Indian Education for All Lesson Plans

Learn more about Montana history, native cultures, and artistry and introduce primary sources (including art, photographs, and documents) into your classroom through these lessons, while providing your students insight into the Essential Understandings regarding Montana Indians.

 

The Art of Storytelling: Plains Indian Perspectives (K-12). These materials are designed to provide you and your students with an exciting way to incorporate Indian Education for All into your art curriculum. The material includes grade-appropriate lesson plans which are aligned with the Essential Understandings and the Montana Art Content Standards; three PowerPoint presentations, one focused on winter counts and two about ledger art (one of which is designed for grades K-6 and the other for grades 7-12); and additional material that explores winter counts and biographical art.

 

 

A Beautiful Tradition: Ingenuity and Adaptation in a Century of Plateau Women's Art (Designed for 4th-12th) These materials are designed to provide you and your students with an exciting way to study this colorful art form while incorporating Indian Education for All in your classroom. There are three grade-appropriate versions of this curriculum: fourth/fifth grade, middle school, and high school.  These interdisciplinary units include grade appropriate lesson plans, aligned with the Essential Understandings; PowerPoint presentations; worksheets; and other material that explores this remarkable art form.



"Native American Trade Routes and the Barter Economy" includes two learning activities intended designed to complement Chapter 2 of the Montana: Stories of the Land textbook. Designed for use in grades seven through nine, Activity One, "Resources and Routes," focuses primarily on mapping pre-contact trade routes, with a special emphasis on Montana. Activity Two, "Trading Times," asks students to simulate the process through which various products from different regional tribes were bartered and disseminated to gain a better understanding of pre-contact barter economy and how it compares with the modern-day cash economy.

"When Worlds Collide: The Salish People Encounter the Lewis and Clark Expedition" is a flexible one- to four-day learning activity designed to complement Chapter 4 of the Montana: Stories of the Land textbook. Recommended for use in grades seven through nine, the activity challenges students to grapple with historical evidence and to better recognize the complexity of native-white encounters.

"Blood on the Marias: Understanding Different Points of View Related to the Baker Massacre of 1870" is a flexible one- to three-day learning activity designed to complement Chapter 7 of the Montana: Stories of the Land textbook. Recommended for use in grades seven through twelve, the activity challenges students to grapple with historical evidence and to better recognize the complexity of native-white encounters. In considering a variety of historic documents, students will have an opportunity to raise questions and draw meaningful conclusions about a historically significant event: the Baker (also known as Marias) Massacre.

 

Denver Public Library	"Hearing Native Voices: Analyzing Differing Tribal Perspectives in the Oratory of Sitting Bull and Plenty Coups" is a flexible one- to three-day activity designed to complement Chapter 7 of the Montana: Stories of the Land textbook. Recommended for use in grades seven through twelve, the activity focuses on excerpts from a number of speeches and addresses given by two well-known leaders of native peoples closely associated with the story of Montana's past: Sitting Bull, of the Hunkpapa Sioux, and Plenty Coups, of the Crow. This lesson seeks to challenge students' preconceived stereotypes of American Indians as one-dimensional, inflexible caricatures who were merely acted upon by outside forces. In comparing and contrasting brief excerpts of these leaders' speeches, students will come to appreciate that great diversity existed among individual American Indian leaders and the ways they responded to changing circumstances during the late nineteenth century.
				Library of Congress

 

"Mining Sacred Ground: Environment, Culture, and Economic Development on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation" is a learning activity designed to familiarize students with an important and contentious issue now facing Montana's native peoples: whether or not to develop their reservation's coal and coal-bed methane resources. Recommended for use in grades seven through twelve, this activity challenges students to better appreciate the complexities of promoting resource-based economic development when such action conflicts with traditional cultural values.

• Privacy & Security
• Accessibility
• Contact Us
• Search