Native American Culture & The Environment
(general views of the culture and how we can relate these aspects and “circle thinking” techniques to help us improve our relationship with the earth and hopefully each other.)
Some new discoveries:
1. What direction are you facing?
2. Those wonderful, healthy, edible weeds.
3. How “mix-signals” start wars.
4. And what’s in your totem bag?
5. You are what you eat eats (and I’m not just being redundant.)
6. They’re not wild. They’re our outside neighbors.
7. Keeping the pulse of the earth and the trees.
8. Grandma moon, mother earth, father sky and the rest of the family.
9. Learning how to speak skunk and other languages and what they are telling us.
- The culminating activity is each student making their own totem bag
Sample of the totem bags the students will make
(Supplies included)
Program runs approximately two hours. First hour is presentation with second hour for activity.
Cost: $175 per class
The Wolf (totem animal of the teacher)
Oh feel the power!!
I really love this program. Mostly because I love nature and I get to see the kids maybe not love it, but at least starting to notice it. It’s a real connecting experience. It is also a huge guilt trip. A trip to see what we do to the environment, which in affect is what we are doing to ourselves. That is the circle that we live in. It’s the true meaning to “what goes around, comes around.”
I explain how the Native American Culture basically thought in a circle (a way to picture cause and effect). We are line thinkers. Great for keyboards and remotes, but not for a way of life.
And so the project begins. Get rid of the guilt. Get rid of the line. Make the difference, relax, connect, see where less is better and ownership is a group activity.
Apart from the fact that it’s just fun and you really need to justify the program with some appropriate language for the data collecting, testing categories, (am I being too sarcastic, I’m sorry) see below.
Expand thinking skills
Implement cause and effect techniques
Learn to observe, perceive, evaluate and form various conclusions
Assess environmental issues
Make associations
Develop hypothesis
Exercise the imagination
It also apart from academic skills helps to
Make a connection to something and understand that we are not alone
Teach respect
Power and control over own life
Knowing what you can change and respecting what you can’t
Learn to depart from linear thinking.
Native American’s thought in a circle.
Their life revolved around ‘cause and effect.’ It is time to see how our actions effect our environment, the good and the bad and yes the very inappropriate.
We have the wrong idea when we look at what is in nature. We see what we want to see, because we aren’t really watching. When we watch, like the Native American culture did, we see something completely different. And it’s pretty amazing.
In a time where so many children feel a sense of isolation and peer pressure, their connection to the world around them gives them not only a sense of belonging, but also empowerment to participate in a better life for themselves