INTRODUCTION

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INTRODUCTION→ The lesson, The Myth of The Vanishing Race: Interpreting Historical Photographs of Indigenous Peoples provides a unique perspective on teaching the social and cultural development of the United States by integrating Native American views for a more complete history of the United States. The lesson provides teachers of whom a majority are non-Native with resources for learning and teaching about Native Americans. The lesson is designed to alleviate concerns or apprehensions that can accompany teaching lessons about Native American history. 

 

History is more than names and dates, it is the realm in which all lives are touched in every way, shape, and manner. The site addresses how history is remembered, interpreted, and taught in ways that shape people’s lives for generations. The project asks students to examine historic photographs of Native Americans; consider accompanying primary and secondary sources; shows them how to ask better questions about the past--all with the goal of better hearing the missing voices in American history that will further expand the pedagogical approach to Indigenous American History. These concepts can help mitigate the false narrative of a Vanishing Race by deepening and expanding the approach to teaching American history from Native American perspectives.

 

By introducing visitors to a series of photographs, documents, and Indigenous voices, this project:

 

• Examines the relationship between Native Americans and white photographers, historians of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

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• Introduces the audience to historiography to help them understand how history is remembered, written about, taught, and its legacies in today's world.

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• Provides the audience with the skills to critically analyze a variety of primary and secondary sources from the past and present including photographs, texts, and Indigenous histories.

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• Prompts visitors to reflect on how societies divided themselves based on otherness throughout American history—and the effects of that division.

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The lesson, The Myth of the Vanishing Race is critical to understanding how American history is remembered, written about, taught, and how the interpretations of these histories have changed over time--what historians refer to as historiography. The lesson plan enhances the student’s approach to critical thinking to understanding history and historiography.

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*(TERMINOLOGY)*(CLICK HERE)