"Honoring the Word: Classroom instructors find that students respond best to
oral tradition"
By Michael Thompson
Thirty years ago this fall, I arrived at Haskell Indian Junior College, now
Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU, Lawrence, KS), as a young humanities
instructor fresh out of grad school, mistakenly optimistic that the way
I had been taught to teach composition and literature would resonate with my
Native students.
Specifically, my indoctrination in the Western literary canon at the state
college I attended had emphasized that
the highest form of artistic, literary expression was one of individual
imagination – Shakespeare, Hawthorne,
Joyce, and the like. I am sure I carried that perspective into the classroom
with me and that it shaped my first
clumsy attempts to teach writing and literature to Native students.
A lot has changed in 30 years. I now believe that there is a uniquely
Indigenous world view that frequently
frames learning. Consequently, my teaching has certainly changed.
It took me years to understand that the oral tradition could be fundamentally
superior to written literature or that
texts that privilege the Indigenous voice might speak more powerfully to Native
students than literary masterpieces.
But in numerous ways it has become evident to me that Native communities
generally value “the word” itself
above the art of writing and that there are, in fact, powerful and compelling
reasons why this is so. In recent
interviews for this article, I have found this opinion to be widely shared
among tribal educators.
http://www.tribalcollegejournal.org/thompson_honoring.htm
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