INVESTIGATING RESERVATION CONTROVERSIES:
Role-playing and Online Research as Aids to Historical Inquiry

Facilitator: Bret Eynon

Overview

Acting as students and using an online lesson created by two American Memory Fellows, participants take the role of a 19th century American Quaker who needs to understand Native American - settler conflicts in the Western territories in order to secure a job as Indian Agent. We read a fictional letter that sets the stage for the investigation, review a guide for taking notes on documents, and break into groups to study the problem using a pre-selected group of online resources. Afterward, we reflect as teachers on the value of the activity and discuss ways of modifying this and other online lessons for our own students.

Objectives

At the end of this exercise participants will be able to:

• Describe the different ways that white settlers, Native Americans, and American Quakers viewed 19th century conflicts over land and justice;
• Analyze primary documents using a note-taking guide, and be in a position to modify this guide for their own students
• Describe the characteristics of online lessons that make them valuable for students, and also the potential drawbacks;
• Describe ways of modifying online lessons so that they are of benefit to their own students

Resources

• Reservation Controversies, an online lesson created by 1997 American Memory Fellows Peter Milbury and Brett Silva.
• Note-taking Guide for Analyzing Documents
• American Memory collections used:
  1. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940
  2. California As I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900

Exercise

1. Setting the stage: A letter from the Secretary (40 minutes)

We discuss the purposes of the workshop, and the fact that we will be working with an online lesson created and tested by 1997 American Memory Fellows Peter Milbury and Brett Silva called Reservation Controversies.

As a group we do the following things:

• Read the role-play prompt, a letter from the Secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This fictional letter assigns you your role as a Quaker mediator, and gives you your assignment: to prepare for an interview for the job of Indian Agent, by finding out everything you can about the conflicts between white and Tejano settlers and native Comanches in the Western territories during the 1870s.
• Collectively make three lists: What you already know about the conflicts; What you need to know in order to be successful in the interview; and sources you might consult to find this information.
• Preview the page of online resources that the instructors have assembled, offering information on the perspectives of three groups: white and Tejano settlers, native Comanches, and American Quakers.
• Preview the Note-Taking Guide that you will use for analyzing the documents you choose. We practice using this guide with an excerpt from a sample document, "The condition of affairs in Indian Territory and California. A report by Prof. C.C. Painter, agent of the Indian Rights Association."

2. Reading and analyzing online resources (40 minutes)

We will use the jigsaw method to prepare for the interview. You and a partner will be assigned to research either:

1. the white and Tejano settlers' perspectives on the conflict;
2. Native Americans' perspectives on the conflict; or
3. Quaker Americans' perspective on the conflict (your own role).

With your partner, go to the online resources page and scan the documents related to your assigned group. Select two or three documents that appear to offer valuable information about your group's perspective. Print them out, or if you prefer, read them online.

Analyze the 2 or 3 documents you have chosen using the Note-Taking Guide for each one. Be sure to take enough notes, or mark the printed text well enough, so that you will be able to use information from the documents in preparing for the interview.

3. Preparing for the job interview / sharing information (40 minutes)

Meet together with the whole group. Each pair takes 5 minutes to summarize for the group the information gleaned from their documents about the sources of conflict between Native Americans and white and Tejano settlers, and possible ways to resolve them. During this "jigsaw" process, you will take notes on what the other groups report. At the end we construct an outline for answering the key interview questions:

• What are potential problems between Comanches and Texans?
• What are the past problems and issues?
• What successful and unsuccessful approaches have been used by other agents?
• How you will effectively protect both the Comanche and the Texans' lives and property without stirring up controversy?
• What questions or confusions do you have, and how might you begin to answer them?

4. Debriefing the lesson (30 minutes)

Take a few minutes to discuss and/or write about the application of this role-playing and inquiry model in your classroom and school. You may use these questions as a guide:

• What did you learn from this process about Native American - Euro American relations in the late 19th century?
• What were the most valuable parts of the lesson?
• What challenges, if any, would your students face in using this method (or a variation) of historical inquiry? What do you do in your classroom to make inquiry activities most effective? How would you adapt this activity?
• Which online resources were most valuable? Least valuable? Why? What can we learn from this? How were online resources organized, presented and used as part of this lesson? Was this an effective organization? How might the organization be modified to make using the documents easier?