Native languages in the home. Decade after decade, intergenerational transmission declined, catastrophic to Native American languages.

A reversal of fortune, however, has come for these language communities. Like the Wampanoag, tribes are reclaiming their languages.  Like the Lakota, tribes are recreating environments for their youngest citizens, language nests, to transmit language to their children. Like the Chickasaw, tribes are using an intensive method of language teaching one-on-one, pairing an elder with a younger adult to create an apprenticeship of tribal language learning.

Another language hero, Daryl Baldwin, is a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. There were no fluent speakers when Daryl set out to learn his language. Among his grandfather’s belongings there was a word list of Miami words. Words led to more, learning linguistics (and a master’s degree) to learn his language, partnering with linguist David Costa to draw from documents in archives and knowledge of related language.

Now, once again, the Miami language is spoken, revitalizing traditions, culture and language. And Daryl helps those from other tribes who rely on archival documents to restore their languages and to wake them up from their hibernation, bringing language home.

Dinner blessings this Thursday will be said in many Native languages — fragile, but still surviving. Native American communities across this country will say chokma’shkimvtowado ― giving thanks for their languages, and for those tribal language champions who work to satiate that hunger.

There is a hunger for language. Reconnecting with tribal languages nourishes the soul.

Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald is a professor of linguistics and director of the Native American Languages Lab at The University of Texas at Arlington. She may be contacted at cmfitz@uta.edu.