Overwhelming support to reject Social Studies Stanards

RAPID CITY—One South Dakota educational organization after another have joined South Dakota’s nine Indian tribes opposing the current changes to social studies standards. The latest are the School Administrators of South Dakota, and the South Dakota Association of Elementary School Principals. Over 20 school boards across the state have issued statements opposing the proposed standards.

The South Dakota Board of Education Standards will meet on April 17 in Pierre. They will decide whether to adopt the changes or scrap them and start all over again.

While the educators expressed many concerns about the proposed changes, the change that concerns South Dakota’s nine tribes most are the removal of references to the Oceti Sakowin. The gist of this removal was to eliminate divisive identities, by repurposing references to the Oceti Sakowin to remove mentions of conflict and trauma, replaced by generalized statements of how many diverse cultures combine as one identity: South Dakotans.

Removed from Kindergarten curriculum are discussion about the meaning of kinship to the Oceti Sakowin, and discussion about the seven council fires of the Oceti Sakowin.

Symbolism of the Oceti Sakowin (star quilts, medicine wheels, etc.) was removed from First Grade civics, as well as geography that recognized the nine contemporary reservations in South Dakota.

Reference sin Second Grade removed included tribal flags, pow wows, beadwork, dream catchers, music and artwork, also geographical place names within communities.

Third Graders had any references to the structure of Indian Reorganization Act (tribal governments, presidents, chairmen, council members) removed, presumably because this encouraged a divisive independent governmental perspective outside of state and federal governments. Third Graders also had more detailed information about the nine tribes in South Dakota removed.

Fifth graders were specially targeted: standards that would have exposed them to important perspectives on tribal sovereignty, exploitation of natural resources, and the adverse effect on the Oceti Sakowin, were removed whole cloth.

The need to erase any independent Oceti Sakowin identity, intensified in the Eighth Grade by denying students to examine the culture and historical trauma of the Oceti Sakowin. Students are also denied a chance to examine treaties in depth, and the consequences of those treaties.

Also removed from Eighth Grade curriculum were evaluations of the changing federal policy towards Indians and any comparisons of traditional tribal government to modern American government.

Revisions were crafted to present the Oceti Sakowin not as a people once at war with the USA, not as a people who had their land taken, and were confined to cubby hole reservations, but as just another culturally diverse body which contributed in positive ways to South Dakota as a whole.

Completely ignored in any curriculum before or after Governor Noem’s involvement in the process, was the 1886 Supreme Court Kagama decision, where the Court asserted that the worst enemy any tribe had was the state in which they lived. There is also no reference to author L. Frank Baum’s 1890 editorials calling for the extermination of the Lakota people. The strategy of Noem and her political ilk is very basic and direct: remove any dark historical truths; remove any study that establishes the Oceti Sakowin as a distinct, separate or traumatized people; always stress how they contribute to the South Dakota diversity that makes the whole better.

(Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com)

 

 

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