Unit 1: A World of Their Own: The Americas to 1500
The focus or concept for this activity is change. The student should explore the Indian tribe that he or she researched and reported on in Question/Problem 2 in terms of what is happening in the lives of these people today.
Indians are changing as the peoples are changing. Yet they retain their identities while speaking English, wearing Western clothes, living in modern houses, borrowing techniques from the West and so on. Who but an out-of-touch intellectual would arrogantly assert that the American Indian, alone among peoples, should not change but should remain a textbook example of 'the ethnographic present'? The Indians' survival in the contemporary world, different as that world is from the form uncovered by prehistoric archaeology and post-settlement ethnography, is itself a vindication of their Indianness.
From Philip Kopp, The Smithsonian Book of North American Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1986).
In addition to some of the topics mentioned in the above paragraph the following could be explored: Students could give an oral presentation of their findings to the class or write an essay.
1. Difficult problems that many American Indians struggle with today: