“Re-Discovering America,” an Interactive Training for Teachers

Are you looking for a creative way to:

• bring the perspectives of Indigenous peoples into your classroom?
• teach the history of this continent through the lens of Indigenous peoples’ experience?
• engage your students in honest reckoning with past and ongoing injustices?
• consider how you might develop relationships with Indigenous people in your community, based on truth, respect, justice, and our shared humanity?

During this training, you will experience the interactive workshop, “Re-Discovering America,” designed for middle schools and high schools. It will be facilitated in-person by Paula Palmer, co-director of Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples, and Gail Melix, Herring Pond Wampanoag. The experiential exercise will be followed by a period for reflection and sharing personal responses. We will conclude with discussion of how you might bring this program into your schools and classrooms.

“Re-Discovering America” is a participatory exercise where students symbolically experience the colonization of North America as the Native peoples and the European colonists experienced it. Though a scripted presentation, students hear the voices of Indigenous leaders and European popes, monarchs, presidents, generals, and historians as the story of colonization unfolds.  They learn about the Doctrine of Discovery and how it was employed to take lands away from non-Christian peoples.  They learn how this Doctrine continues to violate the rights of Indigenous peoples in our country and around the world.  They learn how Indigenous peoples organized to claim their rights through passage of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the issues that matter most to Native Americans today.