Education Week - August 28, 2019 - 12

Teaching Primary Sources When Voices Are Missing
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it raised a question about teaching history: How
do you paint a full picture of the past for your students when some voices have long been silenced?
Since the introduction of the Common Core
State Standards a decade ago, teachers have
been encouraged to give primary sources a more
prominent place in the classroom. The standards
emphasize close analysis of texts across subject
areas, which in history and social studies can
mean reading these kinds of archival documents. In the years since, both the U.S. Library
of Congress and the National Archives have
expanded their digital collections in an effort to
make resources available for teachers.
Still, finding primary sources isn't always easy,
especially when it comes to historically marginalized voices, said Jenn Androsky, a 10th grade
Advanced Placement U.S. History teacher, who
traveled from St. Paul, Minn., where she teaches
at a Catholic school, for the training.
It's especially difficult to find written records of
Native American voices from before the 1800s,
she said. Those that are available have often been
translated through white colonists. Even so, she
said, these sources are essential to teaching history well-and engaging students.
"The nice little progressive American story is
boring," Androsky said. "Once [students] realize
it's complicated, it's interesting."

that European colonists should have to respect
any Native American claims to land, or even coexist with native people, he said.
After the murders, different groups of colonists
debated policy and ideology in the press, through
pamphlets-"the social media of the 1700s,"
Fenton told the teachers. But native voices are
almost entirely absent from the pages of printed
records available.
When these stories and perspectives aren't included in mainstream resources, teachers can
start to believe they don't matter, said LéAnn
Murphy Cassidy, an 8th grade U.S. history teacher
at Memorial Middle School in Middlebury, Conn.
"I'm fighting colleagues who believe that anyone of color who's important is in the textbook,
and if not, they're not important," she said.
Bringing these stories to light is an ongoing
project in classrooms across the country.
The California Indian History Curriculum
Coalition, out of Sacramento State University, is

Beyond the Textbook
The events the teachers were studying in Philadelphia took place in 1763. That year, the Paxton
Boys-a group of white colonists from the Pennsylvania backcountry-murdered the entire
tribe of Susquehannock Indians, also known as
the Conestoga. In targeting this tribe, which had
been allied with the Pennsylvania government
since the beginning of that century, the Paxton
Boys were attempting to send a message to local
authorities and the British crown, said Will Fenton, the director of scholarly innovation at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the creative
director of the Redrawing History project.
The massacre was a repudiation of the idea

among the groups trying to rewrite old narratives.
A coalition of educators, tribal scholars,
and native activists, the group has created resources, vetted by California Indians, that center the perspective of native peoples in history.
"We actually have a lot of documentation,"
said Rose Borunda, a member of the coalition
and the director of the doctorate in educational
leadership program at Sacramento State.
European contact occurred later in California than in other parts of the country, so more
primary sources exist from there, she said. And
more than 100 federally recognized tribes live
within the state. Often, their histories are also
embedded in stories passed down through an
oral tradition, said Borunda.
Partnering with Native Americans in the state
is essential to the curriculum project, she said.
"We don't want to continue oppressive practices in which we're speaking for people who
we don't have a right to speak on behalf of," said

Borunda, who is indigenous.
The National Council for the Social Studies
also endorses this practice. "Central to this process is the concept of sharing power-this means
moving beyond inviting Indigenous Peoples as
guest speakers, to including Indigenous Peoples
as decision-makers," reads a 2018 position paper
from the organization.

'A Conceptual Sea Change'
Back in Pennsylvania, though, the people at
the center of the Paxton Boys story are gone.
"An American genocide was completed on the
Susquehannock people," said Lee Francis, a Native American comic book publisher and the author of the upcoming graphic novel Ghost River:
the Fall and Rise of the Conestoga. Francis spoke
with the teachers at the University of Pennslyvania the day after they visited the archives.
Francis, who had seen the same primary source
documents months earlier as he started work on
Ghost River, said he had been excited to examine
them, too. "But it definitely clued us in on who is
telling the story," he said.
He and illustrator Weshoyot Alvitre set to
work, Francis said, trying to "unerase" the
gaps in the story. As part of the process, they
consulted with the local Circle Legacy Center,
an advocacy group that has memorialized the
massacre. "I'm not from this place either," said
Francis, who is from the Laguna Pueblo in New
Mexico. "So for me, it was also about getting
permission to write this story."
Ghost River takes on a nonlinear narrative
structure, switching back and forth from the
events of the past to the present day, when
Francis, Alvitre, and Fenton are crafting the
story. The dual perspective shows that while the
Susquehannock are gone, native people still exist
and are still telling their stories, said Francis.
"Not only is this book a historical representation,
but it's an honoring," he said.
Some of the teachers listening struggled to
imagine how they could use a book without a linear timeline, and one that didn't attempt to take
an objective point of view. "What's going on in
my head this week is a conceptual sea change,"
one teacher told Francis. But teaching history
that has long been marginalized, or has been
left out of the written record, is complicated,
said Maria Adamson, an 11th grade U.S. history
teacher at William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia. "There are people today who are carriers of history, like Toni Morrison," she said. "Did
Beloved actually happen? No, but it can speak to
the lived history that wasn't written down."
Ultimately, Adamson said, teachers have
to investigate the gaps in primary sources,
and sometimes rely on thoughtfully reconstructed narratives.
"If you're interested in the history of women,
or the lower class, or anyone who's not white, you
have to ask these questions," she said. "You can't
just not teach it."

Photos by Michelle Gustafson for Education Week

FROM TOP: A group of history teachers gathers
around archive materials concerning the
massacre of the Conestoga as part of a
weeklong professional development program
on teaching colonial history held by the Library
Company of Philadelphia and the Gilder
Lehrman Institute of American History.
Julie Levine, an assistant reading specialist at
Shaw Avenue Elementary in Valley Stream,
N.Y., and Ted Zimmerman, an 8th grade U.S.
history at the Math, Civics, and Sciences
Charter School in Philadelphia, look over
archived political cartoons.

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