Course Directors: Kurt Peters and Dwaine Plaza
Course Facilitator: Danette Gillespie
Office: Ethnic Studies Department 225 Strand Agricultural Hall
Office: Sociology Dept. 302 Fairbanks Hall
Office Phone numbers: 737- 0709 737-5369
Course Web Page Address: http://osu.orst.edu/instruct/soc204/plazad/native/index.htm
Office Hours: Anytime throughout the scheduled five days of the course. After the course is completed by appointment only.
Email addresses: Kpeters@orst.edu dplaza@orst.edu Danette.Gillespie@mu.orst.edu
This course is supported in part by the InterACTION! project, a W.K. Kellogg Foundation sponsored grant at Oregon State University
Class Meetings
On Thursday, March 21 Meet at 4:00- 5:00 pm, at OSU, Strand Agricultural Hall, Room 226. You are required to attend a short pre-course information meeting. At this meeting the syllabus will be distributed, pre-departure planning will be finalized and a short ice breaking session will take place. Students from the Bend Cascade campus are not required to attend this meeting but they need to contact Evelyn Reynolds (Ethnic Studies Department) to make arrangements to get the syllabus, the reading kit, and final instructions on where to meet on Sunday March 24th in Bend.
On Sunday March 24 we will meet in Strand Agricultural Hall Room 226 at 8:30 am. We will leave OSU and travel together by van to Burns Oregon. Students will spend five days living in Burns Oregon and interacting with the Paiute Native American population and related stakeholders. Students will participate in all aspects of the course which also includes some domestic chores (cooking, cleaning and maintaining their communal living quarters for the week).
** This class requires LONG hours of processing after we return from stakeholder meetings in the afternoons. Please note that we can often be in class until 8:30 p.m. 13 hour days are not uncommon in this intense course. You therefore need to bring a positive up-beat attitude to this course. Turbulence is also very much part of the group dynamic process and when orchestrating a course of this nature. Please be mentally prepared for this.
During the course there may be some unforseen circumstances which arise that alter the schedule below. In this case it will be YOUR responsibility to find out what those adjustments might be.
Course Goals:
To bring stakeholders from diverse backgrounds together to learn about cross cultural issues that Native American people have faced in Oregon both historically and contemporarily. Through listening, analysis and collaboration with different community stakeholders including: cattle ranchers, school officials, human health and service providers, casino and gaming officials, high school students, extension services personnel, law enforcement officers, and tribal leaders. Course participants will begin to develop a better understanding of the complex cross-cultural issues that face Native American populations in Oregon as they move into the new millennium. The course embodies a non-traditional approach to learning that blurs the boundaries between teacher/ student/ community/ researcher. Stakeholders with vested interests in issues facing the Paiute Native American group in Burns Oregon will be invited to tell their stories to students who will then have the opportunity to reflect upon this information in a collective setting. Group processing of the information obtained through intense listening experiences will contribute to the students understanding of issues presented from different social positions and perspectives. By the end of the week students will better understand the issues facing the Native American population in Burns Oregon as they move into the new millennium.
Required Course Materials:
Winnemucca, Sarah (1994) Life Among the Piutes : Their Wrongs and Claims. Reno: University of Nevada Press.
Course Reading Kit
One notebook (i.e. binder/ spiral) to be used as a reflection journal
Summary of the Final Grade Calculation
Intellectual Engagement/Participation 30 percent
Group Presentation 15 percent
Personal Journal/ Writing To Learn 20 percent
Book Review 20 percent
Web Page Production 15 percent
Throughout the week we will be using a video camera and digital camera to record the discussions and experiences that we engage in. Your cooperation in this matter is greatly appreciated.
Throughout the week we may have member(s) of the local or state press accompany us to observe the pedagogical method of learning. Your cooperation in helping them understand the leaning that is taking place in the course is greatly appreciated.
Graduate students enrolled in the course are required to make their personal journal, book review, web page and participation in the course more extensive than undergraduate students.
Services For Students with Disabilities
Students with documented disabilities who may need accommodations, who have any emergency medical information the instructors should know of, or who need special arrangements in the event of an evacuation, should make an appointment immediately.
The Writing Center
The Writing Center provides students with a FREE consulting
service for their writing assignments. The Center is located at 123
Waldo Hall. The service operates from Monday to Thursday 9-7 pm,
and Friday 9-4 pm. You can make an appointment to discuss your writing
with a peer writing assistant (737-5640). Another option available
through the Center is to use email to get online answers to brief writing
questions (writingQ@mail.orst.edu).
Course Content
The course begins by introducing action research and active listening
as two modes of inquiry for doing research and understanding the changes
which are taking place for the Paiute living in Burns Oregon. The subject
matter then becomes more practical in the sense that the group goes out
into the community of Burns in order to listen to the perspectives of different
community stakeholders including: cattle ranchers, school officials, human
health and service providers, casino and gaming officials, high school
students, extension services personnel, developers, miners, law enforcement
officers, and tribal leaders Throughout the week students will also be
reflecting on course readings, writing journal entries, formulating questions
for the stakeholders, processing interviews and watching short films on
the topic. By doing all of these activities students will get a better
understanding of the ways in which various stakeholder groups in Burns
regard the issues faced by the Paiute native population in Burns as they
move into the new millennium.
Sunday, March 24 Meet at 8:30am at OSU, Strand Agricultural Hall, Room 226. Travel to Burns Oregon via Bend Campus. Action learning, active listening and collaboration skills are discussed and developed throughout the day. Some discussions led by Dr. Janice McMurray (Director InterACTION! project) on active listening and learning. Jack Scruggs (Community drug, alcohol and suicide counselor) will lead a discussion on cross cultural perspectives in listening. Note: the students from the Bend Cascade campus will join us in the Multicultural Room at approx. 11:30 am. We will proceed from Bend to Burns at approximately 2:00 pm. At about 6:00 pm we will go to Windmill Pizza restaurant in Burns. We may have time for a quick windshield tour of Burns pointing out the major landmarks before we head back to the Riley Extension services center conference room. We will spend the remaining part of the evening coming up with questions for stakeholder meetings the following day. Lunch and dinner provided this day.
Monday, March 25 Burns Leave retreat site at 8:00 am. 9:00 am - 10:00 am Paiute community center Jim St Martin (Tribal Administration) & Albert Teeman (Tribal Chair). 10:00-11:00 am Pat Pitman, (Regional Social Services Coordinator for Eastern Oregon) & Michelle Belisle (Commission on Children and Families Director Harney County). 11:00- 12:00 pm Art Tasse (Burns School Board Official). 12:00- 1:00 pm Lunch. 2:00-3:00 pm Martin Vavra (Oregon State University Extension Services) Late Afternoon return to retreat center for debriefing, develop questions for the next day. Breakfast, Lunch and dinner will be provided this day.
Tuesday, March 26 Burns Leave retreat site at 8:00 am. 9:00 am - 10:00 am Paiute community center Michael Sierrier (Community Social Services for Burns). 10:00-11:00 am Rev. Eugene Luttman (Church of the Living Waters). 11:00- 12:00 Lucinda George (Tribal Community Social Services) & Minerva Soucie (Tribal Education Specialist). 12:00- 1:00 pm Lunch. Late Afternoon 3:00-5:00 pm Cemetery Study. Return to retreat center for debriefing, develop questions for the next day. Breakfast, Lunch and dinner will be provided this day.
Wednesday, March 27 Burns Leave retreat site at 8:00 am. 9:00 - 10:00 am Paiute community center Randy Cook (Tribal Police Chief). 10:00-11:00 am Twyla Teeman (Tribal Health Care Issues). 11:00- 12:00 Brian Tate (Casino Manager). 12:00- 1:00 pm Lunch. 2:00 pm -4:00 pm Harney County Museum tour. Late Afternoon return to retreat center for debriefing, develop questions for the next day. Slide show presentation on cattle ranching issues and the history of the Paiute. Breakfast, Lunch and dinner will be provided this day.
Thursday, March 28 Burns Leave retreat site at 8:00 am. 9:00 am - 10:00 am Paiute community center Judge Steve Grasty (Judicial System). 10:00-11:00 am Fred Otley (Cattle Rancher). 11:00- 12:00 a group of Tribal Elders will join us. 12:00- 1:00 pm Lunch. Late morning debriefing and preparation for final presentation; (5:00-7:00 p.m). The Pow-Wow Club will be hosting a dinner for students. Students will do a public presentation in Burns with all of the stakeholders and invited guests as the audience. The students will present to the stakeholders what they learned through the five days. Final course evaluations. The class will formally end at approximately 7:30 p.m. Breakfast, Lunch and dinner will be provided this day.
Friday, March 29th Depart from Burns 9:00 am. Arrival at OSU approximately 5:00 pm. Breakfast and Lunch will be provided this day.
Intellectual Engagement and Active Participation
During the five day period that the course runs, we expect each student
to at various times be an active listener, facilitator, recorder, presenter
and an overall collegial and sensitive member of the learning team for
all activities. At the end of the five days each person will be asked to
submit a self evaluation of their performance and learning throughout the
process. The self-evaluation will be used by the teaching team for assessing
the individual’s final grade. Overall, intellectual engagement and active
participation will be worth 30 percent of the final grade.
Reflection Journal
One of your central learning activities during this course will be
keeping a personal reflection journal. You should think of this writing
as talking out loud or thinking out loud. And you should realize that some
of your most interesting (to you, we mean) and productive journal entries
may well begin with questions or notions that you haven't really thought
about much. They might also be observations of the stakeholders perspectives/
positions on education that make you wonder. If you are used to writing
essays and tests only, then you'll need a paradigm shift. You will need
to lower your standards in order to get the full benefits of your journal.
Think about it: essays and tests ask you to be sure. They ask you to write
clearly and authoritatively about a topic that you've come to some conclusions
about (or even master). Part of the challenge of writing essays and tests
lies in deciding for yourself what your conclusions are. No doubt you will
come to conclusions during this short course and you can certainly use
your journal to reflect on them and examine them. But you can and should
also use the journal to try out new ideas, to pick up on some aspect of
a stakeholder's concerns or class discussion that you disagreed with or
agreed with or that we didn't get to fully air. The journal can and should
be your place to continue our class discussions and your conversations
while out in the field. It can and should be your place to record your
reactions to the reading you do. Your entries can agree or disagree with
the readings. You can argue with it, or just talk about what might be confusing
in your readings. If you end up temporarily lost or at a dead end, that's
reasonable and even useful. The point is that you're using the journal
to become fully involved in all the issues the course raises and your action
learning experience is giving you. Don't forget to go back and re-read
earlier entries; sometimes they'll still look accurate, sometimes they'll
look naive, and sometimes you'll find that you now have answers to earlier
questions. These insights can become new entries. Finally, use your journal
to draw connections between this course and the others you've had.
Grading of Journals
The reflection journal counts for 20 percent of your grade.
It will be evaluated according to three criteria: commitment, ambition
and engagement. Your journals will NOT be graded according to correctness
or paragraphing or sentence structure. So feel free to write quickly. Punctuate
in any way that makes sense at the time. Your journal will need to include
a reflection on each article in the course kit. Reflections on each
stakeholder and the newspaper articles in the course kit are
also expected to be part of the journal. Note, we expect that you
will have at least 15 pages of handwritten commentary in your journal
by the time you submit it for grading.
Writing to Learn In Class Exercises
Throughout the week you will be asked to spend 5 minutes of in-class
time to participate in short writing to learn activities. The purpose
of these exercises is to help you learn more about the course content.
These exercises may include: write and pass, micro-themes, reading response
questions, media/film reflections, or end of class observations. These
writing to learn exercises require no more than one or two paragraphs of
written response in your journal. Your written work will be submitted to
the instructors in your journal at the end of the course.
Book Review (Due April 15, 2002)
Apart from the reflection journal we want you to complete a book review
of the course text: Sarah, Winnemucca, (1994) Life Among the Piutes: Their
Wrongs and Claims. The book review can take any one of the
following forms. (A) an examination of the contents in the book in comparison
with the themes found in the reading kit. (B) Compare and contrast how
the circumstance for the Paiute has changed or stayed the same since Winnemucca
wrote her account. (C) How similar or different were the sentiments of
the stakeholders interviewed with the issues highlighted by Winnemucca
in her book? We envision the book review to be creative and will take into
consideration: content, theme, insights, and interest in the various areas
of the book. The book review is worth 20% of your final grade. The
book review should be a minimum of 3 pages in length. The final
book review must be submitted in TYPED form.
Web Page Participation
Students will work in groups to construct a mini-web page. Each mini
web page will ultimately be joined together to form one large class web
page. The web page will have Native American cross cultural issues as its
focus. Each mini-web page should have a theme which is based on the course
readings, classroom discussions or stakeholder issues. Each mini-web page
also needs to include a group statement (minimum 4 paragraphs) about
the learning experienced during the course. In addition students are expected
to surf the net and find other sites which discuss the theme they are interested
in. These newly discovered sites should be included as links where additional
information on the topic can be found. We envision the final class web
page to be one which captures the overall learning experience from the
students perspective. Some training will be provided on how to construct
a web page but not much. We envision dividing up students into working
groups where at least one person in each group is an "expert" in web page
construction. The web page activity will be worth 15% or your final
grade.
Group Presentation
Throughout this course emphasis is being placed on listening and thinking
critically about issues which Native Americans have faced as they moved
into the new millennium. It is in this spirit that you are asked to critically
explore and present the competing arguments. As a group we will decide
by consensus on the best way to present back to the stakeholders what we
have learned throughout the week. Each mini-presentation group will consist
of 2 people (facilitators for the stakeholder). All presenters will be
limited in terms of visual resources. Presenters can use an overhead projector,
colored markers, or bristol board paper. The group presentation activity
will be worth 15% of your final grade.
Burns Cemetery Assignment One (March 26)
The practice of marking the final resting-place of a loved one goes
back thousands of years. The ancient pyramids are conceivably the greatest
example, standing today as a reminder of the ancient Egyptian glorification
of life after death. Many of the elaborate grave markers erected in the
19th and early 20th centuries were styled after the memorials of the ancient
Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilizations. Cemeteries are living lessons
in history, sociology and cultural studies. People who buried their dead
said much about themselves and the ones who had died. While not considered
a primary historical information source, gravestones are an excellent source
for sociological speculation and theorizing. Most tomb-stones contain the
persons name, place of birth, dates of birth and death, the number of children
they had, and their marital status. Gravestones can also provide evidence
of occupation, military service, and membership in a fraternal organization
and religious affiliations.
On March 26th we will visit the main public cemetery in Burns. We will use unobtrusive qualitative methods of research in order to study the history, demography and social structure of Harney County -- Burns (Circa 1800 to the present) . Through an organized and systematic process of fieldwork, data collection and theorizing students will be able to understand the social, cultural and historical origins of the area by determining who is buried in this cemetery and who is not.
Working in teams of two you will systematically record information from each grave stone in your designated area. Each headstone is unique and will not necessarily yield all of the data below. We would like you to however write down as much information as appears on the head-stones in your designated area. This might include the following:
Name (full)
Date of Birth
Date of Death
Place of Birth
Cause of Death
Marital Status
Number of children
Occupation
Religious affiliation
Can you estimate the social class of this person (based on the size of the stone head or location in the cemetery)?
Are there any relationships stated on the stone?
Are children or other close relatives buried close by?
Is there any information written on the back of the stone?
Are there any other instructions on this head stone?
After completing this assignment we would like you to make an extensive journal entry (1-2 pages) describing what general findings you made in the cemetery and how this relates to the course reading kit or issues discussed in the course so far. What occupations did men/women do? What were the major causes of death in the 19th/ 20th centuries? What was the average number of children women had? What was the rate of marriage? What was the most practiced religion? Were most people born in Burns or did they migrate from elsewhere? How long on average were women living compared to men? What social class would you estimate most people were in the area you surveyed? Overall what can you say about the people in Burns based on this assignment?
By completing this assignment the student will:
Apply their understanding of Native American history and course material in their analysis
Question the use public cemeteries and who was included and who was excluded
Make a linkage between history and the current day treatment of the Native American population in the United States.
Harney County Museum Assignment Two (March 27)
We will visit the Harney County Historical museum on March 27th
in the late afternoon. The Museum contains a wealth of historical artifacts,
records, photographs, and an art collection. While at the museum we would
like you to walk through the exhibitions and collections (take approximately
45 minutes). While moving through the museum take some initial notes on
what you see. Working in pairs we would like you to begin to assess how
the history of Native American peoples and/or culture(s) has been represented
compared to the White Euro-American pioneer population in Harney county.
In answering this question, you could focus on a single room, an art collection,
the photograph collection or, if appropriate, a single artifact. Pay particular
attention to the use of language in the descriptions of exhibits or photographs.
Also pay particular attention to the way the museum curator/historian has
chosen to describe the living arrangements, family structures, and culture
of each group. Are both groups described the same throughout the museum?
Provide specific examples of the differences (if any?). What might different
treatments suggest about each groups social position within the society?
After completing this assignment we would like you to make an extensive journal entry (2-3 pages) describing what findings you made in the museum and how this relates to the course reading kit or issues discussed by stakeholders in the course so far.
By completing this assignment the student will:
Evaluate specific representation(s) of the past and assess their influences on the present
Apply their understanding of Native American history and course material in their analysis
Question the purpose of such institutions and express personal opinions on public representations of history, people, and/or material culture
Make a linkage between history and the current day treatment of the Native American population in the United States.
Self Evaluation
You will be asked to provide the teaching team with a self evaluation
of your participation and learning in the course. The team will consider
your self-evaluation when calculating a final grade for your intellectual
engagement and participation throughout the course (keep in mind however
that we may not arrive at the same conclusion!). The self-evaluation
will be in the form of a letter to the teaching team. The letter does not
have to be formal, but you need to include comments on your performance
from the following areas. How did you do as: an active listener, facilitator,
recorder, presenter, participant in group debriefing sessions, and as an
overall collegial and sensitive member of the learning team. Did you experience
intellectual growth which you feel might be attributed to your experience
with this course. Overall, considering all of these factors, what letter
grade would you assign for yourself using the scale of (A, B, C, D, or
F)? Please submit your self-evaluation letter along with the other materials
by April 15, 2002.