Cross Cultural Issues In Native America: Learning Through Listening
Ethnic Studies and Sociology 499/599

Course Directors: Kurt Peters and Dwaine Plaza

 

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/native2/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

 

Class Meetings
 

On Thursday, March 20 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.
 

On Sunday March 23 we will meet in Strand Agricultural Hall Room 226 at 8:30 am. We will leave OSU and travel together by van to Newport Oregon. Students will spend two days living in Newport Oregon and interacting with the Siletz 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).
 

** This class requires LONG hours of processing after we return from stakeholder meetings in the afternoons. The class also requires early morning starts. 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: school officials, human health and service providers, casino and gaming officials, fishing managers, 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 Siletz Native American group in Western 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 Siletz Oregon as they move into the new millennium.
 

Required Course Materials:

Course Reading Kit

One notebook (i.e. binder/ spiral) to be used as a reflection journal

1 floppy disk 3.5 IBM format
 

Please have an active ONID account password so you can access the computer room facilities in Milne on March 26th. Accounts are automatically created for you, but if you have not done so already, you will need to activate your account. Instructions on how to do this are available at student computer labs.
 

Summary of the Final Grade Calculation

Intellectual Engagement/Participation 30 percent

Group Presentation 20 percent

Personal Journal/ Writing To Learn 20 percent

Short Research Essay  10 percent

Web Page Production  20 percent
 

Throughout the week we may 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. We will have a separate discussion with the Graduate students to discuss course requirements.
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 Siletz people living in Oregon. The subject matter then becomes more practical in the sense that the group goes out into the Siletz community in order to listen to the perspectives of different stakeholders including: school officials, human health and service providers, casino and gaming officials, extension services personnel, developers, fishing managers, 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 the Newport area regard the issues faced by the Siletz native population as they move into the new millennium.

Sunday, March 23 Meet at 8:30am at OSU, Strand Agricultural Hall, Room 226. Travel to Newport Oregon. Action learning, active listening and collaboration skills are discussed and developed throughout the day. Bob Zybach will provide an overview of Human Interaction on the Yaquina River. We will spend the evening coming up with questions for stakeholder meetings the following day. Lunch and dinner will be provided.

 

Monday, March 24 Newport Leave retreat site at 8:30 am. 9:00 am -10:00 am Dan Smith (Mayor of Siletz); 10:00-11:00 am Philip Hutchinson (Executive Director Greater Newport Chamber of Commerce). 11:00-12:00 pm Marie Jones (Regional Manager Community Services Consortium). 12:15-1:15 pm Sharon Branstiter (Lincoln County School District Highschool Counselor/ Mayor of Toledo ). 1:15-2:00 pm Lunch. 2:00-3:00 pm Tina Retasket (Assistant General Manager Siletz Tribe); 3:00- 4:00 pm Robert Kentta (Siletz Cultural Resources Director). 4:00-5:00 pm Joann Miller (Siletz Tribal Council Member). 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 25 Newport Leave retreat site at 7:45 am. 8:00 am - 9:00 am Mike Kennedy (Siletz Natural Resources Manager); 9:00 - 10:00 am Craig Whitehead (Siletz Pow Wow coordinator). 10:00-11:00 am Judy Mushchamp (Siletz Health Director). 11:00-12:00 Nancy McCrary (Siletz Social Services Director). 12:00-1:00 pm Lunch. 1:00-1:45 pm Delores Pigsley (Siletz Tribal Chair). 2:00-3:00 pm Frank Simmons (Siletz Tribal Elder); 3:00-4:00 pm Ashley Bellamy and Apples Lane (Siletz tribal youth/ Toledo highschool students.. Breakfast, Lunch will be provided this day.
 

Wednesday, March 26 Oregon State University Begin at 8:00 am. - 10:00am. Debriefing from previous day. 10:00-11:00 pm Delphine Jackson (Equal Opportunities OSU Faculty Member). 11:12:00 Samantha Hatfield (OSU student and member of the Siletz Tribe); 12:00-1:00 pm Lunch. 1:00-2:30 pm (Web training in Milne 201 Computing Center). 2:30-3:30 debriefing from morning interviews. 3:30-8:00 pm final presentation preparation. Preparation for final presentation. Late Afternoon work in the Honors College debriefing and developing questions for the final day. No meals will be provided this day. Please bring your own lunch and a dinner snack.

 
 
Thursday, March 27 Newport Leave Corvallis for Chinook Winds Casino 7:30 am. 9:00 am - 10:00 am Jim Kikumoto (Casino Manger). 10:00-11:00 Sar Richards (Director of Casino Operations/ Siletz tribal member); 11:45-1:15 pm Pearleane Edge (Eureka Cemetery Visit). 1:15-1:45 pm Lunch. 2:00-3:00 pm Visit Newport Museum. 3:00-6:00 pm debriefing and preparation for final presentation (Return to Hatfield center board room to work). 6:00-8:00 p.m the Siltez Pow-Wow Club will be hosting a dinner for students. Students will do a public presentation at Siletz 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 8:00 p.m. Bring your own Lunch today. Dinner will be provided.
 
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.
 
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 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 20% 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 which you learned throughout the week. 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 2-3 people. All presenters will be limited in terms of visual resources. Presenters can use an overhead projector, power point projector, colored markers, or bristol board paper. The group presentation activity will be worth 20% of your final grade.
 
Eureka Cemetery Assignment One (March 27)
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.
 
Cemeteries are fantastic laboratories that provide us with the opportunity to unobtrusively study social processes and change over time. On March 27th we will visit the Eureka public cemetery in Newport. We will use unobtrusive qualitative methods of research in order to study the history, demography and social structure of people buried in the cemetery. By doing this we should be able to discern something about the culture, society and history of Newport and Oregon (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. Also by using your Sociological imagination students will be able to study major social and cultural changes taking place in the society based on clues which are contained on the headstones in the cemetery.
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
Fraternal Membership
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 select one pattern or theme you see consistent in your designated area and then using the Valley library as a secondary source for historical data write a mini-research essay. Using the Internet as a secondary source is also acceptable. The paper should be between 3-4 pages in length. The paper can examine a diverse set of issues like: What occupations did men/women do in the 18th and 19th Century? What epidemics might have caused major deaths in the 19th and 20th centuries (influenza, polio epidemics ect)? What was the average number of children women had? What was the rate of marriage? What was the most practiced religion? How important was military service in the lives of men in Newport? What might this tell us about masculinity of the time? Did women play a role in the military? What professions tend to noted on the grave stones-- what does this tell us about prestige and social mobility of certain professions in Newport? Were most people born in Newport 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? Are there any Native American people buried in the cemetery?Are there any fraternal organizations represented in the cemetery? How important were fraternal organizations in the lives of men and women in earlier periods?
 

Lincoln County Museum Assignment Two (March 27)

We will visit the Newport 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 30 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 Lincoln 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 14, 2003.